It's not honest in AGI timelines (only biological ones). It just accidentally supports your unsubstantiated belief. Your belief isn't magically true because you're somehow able to see the future when others can't. You're just arrogant.
It's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?
It surely resonates if your reason for working is to extract wealth from others (ie. be a parasite) but if it's to improve things for everyone, then it's wonderful. You might still work just as much and get paid just as much but produce a lot more because of technology.
Writing about your Neo-Nazi beliefs, or even being a Neo-Nazi doesn't make you a terrorist, and I'm sure none of those you're talking about are. So no, by his definition, Substack shouldn't be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown.
Doesn't the term "land of opportunity" imply to you that it's also the "land of risk"? That's certainly how I've always seen lands of opportunity - places where you can fight it out on you own and have a chance to succeed - or fail. Not a comfortable safe zone to relax in.
That's not what "land of opportunity" means in the US. It means upward social mobility, plentiful job opportunities across a wide range of inudstries, decent work for decent pay, ample rewards for hard work.
Socioeconomically, the post-WW2 era is widely considered America's peak. The strong economic growth was broadly shared and created the largest and most prosperous middle class in modern history.
During this time, a single breadwinner could buy a car, a house and support a family. This is the "land of opportunity" and "American Dream" people talk about today and politicians have been promising the return of for decades.
The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.
>The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.
I'd be interested to see the economic mobility stats for the gilded age. Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard and were flexible but there were also a ton less opportunities to just go through the motions and be materially well off.
> Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard...
The "vibe" you get? You were there?
I'd point out that during the Gilded Age, women were largely excluded from the work force, blacks were forced into sharecropping and tenant farming while under threat of racial violence including lynching, Chinese workers were forced into the most dangerous jobs and then punished for the privilege (see the California's Foreign Miners' Tax), and so on.
But I guess if you were a white Murican with ambition and a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed, it was a great time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
So you're saying that the mobility was a direct result of oppressing minorities? That's certainly a take. (See, we can both play this stupid game.)
At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
This is an example of the type of law that was passed during your "good vibes" period that was designed to push out non-white labor.
So the point that you don't want to seem to acknowledge: the period of time that you seem to be holding up as an ideal (read: where Americans could work hard and get ahead) was filled with laws and even violence that sought to restrict opportunity for non-whites and women.
This is historical fact, whether you like it or not.
> At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
What in the world are you on?
But this is the perfect example of America today: you can't have a vigorous debate without somebody resorting to casting aspersions on another's intentions and blaming them for things that happened when they weren't even alive.
Unless you think the racism and sexism is a key part of what enabled economic mobility and prosperity for others bitching about beliefs people held in the past that are now considered unfashionable/wrong/a drag on society is whattaboutism at best.
> Unless you think the racism and sexism is a key part of what enabled economic mobility and prosperity for others...
It is an historical fact that women and minorities were excluded and discriminated against in the 1800s, and that this was to the benefit of white men.
It's easy to criticize other cultures through the lens of your own. If you're not a moral relativist, then find the best culture as your benchmark, not your own - you're not going to be magically lucky enough to live in the one morally right culture in history. Some of your own beliefs about right and wrong are going to be backwards - if you can't face up to that, stop being a cultural supremacist.
Or accept that every culture does things that look bad to outsiders and that doesn't change the fact that they may have gilded ages - no matter how good social mobility is for black people today, it's still crap for chickens.
"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?
I think neighborhoods that people see as "authentic" are actually bland and depressing to their initial occupants. Do you want to live in an outdoor museum for the sake of strangers who don't suffer the routine grind of poor-people life to come and oggle your mismatched buildings and blankets hanging over your balconies?
There are some historic districts in my hometown and it's because they have rows of posh but nearly identical houses. That uniformity seems to be part of what makes now gives them "character".
Well yes, but usually the initial occupants are long gone before these neighborhoods become desirable. Some of it is rarity, but some of it is the presence of design elements (whether accidental or intentional) that aren’t present in most newer developments. Sometimes this is because the buildings have features that aren’t allowed under newer building codes, and sometimes the neighborhoods grew organically when land was cheaper, so you get better walkability or interesting neighborhood features.
It’s possible to build new buildings that are interesting and unique, it’s just very expensive under current zoning, building codes, and local planning restrictions, so it usually only happens with very large structures.
How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause.
I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.
Except the distributed ownership is FAR from being anywhere near evenly distributed. 7-11 doesn't have half the population holding 50%+ of its value. It has 50% of the population holding 1% of the business, 1% holding 10% of the business, and then 0.1% holding 50%+ of the business.
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.
As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.
It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.
> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.
Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!
I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.
By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.
> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code
I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.
Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.
I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.
Companies that didn't give away all their content for free to anyone have actually denied AI companies from training on all their data without paying a fee. Reddit, Associated Press, etc.
For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.
How exactly other websites “gave it all away”? Also examples you list are websites putting some explicit rule eg in their robots.txt or filtering web crawlers. This is all a reaction to existing situation, so Reddit for sure has been scrapped before Reddit realised what was happening.
If the AI company bought their book, then they didn't give it all away. If the AI company obtained it indirectly like a library or 2nd hand, then the author has already been paid when he first sold it. In either case, he could have refused to be so liberal in sharing it if he didn't want it to be used like that, but he preferred to make some money instead.
If buying one copy of a book entitles the ai company to train on that data and redistribute information derived from it in perpetuity, then why shouldn’t a rival ai company be allowed to train on tokens from say OpenAI and redistribute information derived from the OpenAI model also in perpetuity? The rival ai company paid for the tokens, after all.
Yes, information is not copyright protected. It's mostly free. The rival company isn't allowed to train on AI output because it didn't buy the AI output, it agreed to a contract where it said "I won't do that".
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