MichaelRo

> Just don’t think about all the suffering you or I could ease with the money we spend on a “good time.”

Look man. I am not responsible for any random person or creature that suffers in this world. Lamentations like this ("ease all the suffering") originate in a primate brain that hasn't yet processed that we're no longer a tribe of 100 but there's 10 billion people in this world. Objectively you don't have resources to help more than a few people. And morally, you aren't obligated either.

And btw, I actually do help a person in need, every month with a substantial amount of money. Unlike the occasional act of kindness, helping a complete stranger on a recurring basis is a much harder nut to swallow. Makes you progress really quickly from superficial platitudes like the one you said to the hard, cold reality of the fact that you're losing resources and resources are finite. And that on top of half my income that the state grabs and mostly hands out as welfare anyway. So don't tell me I'm not paying to ease suffering, want or not, I pay through my teeth.

> But a restaurant where clients don’t get of food poisoning 98% of time is getting people sick on a monthly (or even weekly) basis.

Objectively, I think it's impossible to work in the food industry and avoid food poisoning 100% of the time. One of the reasons I never attempted several of my food industry business ideas. I'm certain they would be at least profitable enough to keep going, would be rather trivial to access EU subsidy money in the €50k, but the amount of regulations and inspections terrifies me. And I'm sure at some point, some salmonella or what else would slip through and don't wanna deal with the consequences.

Easier with programming computers since a "bug" won't make people expell waste simultaneously through both incoming and outgoing food orifices, like it happend to me last time I ordered sarmale from a local restaurant. Like in the food industry a "bug" is literally that.

> But sugar maybe?

Interesting observation back at you! :) Never thought of this but recently I started being a bit more careful with my sugar and carbs intake, after a blood test has shown an elevated level of glycated hemoglobin. Could be it's not alcohol per se but disruption of blood sugar after a binge drink, thanks for making the connection. Darn it, first no sugar, then no carbs now I have to cut down on alcohol too, getting old sucks :P

Didn't know there's a "car sickness" strictly related to reading the phone while in transit, I knew there's those people that can barely survive riding a car but that was it.

I do get the "reading phone motion sickness" a couple of days after heavy drinking. The hangover has worn off but there's this weird after-effect which gradually fades over a few days until it completely disappears. At first I thought how the hell do I get car sickness until eventually correlated with reading the phone and having to stop or else.

Based on my manifestations being chemically-induced, wonder if that's also valid in general. Some level of Gaba or something, which is normally lower in most people, gets elevated by drinking and then (hopefully) cleared.

Don't have an online presence yet, will let you know when I add that.

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.

Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.

And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.

Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.

About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.

If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.

I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!

Nothing new under the sun. When clocks and precision mechanics started in the 17th century, there was a tendency to view humans as "machines". Computers came, suddenly human brains are "computers". Now we're LLMs.

If scientists make green jelly that emits thoughtful judgements, humans will be compared to green jelly.

I had my phone fell from my pocket while in a dancing club at night. Someone found it, took it to the bartender and I got it back (saw the location on my computer using Google's find your phone).

But would I deliberately leave my phone or laptop unattended on the table at a random coffee shop that I know nothing about? Probably fine but not taking that risk. Also as others pointed out, context matters. A small indoor coffee shop while I visit the toilet? No problem. Large crowded outside terrace? I'm not stupid.

> Friends whose family also worked for the company were sort of privileged as a result.

Well to tell the full story, my father was an employee of the Agricultural Production Cooperative (CAP - Cooperativa Agricola de Productie - in Romanian), the national company who owned the land (forcibly nationalized in the 50s) and grew food. No individual would have been able to afford a private telephone line in the village, there were two of them, one to CAP one to the Post office. While it was possible to go to the post office and pay to make calls, it was more awkward getting them. So we hooked a phone to CAP's line, meaning we shared the calls with it's office, phone rang both at out home and in the office and everytime we made a call, someone in the office could pick up the phone and listen (and we could do the same with them). And of course not every employee of the company was allowed to hook up a personal phone to the company line ;)

My first phone in the early 80s was a hand-cranked magneto phone like this: https://images.okr.ro/serve/product/572e8fdd848db2d3b02d36d2...

Connected by 12Km of telephone wire to a manual switchboard where an operator would pick my call and connect wires for local or long distance: https://alexandrone.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02...

Yes, in the early 80s, Romania was still using 1950s technology. And with only 3 telephones in the village, it was a big deal to have one.

Then at the end of the 80s moved to a nearby town and was amazed at how much more convenient a rotary dial phone is.

> I have a hard time spending, to the point where I would often procrastinate on buying things that I know I’ll need in the future.

Well, what I noticed is that I go to great efforts to avoid buying me some stuff that would make my life easier (say an electric bike or a better computer). Month starts, I get my paycheck and every day I fend off the desire to buy the stuff I want/need. And then come the bills. Like some surprise "regularization" gas or electricity bill that costs more than the item I didn't buy. If it's not that, some darn thing breaks and needs repairs. And if it's not that, kid has to go in some school trip, there's some birthday or wedding we have to attend, someone asks me to lend them some money (coze they know I save) or some other event happens and requires a ca$h infusion.

By the end of the month, money's gone and I haven't got nothing. At some point working just to pay bills and expenses makes Jack a dull boy. So funk it, I buy that stuff AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH. And when shit arrives demanding money I can truthfully say: "I don't have any money left". But at least I got the thing, opposed to neither money, nor item.

> With AI, we‘re cargo-culting understanding

We're cargo culting "the manager view". Like the critic you can read on Bret Devereaux's blog about Game Of Thrones having been written from an elite's point of view, it's utopian and sounds good ... for the elites, the people who benefit from the hard work they never have to do themselves. But like any elite bubble wildly disconnected from reality, this one will fall bad. Maybe French revolution bad, when the answer to the masses of unemployed "displaced" by AI screaming "we can't get a piece of bread to eat" is "let them eat cake instead".

My wife gave birth by C-section. That would have killed her up until very modern times.

She may theoretically birth another child but there's a substantial risk.

There are "physical aspects", just because it's all theoretical and principles to you doesn't make them go away.

I don't understand the "knowingly stunting the growth of your child" attack. What makes you conclude I'm stunting the growth of my child?

He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.

> But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk.

ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury).

Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene.

Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.

> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.

I would bet on "I'm old and I don't care".

What I'm curious though is why would he sell the physical collection.

> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.

This. It's a number's "game".

My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.

I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.

> Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards.

Doesn't help much, accounting needs accreditation and standards, but that doesn't prevent competition level of some 100 accountants per job. Only way you prevent that is by limiting numbers, like lawyers do, case when connections and nepotism matter, you basically get a hereditary aristocratic caste.

I guess we better get used to going back being peasants working shit jobs barely above starvation since that's what the future of capitalism seems to bring: https://realityraiders.com/fringewalker/irreverent-humor/mon...

> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.

> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.

Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?

Well, Alt+Tab in Windows is supposed to switch windows. That's unless you're in Microsoft Edge where obviously, it switches tabs. Inconsistent and annoying.

While I agree with the sentiment that sending manned missions to the Moon is kinda useless, unfortunately diverting those money to "noble purposes" is an utopia because that's not how things work.

In practice if those billions don't fund NASA programs they go into making some billionaires richer, Oracle laying off 30,000 people to fund data centers that will be obsolete by the time they are ready and similar stuff. Not a dime towards noble goals of humanity.

Question is weather the guy who got his account banned and lost access to all his data, was paying Google for cloud / hosting services or not.

If it was on the free plan then all bets are off. If he was paying for a service, I believe there is enough case for a lawsuit where Google pays through their teeth for basically taking the client's data hostage.

At some point I'll move my hosted services to one or more companies, which for a cost - essential point if you want legal protection - offer me their services. And if shit happens, I get my data back. And there is someone, a physical person that I can call when shit happens and they can't hide behind AI and automated replies. Otherwise I have real leverage to sue their ass and settle for mucho dinero so they learn to behave.

Seems to me Google is not such a "service provider" company, so it's naive to let them hold your data, with zero legal protection if they decide to take it hostage.

Kids today probably won't get what's the big idea with "just" some TV, no DVD playing capability, no computer games. But in the early 90s I would have sold a kidney for one of these, on a boring 8 hour train trip, they would have been the ultimate gadget. Not just for entertainment purposes, watching TV, but also bragging rights since noone even dreamt of having one of these in that time period and that place (Eastern Europe). At least I didn't see or knew anyone that had such a thing.

> then the software industry will enter into a self-serving productivity craze building all sorts of software tooling, frameworks

> Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products [...]

This is not the 90s anymore when low hanging fruit was everywhere ready to be picked. We have everything under the sun now and more.

The problem with bullshit apps is not that it took you 5 months to build. What you build now in 5 minutes it's still bullshit. Most of the remaining work is bullshit jobs. Spinning useless "features" and frameworks that nobody needs and shove them down the throat of customers that never asked for them. Now it's possible to dig holes and fill them back (do pointless work) at much improved pace thanks to AI.

> It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

Exactly this: "Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens" : https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...

Well, it's a skeptical take on AI so it will be downvoted to oblivion and buried.

> Teaching and research should be decoupled.

This is like saying peasants growing vegetables in the field should not mix with philosophers questioning the secrets of the Universe.

Problem is most research is just pissing in the wind. No real results. Show me the cure for cancer. Show me the warp engine.

So it's very nice to sit in their ivory tower doing ivory tower stuff while the peasants feed them with the vegetables they grow plowing the fields.

In reality, let them also teach. That's real, palpable work. I can't do all nice things and never touch shit work, so should professors because unless they cure cancer or invent the warp engine now, they are not a privileged cast.

"They" want you to be! :)

> I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company.

LOL, it's the age old "responsibility without authority". The pressure to use AI will increase and basically you'll be fired for not using it. Simultaneously with the pressure to take the blame when AI fucks up and you can't keep up with the bullshit, leading you to get fired. One way or the other, get some training on how to stack shelves at the supermarket because that's how our future looks, one way or the other.

Also I'm getting downvoted and don't really understand unless I fall back to experience from 30 years ago, after the Romanian revolution and fall of =~ 50 years of dictatorial regime (not that before that was much better, with small interruptions).

At that time (1990), when everything seemed possible and a quick path to democracy and all that it brings (in the imaginary of the poor, oppressed people that we were) along with it, this guy came along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Ra%C8%9Biu

He ran for president in the first free elections and made some 0.5% or something. I remember him for his words which go along the "it will take 20 years at least, for democracy to settle in Romania". He was right on. Now, 30 years after, we have a strong, frile democracy. Everyone can run for president but not everyone can win, even if they could: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4x2epppego

All things considered, I live a much, much better life now than 30 years ago during the communist dictatorship. Perfect? Far from it and perfection is a moving target. But we're definitely a solid democracy, and also definitely, it's a miracle the first 5-10 years didn't erupt in a full scale civil war. And the despised "revolutionary guards" had some involvement in making sure it didn't happen, so as much as you hate them, you need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_clashes_of_T%C3%A2rgu_M...

Forgot they aren't already in EU.