mostertoaster

Yeah I agree.

Still would be very valuable to be able to read works that shaped western civilization in their original language, since a lot of nuance is lost translating to English. Just see how many crazy readings of the Bible people have (american evangelicals particularly ) because English can’t express the original idea in Greek well enough.

The classical school movement in America is growing quite rapidly, and so maybe we start to see it again?

My kids at least are all learning Latin, and later, Greek.

I love Costco. Jim Senegal (former CEO of Costco) is what I wish more CEOs were like.

I have a large family, so we buy almost everything at Costco.

When I was kid I was so mortified when my parents suggested to buy clothes at Costco.

Now I think half my clothes come from Costco.

I’ve used chatGPT to take silly ideas I had and make fairy tale like stories for my daughter that often have goblins and things like that in them.

Watch now it’s gonna be like weirdly not including them.

Gonna go and try to have it make me a story about a goblin and a pigeon and a raccoon and see what it does.

Even this subjective interpretation shows why the question is so good. Someone on the other side would say the fundamentals are completely different.

It is meant to point out how many people say they would be willing to sacrifice even their very lives for a stranger, but in reality they only sacrifice if they already know others had to sacrifice and now they're forced to.

Like if you took the combined wealth of every person who thinks we should tax people more to help the less fortunate - do they give anything freely? They want others to sacrifice first. I'll believe people would actually press blue in a majority, when I see people who claim we should pay more taxes, voluntarily paying more themselves.

I'd love to live in a world where I was confident a vast majority of people would press blue. But I've literally seen people say they would press blue - then go on to say that in a communist revolution certainly we will have to end the lives of all the bourgeois.

I would most definitely press red, because I don't believe anywhere near half the population are actually that good, and don't think I'm a good enough person to actually think I'd risk pressing blue. (Trump won the popular vote in America, and so based on the rhetoric I hear from my left leaning acquaintances, neither would they)

Sad world really. Also why this question is so good.

This question is genius like the way secret hitler is a genius game.

All the different ways to frame it and think about it, and the balance between them all.

Saying "I would press blue" is different than actually pressing blue. Many people have insisted if I strike it rich, I'm going to give all my money away, and then... they don't.

Oh and the amount of ways you can ask it differently "If more than 50% vote for Trump/Kamala everyone lives, but if less than 50% all Trump/Kamala voters die" - and then seeing how the responses change. And the way the whole calculus changes depending on what other parameters could be added/presumed.

Once again just such a good rage-bait question.

Though I can't for the life of me figure out why people get so mad at people's answers, unless it's like in secret hitler where someone accuses of me being a fascist, and we get all mad, but we all laugh at the end because it's just a silly game, like this silly but fun question.

Yeah I’m all for doing what makes sense.

I probably just overreact and judge too quickly certain statements from my experiences of people who act like I’m destroying the earth because I have more than 3 kids.

I appreciate reasonable people though, and I should not assume, everyone is a crazy alarmist because they have any concern, so I apologize.

Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps

My first thought from that heading was “my company will know where I am at all times”. Though that was not the point thankfully.

It’s really about the cost/benefit analysis.

The value of plowing ahead and using more energy is worth far more than making sure Florida doesn’t lose some coastline.

The presumptions I see that annoy me with the alarmists, is that they completely negate human agency and ingenuity, and they ignore the economic cost of many of the proposed plans.

Natural gas is far better than coal and should be encouraged rather than condemned. Nuclear power is best of all, is the cleanest and safest energy, and yet is hardly ever the first choice of the alarmists.

I’d rather spend double the energy unlocking breakthroughs in science with the help of AI, and address the problems when they come. I don’t go out of my way to lower my “carbon footprint”, but I also don’t just do things that are wasteful and deliberately harmful to the environment.

AI making us forget how to think for ourselves is a far bigger risk to mankind than climate change. Thanks.

The EPA repealed its 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases warm the Earth and endanger human health and well-being.

So this is not a good reason to oppose AI. Now the sheer energy it requires does mean we might want to go nuclear though.

Natural gas is nice though because it does pollute the air far less than coal.

You might argue the EPA only repealed that because of political agendas, but the same argument could be made for why it was passed.

A lot of people got very rich off the fear mongering from climate alarmists.

I thought the “sponsored by nobody” thing to donate through was another example of the spam at first.

Thiel is not an idiot.

Competition is for losers, is a way to say to go and compete in a super crowded market where it is impossible to differentiate yourself is not going to make you a winner.

But usually people are called idiots because they don’t swallow the progressive propaganda wholesale.

The word monotheism didn’t even exist until the 17th century.

I’m doubtful of some of the article’s claims, that seem to project our modern ideas onto the ancient world.

But I think ancient israel saw there were many “gods”, but they viewed Yahweh as “God most high” or even “creator God”.

It’s like saying “Hinduism” is this singular religion, that is actually full of different gods and different practices, but we just lump it all together as one thing.

We just really like taxonomies.

As an experienced software engineer, I’m incredibly excited about what AI is going to be able to do, like on a scale of 1-10, I’m an 8.

As a citizen, who doesn’t trust the government, or the media, or giant corporations, I’m also an 8/10 concerned.

That means I’m equally concerned about AI as I am excited, I might be more concerned than someone who isn’t excited at all about AI 1/10, but who is mildly concerned with a 5/10.

The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.

What does it mean for rocketable to dog food their product? :)

I love that you have to find the cancer on the CT scan to see the jobs page. That’s creative. Now I’m craving some gamified version of that to see how terrible of a radiologist I would be.

Oh that sounds cool. Thanks for sharing. I’m definitely going to check it out.

Ok does anyone else’s mind just immediately go to “The Minority Report” is soon going to no longer be just a sci fi dystopia?

Or just because math is awesome and knowing more is just great knowledge to obtain.

For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.

I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.

Be curious how they got their numbers. Because I had to fill out intent to homeschool forms for my 4 kids that are over 10, but they’re all at a classical Christian school, but there is one home day a week so it technically is considered homeschool by the state. So if they pull from those types of forms it could be there are a lot of kids who are at schools but look like they’re homeschooling from the numbers.

And sure, if you can express your intent clearly in English

I think it is underestimated how difficult this truly is.

And this will always remain uniquely human because only The human truly knows their intent (sometimes).

I’ve had the AIs (ala the google) after I say “make me a script that does XYZ”, say here you go, and if I asked does it work and it tests it out will say yep it does, but only I will know if it is actually doing what I intended. I often will have to clarify my intent because I didn’t communicate well the first time. As we’ve all seen even amongst humans to each other, intent is not always well expressed.

There will always be a judgement made by a human with yes that is my intent or no it is not.

But even in old days of writing the “code” itself, most bugs were you not precisely saying what you wanted the program to do.

I think it’s correct to think of LLMs as compiling English to code, like c++ getting compiled to assembly.

I think what happens is things come from people with certain views, who seem to be part of some specific tribe, and so the presumption is they’re just spinning a thing for their own angle.

This happened all the time during COVID. Facts about its transmission and impact, would be immediately dismissed depending on if it went with the story we already accepted.

Everyone has already accepted a story of “Israel good”, or “Israel bad”, and online forums hardly change anyone’s mind.

If a Baptist tells me I’m sinning because I smoke and drink whiskey, I don’t hate him, I just dismiss him. If Charlie Kirk said a male cannot be a woman, then the response was hate and was felt to be completely justified.

The hate mongering is from those who bow down to the zeitgeist of the age.

My hope is that Charlie Kirk bravely speaking the truth in the face of so much hate, even though it cost him his life, inspires many more to not fear for their lives to speak the truth, and raise their kids to be the same, until society turns and rejects what is false.

It is likely more than just coincidence that the wealth gap increased so much as soon as we went off the gold standard in the 70s.

Might’ve been worth it if we all are ultimately wealthier than we would’ve been, but also easy to think it just become a way for the rich to soak the middle class with a hidden tax, that the proletariat applauds and votes in favor of with only short term thinking.

We get that middle class to be much less than 50% of the populace, as long as they give us EBT, and some money for healthcare and maybe once the mega corporations own most the property they give us some box to call shelter, the entire middle class will just become be good little subservient serfs, happy that our noble lords take so good care of us.

Honestly I think UBI would be awful. And what I really mean is take the sum amount of all welfare we spend today divide by the number of citizens and give every citizen that much. Would hardly be enough still. The only people who should be in favor of it though is the billionaire aristocrats.

It would effectively take the entire middle class and make them serfs.

It would be the quickest way to bring back a feudal type system with a few people at the top and everyone else pretty much poor.

Sure they’d make sure we have enough to eat and clothe ourselves, but even the slave owners of old did that.

Just look at the experiment in 2020-2021 where we gave everyone even more free money, the result we saw companies go from less than a trillion market cap to over three trillion while wages went up maybe 25%

If we could get rid of social security, Medicaid, food stamps, and all forms of welfare, and replace them all with a UBI equally given to every citizen, the trade off might make something as inherently idiotic as UBI worth it.

Yeah unlikely. I don’t even care that Elon isn’t just being altruistic and is in on all this just to benefit himself. My support of what they’re doing thus far is pretty steadfast, and I just want to see more and more people fired, and more and more budget cut.

I don’t care what happens to Ukraine, just don’t want us to send another dime. Hoping it can just end soon, which is more likely now than it was with previous administration.

Tariffs are a terrible idea though, but would take them if we got rid of the income tax.

As of now DOGE and Trump are doing exactly what I hoped, and I’ll check back in a year and see if I’m worried.

Do you think maybe this is less of a big deal in the brave new world of chatGPT.

I know I have zero worries about having to code in a new language or framework with the ability to get answers so quickly to my dumb questions, but maybe that is because I’m still choosing languages and frameworks that are fairly popular and have so much online documentation that the LLMs know about them, and if something is really esoteric maybe the help wouldn’t be that good?

So no different than Biden and Obama and Bush. Oh well.

At least it is enjoyable to see progressives squirm. And to gut dept of education and usaid, both very solid ideas so far.