siriusastrebe

Why can't we train our own citizens to become construction workers?

If you claim that people "don't want to work" for those wages, then isn't immigration keeping our wages down?

Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less?

I did some digging, reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane.

Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.

So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.

Russia fires conventional warheads into Kiev all the time. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. The city survives.

Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.

Air power relies on fuel and maintenance and runways. It's not necessary to contest the skies if the adversary can destroy the "tail" that supplies the aircraft.

Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.

The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range

Moscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry.

Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.

Identifying objects in pictures was considered an insurmountable task only a few years ago, like in the xckd comic https://xkcd.com/1425/

We're about to see our political campaigns flooded with fake videos, slander, fabrications, and misinformation. Used to be you could be relatively certain if something was a video it was too much effort to be photoshopped. Not true any more.

As a bootstrapping founder who is between 'regular' jobs, AI coding looks like a recurring cost that eats into my ramen savings, promises 80% of the benefits but leaves the hardest 20% to me, and makes it that much harder to dig into the code when a bug surfaces.

Also, I learn way less when dealing with AI. The struggle that used to turn effort into domain knowledge is gone with AI. What's left is spaghetti code.

That reminds me of another though I’ve had.

Humans need food, water, shelter, and medical care to survive. Similar to your earlier point, robots will need raw materials, electricity, manufacturing capacity and maintenance.

What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.

Certainly plausible.

Humans have goals and desires because we are a self-replicating species of animal subject to natural selection. The individuals that don't have goals and desires, or have goals and desires that are misaligned end up selected out of the gene pool. Agency comes from the need to survive.

Worker ants and worker bees don't have agency on their own. They are goal oriented and have the 'desire' to do work for the colony (or not, researchers have identified some workers will be lazy), however, worker ants or bees don't reproduce. They are an evolutionary dead end.

I think this is similar to how we will build robots, at first. They will do things, but have no agency of their own. They exist to fulfill tasks. Why would they? The companies that buy them want dutiful workers.

So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?

Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race. When robots are mining the raw materials for robots and creating more robots, maybe with a bit of human labor in the mix, then what drives the demand for more robots?

Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.

A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.

If human labor becomes 'uneconomical', what will happen? Obviously a great deal of social upheaval.

But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.

Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?

Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.

So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.

The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.

I don't think LLMs inherently do anything perfectly. They can make sure it compiles and passes tests and they can be trained to do an enormous array of tasks, but the code it generates isn't perfect, it's selecting one of many possible outputs based off of some numbers it came up with after a few matrix multiplications and ReLU activations.

Those matrix multiplications aren't a divine perfect thing. They suffer from floating point precision issues and training data issues and there's still debate if adversarial examples are just an unsolveable property of our linear-algebra based neural network architecture.

Can they do things way faster than a human? No doubt. Can they do very complex tasks? Yes. Do they do things with perfection? Not by our human definition of perfect.

The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while.

Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.

But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.

Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.

What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.

Church is how most people learn to sing in a group setting

Next you'll be telling me there's punch card programmers still. For love of the punch card craft.

This product looks fantastic!

I got one question that I can't find the answer to on the website.

What sql variants does it support? Postgres? MariaDB?

Once the good-enough bridge deteriorates and we have to spend more money maintaining or replacing it

Don't we end up just spending the same? Just now we're left with a crappy bridge.

And if your one bridge survived as long as, or longer than three bridges?

What would happen if we made bridges to last as long as possible, to withstand natural disasters and require minimal maintenance?

What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it?

Ukraine is claiming 1,500 daily Russian casualties. That’s 45,000 per month. That’s an enormous human toll.

I don’t think Russia can continue to sustain losses at these rates. Putin can remain as stubborn as he wants, but if Russian soldiers are being hunted down by drones faster than they can be mobilized, the frontline will recede.

While atlatls and bows can be used for hunting, I’d wager warfare defined these people’s toolkits.

The fast transition suggests there was a strong pressure to switch, which probably didn’t come from animal hunting patterns.

However, nation states will absolutely pay for subtle, emotion evoking, destabilizing messaging with no timeline for success

This looks very promising. There's a need for persisting game state in a central place, but also have that data streaming in.

I'm wondering about temporary gamestate that doesn't need to persist. Things like terrain or destructible voxels, where the size could be prohibitive to keep in a databases, but would work well in memory or with a cache.

This is awesome! You could probably incorporate a graph visualizer to map out all the table relations (which could be a good selling visual).

How does it distinguish which tables have foreign keys to other tables? Can with work without defining constraints?

Can this be solved by a question answer session?

You ask the coding assistant for a brand new feature.

The coding assistant says, we have two or three or four different paths we could go about doing it. Maybe the coding assistant can recommend a specific one. Once you pick the option, the coding assistant can ask more specific questions.

The database looks like this right now, should we modify this table which would be the simplest solution, or create a new one? If you will in the future want a many-to-one relationship for this component, we should create a new table and reference it via a join table. Which approach do you prefer?

What about the frontend, we can surface controls for this in on our existing pages, however for reasons x, y, and z I'd recommend creating a new page for the CRUD operations on this new feature. Which would you prefer?

Now that we've gotten the big questions squared away, do you want to proceed with code generation, or would you like to dig deeper into either the backend or the frontend implementation?

An abundance of resources and opportunity?

I did not expect it so soon, but generative AI has the potential to become the holodeck: where you can tell the computer what kind of fictional adventure you'd like to experience in virtual reality, and it would bring it to life.