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Neal Stephenson had a book about that!

You know, the funny thing is every technically minded friend if mine would apend the evening communing with a scotch and Claude if time permitted.

There was even a depressing conversation where we all figured most people are signficantly more boring to talk to than an LLM. Its fantastic if you have the luck to be surrounded by interesting people, but that is an extreme luxury i suspect.

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

yeah comments like this show that ending USAID was the right move (apart from it's obvious utility to pass along bribes)

Anubis is awesome, but yeah everything else... gtfo

Our country is run by lawyers for the benefit of laywers. This explains much of what we see around us.

I dunno, it means Anthropic and OpenAi need to get efficient and maybe cannot just expect trillion dollar ipos?

100%. It would strongly behoove the US to encourage domestic 3d printer manufacture (or friendly countries like Japan), to the point of bannning Bambu and Chinese companies. Obviously we are doing fine for industrial 3d printers, but the small scale consumer stuff is very important too.

If and when AI commiditizes professional services, it would be good to have modern industry to fall back on. With 3d printing the gap isnt insurmountable yet.

However, our country is run by lawyers, not engineers, so I dont have too much hope. At least a lot of our billionaires started out as engineers...

Yeah it just reeks of AI, and thats a turnoff

Americans and Chinese have money for cars. Europeans, less so.

Imagine if we can replace all the locomotive drivers with pensions with retired software engineers who literally will pay to do the job remotely? Even better if there is a prediction market and twitch stream on top with bets for the most mundane things.

edit: This actually sounds awesome

China has missed their window of opportunity, sadly.

For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.

For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.

I want to retire and have this be my job

If your field (NLP/computational lingustics) has evaporated the next best thing to do is hit the pundit circuit.

No, it is deeply stupid strategy, because groundwater is being depleted much faster than it can be replenished:

"We reviewed 160 journal articles, along with supplementary data and reports from GW, agriculture, and meteorological authorities. Our focus was on GW depletion in India, with particular emphasis on GRACE satellite data, in situ observations, and the influence of hydrogeological conditions, anthropogenic activities, and climatic disturbances. GRACE observations reveal significant depletion, particularly in Eastern Uttar Pradesh at 7 cm/yr rate from 2002 to 2022, while localized in situ data highlight Punjab as the most rapidly depleting area, with a rate of 46 cm/yr (2003–2012)."*

*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23528...

India uses something like a quarter of the world's groundwater. 20 years ago, it was all open channels, which lose 40-80% of water due to evaporation and seepage. Mexico and Egypt fixed this decades ago.

Nowadays, farmers have shifted to directly using groundwater, and just pump as much water as possible from wells (thus depleting them). This is exacerbated by: 1) Relying on flood irrigation (ie just let water flow across the field and evaporate, vs drip) 2) As temperatures rise, using even more water

The situation was already pretty dire, and despite various efforts, it's getting much worse.

https://fse.fsi.stanford.edu/news/indian-groundwater-depleti...

To be fair, Egypt and Mexico made major reforms to their water usage in the past and succeeded. Compared to India, which failed abjectly.

Oooooh this is great.

I concur, this would be good for developing cheap drone warfare capabilities. I mean, I love loud explosions and the sound of freedom because I'm not a wuss, but we need to get our drone game on China's level.

If there were bounties for invalidating peer reviewed research, I suspect this would be a lot leas common.

Just post these on 4chan. That's the fastest way for the issues to get attention both good and bad and get a fix in as fast as possible.

It depends heavily on your manager and skip. My boss values operations and getting things done (including both doing things right from the beginning, and fixing things when we have to cut corners to launch quickly due to exogenous pressure), and that means people get promoted for being good engineers. Of course this falls apart for higher levels where it is entirely politics, but that is beyond my boss' influence.

Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever.

Exactly. The "creative" wankery is just people who got college degrees but don't want to work in offices and/or do things with numbers.

Sorry, jobs that are fun and desireable aren't in big supply. Do something difficult, boring, disgusting, unsexy and perhaps dangerous and you are set.

Seattle has a few confounding factors: - Higher taxes that are not present in surrounding cities - A public school system that is hot garbage compared to 20 years ago (Eastside schools are still ok) - Amazon as of almost a decade has been pushing hiring to their Eastside offices, and trying to freeze headcount in the state overall - Lots of the engineers you want to hire live on the Eastside

Short term, Bellevue is a better place to have your office. Mid term, the big winners are Texas, Vancouver (CA) and India. A little longer term, the lower end of all those jobs are gonna anyway in a puff of tokens.

Us either, at least any team I work with (reasonably large public software company worth several hundred billion dollars)

I wish they would explore alternate hypotheses.

Because enough of the plebs are realizing the future is grim, so the PR firms have been put i to action. Earlier this year as if on cue Sam and Dario changed their tune on AI replacing workers.

I always though the skin model would be a great UX paradigm for an OS to follow. Pity we have gone the opposite direction and it is turtlenecks and "user delight" all the way down.

Aluminum smelting is enough?

Hmmmm that's odd, because everybody I know who has worked (or works) at a major social network (or two or three), including me, thinks it is horrible for mental health of everybody involved.

I'd be very curious what kind of "research" NPR is talking about, and who funded it, because it flies in the face of what all of us at these companies have seen.