It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.

Pentagon says US military to be an ‘AI-first’ fighting force

Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!

Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove.

The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?

The whole political convention feels like a sporting or entertainment event. The endless personalistic glazing, rock music… is this really how every party does politics in North America? Trump really comes off as much less of a deviation in this context.

Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.

For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.

Heard Satya was getting a bit worried about the usefulness of AI, thankfully the creator of Node knows what’s really up.

Used FF for over a decade, switched to Vivaldi about a month ago. It’s pretty much as the article says, adblocking not as good as FF+uBlock, but it mostly does the job, including YouTube videos. Note the inbuilt adblocker also works on mobile, tho there’s no extension support there. One upside I discovered is that the performance is slightly better at least on my mid-range devices, the web is just built around Chrome-related browsers nowadays unfortunately. It’s a bit feature-bloated for my taste with even an inbuilt browser-game (you can hide it from the menus), but honestly that’s at least cute and more sincere than AI crap.

Many ordinary people lost their jobs and homes during the Great Recession, while no one at the top was ever held individually accountable. Knowing the dynamics of the tech world, a hard crash would likely end up playing out the same way.

Reminds me of the stories of how Soviet peasants during the rapid industrialization drive under Stalin, who’d never before seen any machinery in their lives, would get emotional with and try to coax faulty machines like they were their farm animals. But these were Soviet peasants! What are structural forces stopping Yud & co outgrowing their childish mystifications? Deeply misplaced religious needs?

A generous interpretation may be that writing music in the context of the modern music industry may indeed be something that’s creatively unsatisfying for composers, but the solutions to that have nothing to do with magical tech-fixes and everything to do with politics, which is of course anathema to these types. What dumb times we live in.

Ah, the Image Upload Protocol must have gone woke.

I’ve never heard of anyone describing 1984 that way, could you elaborate on your points or link to some analysis?

Someone else said it, but for someone completely accustomed to a life of easy privilege, having it suddenly disappear can be utterly intolerable.

You should read the article first.

Indeed an amazing piece of journalism, a gripping read throughout! Thanks for the share.

I feel like you’re just going offtopic here. I mean, poverty around the world may be down for reasons that have nothing to do with what Silicon Valley is peddling; the article specifically criticizes the latter’s particular “tech utopia” vision of the future and not what was written up in the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Testing for genetic defects is very different from the Gattaca-premise of most everything about a person being genetically deterministic, with society ordered around that notion. My point was that such a setting is likely inherently impossible, since “heritability” doesn’t work like that; the most techbros can do is LARP at it, which, granted, can be very dangerous on its own – the fact that race is a social construct doesn’t preclude racism and so on. But there’s no need to get frightened by science fiction when science facts tell a different story.

Well, in the same way that Mars colonies are here now. Techbros with more money than sense throwing it at things with futuristic aesthetics doesn’t make them real.

That is high praise indeed, but I believe the good mayor has yet to make clear to everyone that, as an acausal manifestation of the godhead, self-driving cars serve to remind us to spend at least an hour a day in silent contemplation over how to bring ASI into existence, lest one should incure the Serpent’s eternal wrath in the Simulation.

the only future in that direction is one where they’re doing a much more painful version of the same job (programming against cookie cutter LLM code) for much, much less pay.

To the extent that LLMs actually make programming more “productive”, isn’t the situation analogous to the way the power loom was bad for skilled handweavers whilst making textiles more affordable for everyone else?

I should perhaps say that I’m saying this as someone who is just starting out as a web developer (really chose the right time for that, hah). I try to avoid LLMs and even strictly unnecessary libraries for now because I like learning about how everything works under the hood and want to get an intimate grasp of what I’m doing, but I can also see that ultimately that’s not what people pay you for that and that once you’ve built up sufficient skill to quickly parse LLM output, the demands of the market may make using them unavoidable.

To be honest, I feel as conflicted & anxious about it all as others already mentioned. Maybe I am just too green to fully understand the value that I would eventually bring, but can I really, in good conscience, say that a customer should pay me more when someone else can provide a similar product that’s “good enough” at a much lower price?

Sorry for being another bummer. :(