BugheadTorpeda6

The first thing. Governments let it fester uncontrolled for decades, it's going to be a huge shitshow to try and control it now.

I don't think it would even be remotely as technically feasible or viable if it was crypto based. I don't want crypto either, but as far as I can tell, crypto is much much much less ergonomic and inconvenient than just having a tab that you pay off monthly in a normal way with a single transaction.

I'm reasonably certain that a lot of that sort of bullshit is literally just astroturfing by desperate AI companies. I know it happens but that doesnt mean there aren't people really going along with it.

In this case, it deserves an insult. The answer to all of those hypotheticals is "you don't, it's impossible". Please, go ahead and tell us how you ensure all of those things. I would very much like to hear what you have to say because it will be groundbreaking for the whole industry, clearly. You have found the golden goose.

I totally agree with you but the people and processes that led to this are going to be defensive no doubt. It's been telling who has been adopting "AI" coding and why.

I work in Texas and this is definitely a real thing. In person and within the company, sometimes swearing happens. It would certainly get you in trouble if it happened a lot on customer calls though. We may not care personally about it, but who knows what your customers opinion on it is, so it is better to be polite. It is also very easy to just try not to swear unless you are one of those people that has been swearing like a sailor in every sentence your entire life, which would probably be interpreted as you having some kind of self control problem.

I should also mention that this attitude is not just a liberal vs conservative thing. I've lived in Austin and Houston and Dallas (all three are about as liberal as any other major city in the country) and swearing in a formal setting is frowned upon in all three.

Yes, I am saying that platforms should be policed to such an extent that they remove and ban all illegal content within a reasonable timeframe. And in the case of something like child porn, knowingly failing to do so quickly should lead to a lot of people going to jail (I think a lot of tech executives and employees belong in jail).

I don't find this to be too much to ask. Every other platform has to do this. The only reason you have a bunch of ridiculously wealthy anti-social people rampaging across the world "disrupting" whatever they see fit is because we decided the rules arbitrarily should't apply to them because of some wide eyed and ridiculous utopian bullshit how "the internet is for free love and knowledge mannnn, and it should be like, freeee brooo". I'm not even slightly sympathetic to that argument and I don't think the Internet has proven to be valuable enough either culturally or productivity wise to justify even the slightest loosening of the rules that apply elsewhere. The whole thing starts to look like a rent seeking scam that was used to destroy a lot of higher quality information resources and businesses if you squint at it for even a second.

Yep, just another reason they should be held liable the same as everybody else.

I really like this explanation and I think you are probably onto a thread of something real.

Yep. That's my impression as well. It makes sense and seems like a good move. The whole thing was silly in the first place and it's not like almost everybody that has bothered to look into it didn't already suspect it was cooked up bullshit.

It is literally exactly what probably a majority of UFO people have been saying for a long time. That's why it's so funny.

A lot of UFO people (maybe enthusiasts would be a more apt term) are more skeptical of aliens and spaceship stuff than "normies" cause they tend to have experience getting burned. Just comes with the territory I guess.

Try to post a perfectly legitimate photo of something weird looking on a UFO forum and they will forensically tear it apart in a way that would put a lot of more professional outlets to shame.

I've been hearing the whole "the government wants you to believe in aliens thing" since the 90s but it goes back way further. Of course the other thing that comes along with that is believing that a lot of the "true believer" types are shills on account of their obvious and often pretty suspicious connections. The most recent one I can remember is that guy with some sort of military connections and very shady funding that went on Joe Rogan talking about starting a company to study and release technology from a crashed spaceship. The intended audience of that sort of thing is not UFO enthusiasts, it's gullable normal people that just happen to accidentally dip their toes into the subject for a split second.

All in all, my opinion is that the whole thing has been a pretty sloppy display of our governments disinformation and psyop capabilities to the extent that it makes me a little bit worried for our safety. Hopefully the people that got assigned to run the UFO stories were the B team.

Yes yes yes yes

I absolutely agree. I find it abhorrent.

I think basically what they are trying to say is that the whole idea that men behave the way they do because of a "lack of education in emotional literacy" or whatever is incorrect. The emotions themselves that bubble to the top between both groups tend to be different and require different responses. A "heart to heart" like you might have with your wife is not necessarily gonna help with your teenage beef between a bunch of insecure young men.

They are saying that relationships between men are different from relationships between women or between men and women, and that they don't necessarily rely on things like emotional intimacy to the same extent, or perhaps that the emotional intimacy experienced doesn't have to be in the form of a very caring heart to heart conversation about feelings.

To be honest, they have a good point in some ways. I think it's true that male friendships are different from women's and it would be basically biologically and culturally impossible to get men to share their feelings as often and in as much detail as women (nor would that necessarily be desirable). But I think there is definitely something to be said for lack of connection between men, and that the original article is correctly identifying a number of very real problems. It's just the whole cliche "men need to cry it out with their bros more" thing that is misguided and not believable to plenty of mature and not frustrated / Andrew Tate watching guys.

I also suspect the whole Andrew Tate thing is really a phenomenon of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys and that it is not nearly as big a problem among, say, people in their 20s. I'd really like to see the statistics on who is watching because I suspect the demographics are like plenty of other "edgy" teenager type shows and that it precipitously drops off once people pass through puberty. My suspicions are mostly driven by the fact I've never heard a man in real life ever mention the guy once and I'm only 28 years old. Certainly, if he had some more broad appeal to men in general, I would have at least heard of it and maybe watched it at least once? I've certainly heard of Joe Rogan for instance, who certainly has a more broad appeal to men more generally.

Young men have always been into a lotta uncouth and kinda shitty stuff like that and I'm not sure they aren't going to grow out of it just like we did with our own "manly man" bullshit back in the day.

It's absolutely good to have women spearheading this issue in my opinion. I don't think that's particularly cynical of you to want at all.

Productivity? I don't think so. Correctness, sure.

It would be interesting to see the hypothetical "return to fax machines" scenario.

If Solows paradox is true and not the result of bad measurement, then one might expect that it could be workable without sacrificing much productivity. Certainly abandoning the cloud would be possible if the regulatory environment allowed for rapid development of alternative non-cloud solutions, as I really don't think the cloud improved productivity (besides for software developers in certain cases) and is more of a rent seeking mechanism (hot take on hacker news I'm sure, but look at any big corpo IT dept outside the tech industry and I think you will see tons of instances where modern tech like the cloud is causing more problems than it's worth productivity-wise).

Computers in general I am much less sure of and lean towards mismeasurement hypothesis. I suspect any "return to 1950" project would render a company economically less competitive (except in certain high end items) and so the EU would really need to lean on Linux hard and invest massively in domestic hardware (not a small task as the US is finding out) in order to escape the clutches of the US and/or China.

I don't think they have the political will to do it, but I would love it if they tried and proved naysayers wrong.

What extra productivity? Why doesn't it show up in the economic figures?

I don't see why being interested in academic subjects like that has to be driven via universities. In fact, they might even get in the way of developing a genuine interest in topics outside of your chosen major.

I don't really believe the whole bullshit jobs thing to the extent some do. There are definitely a lot of office space style "I gather the requirements from the customer so that the engineers don't have to" type jobs that exist as intermediaries and handle bureaucracy, but I suspect that those aren't actually bullshit and they have good reasons to exist. They could be eliminated, but work quality would probably suffer without those personnel. Hence why everybody complains about being understaffed and having to wear too many hats.

It's easy to think there are a ton of bullshit jobs if you are in a startup that isn't being regulated and is growing and intends to compete with large entrenched companies. Especially working on mostly greenfield projectsm The minute the startup becomes entrenched themselves, I think you end up seeing why the big dogs had so many so called bullshit jobs in the first place and that maybe it wasn't stupid after all.

I think running lean and mean is easier said than done and we would see more of it if it were actually a case of jobs just being invented out of thin air for no reason.

Certainly, a lot of jobs FEEL like bullshit, but that is more of a function of alienation from the actual work output due to positioning in an organization and lack of ownership, rather than actual uselessness.

I think recent history has made Solows paradox more interesting than Jevons, which is mostly a thing talked about by people with something to sell related to AI it seems, and less so by economists. Seems to have applied much better early in the industrial revolution. I'm not sure economists even work on Jevons anymore (or if it was ever a very interesting topic for them, the writing on it seems very sparse in comparison).

I think it did, then they built up a most that made it very hard to turn momentum the other direction. It's turned now but it happened very slowly. Who knows if it ever falls of a cliff, all I know is that moats are only broken when momentum is going in the wrong direction and so they are certainly more vulnerable now than they would otherwise have been if they hadn't pissed so many people off about their products.

At one point, their desktop user experience was actually pretty good. And that was all their products back then. They definitely didn't get to where they are now by selling products that were bad. You could make the argument that some of them were bad but they were cheap, but if price is a big aspect of what makes a product good in the eyes of the consumer at the time and nobody else is competing on price, then that isn't "bad" in the sense I'm using the word.

I don't think I'd have called them out for always making terrible products all the way through till about Windows 7. I had no major complaints about that release, cloud was in its infancy, no pushing 365 etc. After that, quality started to go downhill. To the point that I'd argue with a straight face that most major community supported Linux DEs provide an objectively better and more stable user experience for both technical and non technical users.

If people doing that truly wasn't a consideration before going ahead with this then the people that made the call are just as dumb as if they hadn't. Fwiw I don't think anybody is being driven "insane". More like humiliated and frustrated.

Remember, Microsoft publicized that they would be doing this and wanted to make sure everybody knew.

No not most people. A much larger percentage (I would wager greater than 50% of professionals) aren't using AI in any capacity in their professional work. It's banned in a lot of places for good reasons, and many more teams haven't found a use case.

So no I don't think any of this is normal. That's why it made the top of HackerNews, because it's very abnormal.

If they are just messing with their own projects then I guess I don't think it's immoral. If they start submitting AI slop to other projects then they ought to be banned by those projects' maintainers.

I don't know. I guess it depends on what you classify as being change. I don't really view software as having changed all that much since around maybe the mid 70s as HLLs began to become more popular. What programmers do today and what they did back then would be easily recognizable to both groups if we had time machines. I don't see how AI really changes things all that much. It's got the same scalability issues that low code/no code solutions have always had and those go way back. The main difference is that you can use natural language, but I don't see that as being inherently better than say drawing a picture using some flowcharting tools in a low code platform. You just introduce the same problem natural languages always have had and why we didn't choose them in the first place, i.e. they are not strict enough and need lots of context. Giving an AI very specific sentences to define my project in natural language and making sure it has lots of context begins to look an awful lot like psuedocode to me. So as you learn to approach using AI in such a way that it produces what you want you naturally get closer and closer to just specifying the code.

What HAS indisputably changed is the cost of hardware which has driven accessibility and caused more consumer facing software to be made.

Yes it's going to cause many problems forcompanies I think, but at least they will deserve it (the employees won't unfortunately unless they've drank the kool-aid, I rarely meet ICs that have drank it fwiw, which means I'm either in a serious bubble, or this is being pushed from the top down). The only clear winners are going to be chip companies.

There's never going to be an industry standard measure either. Measuring productivity as I'm sure you know is incredibly dumb for a job like this because the beneficialness of our work product can be both insanely positive and put the company on top or it can be so negative that it goes bankrupt. And ultimately a lot of what goes into people choosing whether they like the work product or not is subjective. A large part of our work is more of an art than a science and I say that as somebody that works about as far away from the frontend as one can get.

I'm lucky currently but have been unlucky in the past and very much understand where the person you are responding to is coming from. I think you've had an exceedingly long string of luck that is very rare if you've never had upper management that was misaligned with the long term goals of the employees and the company.

Only in very specific circumstances where there are clear moats to be built (mobile was one of these that Microsoft missed, but that's a PLATFORM in a way no AI product at the moment comes close to). As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of such a thing with the current applications of AI and I am unconvinced that there ever will be. It's just going to ride on top of previous platforms. So you may need some sort of service for customers that are interested, but having the absolute best AI story just isn't something customers are going to care about at the end of the day if it means they would have to say migrate clouds.

At the moment, I'd arguing doing much more than what say Apple is doing would be what is potentially catastrophic. Not doing anything would be minimally risky, and doing just a little bit would be the no risk play. I think Microsoft is making this mistake in a big way and will continue to lose market share over it and burn cash, albeit slowly since they are already giants. The point is, it's a giant that has momentum going in the opposite direction than what they want, and they are incapable of fixing the things causing it to go in that direction because their leadership has become delusional.

HackerNews is driven by a particular kind of radical libertarian philosophy believing person. You don't come up with the sorts of pump and dump start up ideas that typically come out of Y Combinator without being either sociopathic or delusional in the above way.

Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by being social liberal to go along with their economic liberalism.