mekael

As a society we already know how to make the lives of everyone better:

1. Stable housing

2. Access to safe drinking water

3. Access to food

4. Access to healthcare

5. Access to education

6. Stable governments

The EA community has so many "ideas" about what would help, when all they need to do is focus on those six and the world would be as close to a utopia as you or I could hope to see in our lifetimes.

I legitimately thought you were kidding about the shrimp welfare initiative, but after looking it up I was more infuriated about EA than I normally am when it comes up. I can think of several causes which would be better served with 3 million USD, and all of them take care of human beings. Living, breathing, intelligent human beings. These people should not be in any position of power or taken seriously ever.

Im unsure as to how "it's clear that AI is going to make that possible".

Things that help kids learn

- parents who love and care for them

- stable housing

- stable access to food

- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being

- stable access to healthcare

None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.

Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.

Years ago i slid down a bannister at a dance club, caught my foot, flipped over backwards, and landed on a barstool. Having grown up poor as dirt, i knew that calling an ambulance would be at least a grand if not double that. I called an uber to take me the 15 blocks to the hospital.

Total cost was 70 bucks (10 bucks for the uber, 60 for the er copay).

The number of people here in the US who use uber as an ambulance is waaay higher than you would think.

At the end of the day doesnt that just end up being universal healthcare but with more steps?

Which one?

As an aside, i read this, gave you an upvote and then went to check your submission history and saw that I’d kick your rep over to 2222. Congrats!

Ive mainly been outputting them to high fidelity jpegs and then stuffing them into a cbz for portability. Works well went im reading on my ipad. As for the others i had them sorted out about a week or two after i decompiled the original binaries.

I’ve definitely kicked myself a few times for not posting about them sooner, but the fear of pissing off CondeNast tempered my willingness to show off

Interestingly enough, i’ve been sitting on a project for the last 12ish years where i just took the FMloader lib and used that from C# to turn the djvu files into pdfs. All that was needed was a decompiler and an hour of banging my head on it. I published some of the results a few years ago but need to go back and actually build out a full app.

Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.

Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge.

Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.

Ummm. Plenty of people starved to death as a result of the industrial revolution.

Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again

“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”

- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).

There are several quite decent open source CRM’s they could have deployed just as rapidly and easily. For example, years ago I lead a team who stood up SuiteCRM in six weeks where the build/customization was three days and the rest of the time was negotiations with other divisions about integrations (i work at a pretty large company). Last i checked it cleared half a million records with the only downtime being during a weekend patch cycle.

You have no idea how many times I’ve asked “why are we not using the project generator” or “why did you write 200 lines to parse a csv? Here’s a library and five lines to get it done” in the last year. Its easily up 20x compared to pre ai, and getting worse.

I’ve worked for companies with less than that in total personnel expenditures (100ish people) and they were actually economically productive / provided a tangible service. With 15 million and a year(ish) I could spin up dedicated teams to build multiple profitable applications. That sounds like hubris, and maybe it is, but i’m pretty confident given my domain knowledge.

Has everyone gone crazy?

What are you working on?

We can take the LEO's that would have patrolled highways/city streets and have them patrol on public transport, same job just slightly different environment.

Can I ask why you feel that public transit is unsafe in the US?

Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.

A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.

The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#

It’s precisely this, and, to be fair, it’s a rational approach given a Data Security Exhibit starts at 6 weeks and can hit 6 months to complete. That being said, I work with regulated data, so YMMV.

I’m most likely going to be downvoted, but Tofutti Cuties are absolutely delicious vegan ice cream bars. And i’d consume one in celebration of your accomplishment.

I think you’re missing the /s.

Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?

I’ve never thought of it in terms of “how many new metropoli(sp) are being added”, but it seems like a deceny unit of measure. If we use the average of 6gw, we’re adding essentially 40 nyc’s.

Brevity is the soul of wit:

You’re pretty much spot on.

In that case I'm just moving the reading of the documentation from reading it as I'm writing the yaml to when I'm doing a code review. Not saying it isn't helpful to have a pair researcher, just seems like I'm moving things around .

Would you be able to give an example of a feature? For my example, I need to query an ancient undocumented database , pull back a pile of data, do some validations on it, and then show it to the user or pass it along with another processing step. The human part is researching the database and the data living in it, and implementing the validation(s) while talking to a business user, everything else can be templated.

I'm still confused about the things I'll be slower in though, and I'm being sincere with that confusion. If it's "boilerplate", then I haven't done enough research or pick a library which has little to none of that, or I'm not using the template(s) built into whatever framework I am using.

For example, in one of the projects I'm working on, I'm using the VSA pattern. I have the list of 50 to 75 features I need to implement and what "categories" they slot into, I have all of the frameworks and libraries picked out, and I have built out "feature templates" with all of the boilerplate setup (I'm reusing these over multiple projects going forward). for each of the features all I need to do is

'ftr new {FEATURE_TYPE} {FEATURE_NAME} {OUTPUT_FOLDER}'

and then plug int the domain specific business logic.

I'll most likely use Claude/Codex/Whatever to write out some of my tests, but the majority of the 'boilerplate' is already done and I'm just sorting out the pieces that matter / can't be automated.

Am I missing something huge with these tools?

Don't get me wrong, for doing reverse engineering they're great helpers and I've made a tonne of progress on projects that had been languishing.

If I don't have experience with the underlying framework/language/thing being modified, it makes it quite difficult to trust the actual review. In this example, I haven't worked heavily with Cloudformation, so I can't call b.s if it leaves a database instance exposed to the wider public internet rather than in my company's private VPC.

I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me.

Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.

I’ve heard estimates of starting at 2k a month per person, and thats for the “normal” user-base