weweweoo

What I'm most worried about is how farming will adapt. Either food production needs to shift to geograhically new areas, or we'll need massive storm-proof greenhouses where hostile weather conditions don't matter. Large scale desalination of seawater will be likely needed too.

Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.

I believe most of the misery could be still avoided with massive amount of investment into green technology, AI and robotics to take care of the old and so on. But if Americans continue to elect people who hate science and have ideological love for fossil fuels, then we're probably doomed indeed.

If most people are unemployed, modern capitalism as we know it will collapse. I'm not sure that's in the interests of the billionaires. Perhaps some kind of a social safety net will be implemented.

But I do agree, there is no reason to be enthusiastic about any progress in AI, when the goal is simply automating people's jobs away.

Babies can at least manipulate the physical world. Large language model can never be defined as AGI until it can control a general purpose robot, similar to how human brain controls our body's motor functions.

Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.

Obviously extremist attitudes don't disappear overnight when a regime promoting them disappears. Still, I would prefer to see a comparison to other parts of the world. Were antidemocratic, racist and antisemitic attitudes more common in postwar West Germany compared to other countries?

What is particularly lacking in research is perspectives from countries beyond Western world. Humankind's history is full of racism and xenophobia everywhere, but most research has a Western perspective.

Yeah, I'm no fan of Musk or Trump, but I think Twitter always was a spam-infested, hateful cesspool where people with online-addiction yelled at each other. There was nothing for Musk to ruin, because the whole concept was rotten from the start. Allowing only short messages doesn't promote intelligent discussion, it does the opposite.

Yes, firing ordinary workers and moving production elsewhere is definitely going to fix bad management and rotten company culture on top level.

Boeing management created the 737MAX fiasco and killed those people.

Mainly the various physical operations many of them perform on daily basis (due to limitations of robotics), plus liability issues in case things go wrong and somebody dies. And finally, huge demand due to aging population worldwide.

I do believe some parts of their jobs will be automated, but not enough (especially with growing demand) to really hurt career prospects. Even for those parts, it will take a long a while due to the regulated nature of the sector.

The question is, why wouldn't nearly all other white collar jobs be professions of the past as well? Does the average MBA or whatever possess some unique knowledge that you couldn't generate with an LLM fed with company data? What is the alternative career path?

I think software engineers who also understand business may yet have an advantage over pure business people, who don't understand technology. They should be able to tell AI what to do, and evaluate the outcome. Of course "coders" who simply produce code from pre-defined requirements will probably not have a good career.

To be honest, if the bottom 50th percent of coding talent is going to be obsolete, I wonder what happens to rest of the "knowledge workers" in those companies. I mean people whose jobs consist of attending Teams meetings, making fancy powerpoint slides and reports, perhaps even excel if they are really competent. None of that is any more challenging for LLM than writing code. In fact replacing these jobs should be easier, since presentations and slides do not actually do anything, unlike a program that must perform a certain action correctly.

What's the alternative? If AI is going to replace software engineers, there is no fundamental reason they couldn't replace almost all other knowledge workers as well. No matter the field, most of it is just office work managing, transforming and building new information, applying existing knowledge on new problems (that probably are not very unique in grand scheme of things).

Except for medical doctors, nurses, and some niche engineering professions, I really struggle to think of jobs requiring higher education that couldn't be largely automated by an LLM that is smart enough to replace a senior software engineer. These few jobs are protected mainly by the physical aspect, and low tolerance for mistakes. Some skilled trades may also be protected, at least if robotics don't improve dramatically.

Personally, I would become a doctor if I could. But of all things I could've studied excluding that, computer science has probably been one of the better options. At least it teaches problem solving and not just memorization of facts. Knowing how to code may not be that useful in the future, but the process of problem solving is going nowhere.

I agree with the hypothesis. My country has a significant shortage of doctors, and guess what the few doctors spend a large amount of their day on? Paperwork that used to be done by secretaries, whose salary would be maybe 1/3 or the doctor's. It's a massive waste of both money and doctor's potential, but somehow that's what the free market prefers.

Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.

The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.

So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.

Definitely do that. Old Fujitsu thin clients make awesome DIY routers.

Here's examples of idle power consumption of second hand mini-pc's i've tested, running Ubuntu, measured from the wall:

Dell Wyse 5070 with Pentium Silver J5005 ~ 5W

Fujitsu Futro S940 with J5005 as well ~ 7W

Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro with i5-10500t ~ 12W with two SSD's

In comparison, my Ryzen 7 server build consumes about 22W idle (before I added GPU), has 4x SSD and 4x RAM sticks. I like raspberry pi, but for most purposes an used mini-pc is a better choice.

That's true. The US economy is still very strong by world standards.

In my country (Finland) even entry-level jobs that pay peanuts often have multi-round interviews, with applicants recording videos and taking psychological tests. It's all handled by recruiting firms, which make good money by filtering the masses of desperate applicants through meaningless tasks like this.

Even if the workforce is small, job market can still be highly competitive when the there are simply too few successful employers.

Housing is inexpensive in places where there are not enough jobs. Cities were born due to industrialization moving jobs to them, not because people suddenly wanted to become urban.

So, what individuals want has little to do with it.

Yep, collapse of farming is much bigger problem than the cooling itself. People live even in Siberia and Alaska / Northern Canada, but in much smaller quantities as it's harder to produce food. Europe has money to import food, or if it's not available, then take it by military means.

So, my bet is that in case of AMOC collapse Europeans simply elect authoritarian governments that will make some unfortunate developing countries colonies once again, and use them for farming. Given bad enough existential threat, things like rules-based order, human rights and democracy cease to matter, and the strong take what they want from the weaker parties. That's just how humans work.

What you're writing was true a couple of years ago, but right now six week bootcamp isn't going to get you a job at all in Western world. In my country even new grads with 5 year CS degrees struggle to find jobs, especially if they don't program on their spare time. Meanwhile doctors can pretty much choose their workplace, and earn at least twice as much as average dev.

I would never recommend any technical role in this field for anyone who has no genuine interest in it. Sales, project management etc might work better.

Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example.

Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.

Well, that obviously depends from how sunny and warm it is.

I think there should be just many types of neighborhoods. Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center, where there's enough space for parking slots, while the rest can enjoy pedestrian-first neighbourhoods closer to services. Public transport should of course reach all areas, so that the car owners have no real need to use their car much to reach the denser areas.

City centres should be built so that people naturally prefer walking/cycling/public transport over driving there. That's how many European cities are, and it works just fine. It doesn't mean anyone has to give up their car, instead people can learn to use it only where it makes sense.

I would never give up my car, but I use it only for stuff where walking is not practical (visiting countryside, buying lots of groceries from a big market located in less dense area). Suburbs that have apartments with enough parking slots AND adequate public transport / cycling roads to city centre work perfectly for me.

Recently I found a long lost go-pro style camera using metal detector, after it had fallen off an RC plane, which crashed into a tree in dense forest. Over nearly a decade the camera had been buried several centimeters into the ground, and the card inside the camera wasn't particularly well protected (just an open slot, not waterproof or anything), which made it exposed to lots of water and freezing winters for nearly a decade. After some cleaning the SD card worked perfectly, and all the data was intact. It even had the crash recorded in it. I was impressed by that. The camera didn't survive though.

Obviously the transition away from oil should be gradual, and the sectors which are hardest to transition could be given more time to do so. But there's no fundamental need for large scale use of oil, it's just the current infrastructure and limited tech that's the problem.

Hundreds of millions will die due to climate change if we don't act.

No, things should be regulated so that individuals have no choice but to do the right thing. It's governments responsibility to steer Karen towards more sustainable consumption choices. Either tax unsustainable business to make it unprofitable, or tax purchase of their services so that it's not rational for Karen to buy their product / services. The ecological choice should be made the cheapest.

Universally in this world people live most ecologically in parts of the world where they are too poor to act otherwise, not where they are most climate or environment conscious. Voluntary personal responsibility gets you nowhere when it comes to solving large-scale problems.

Buspar seems interesting, but somehow SSRI is what doctors describe by default over here for any anxiety disorders.

I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005 based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.

But isn't social anxiety a source of many harmful inhibitions? To me moderate lowering of inhibitions is a good thing, and a couple of beers helps with that. But with anything more the bad effects outweigh the good.

Still, facing one's fears and going sober to anxiety inducing situations is absolutely much better long-term treatment of social anxiety. That has a lasting effect, alcohol doesn't.