adamiscool8

Maybe it is NBD - the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are" has always seemed vulgar, so in some ways this turning is simply a necessary comeuppance for that status-seeking mentality. If these folks can muster some of their newly idle individual intellectual activity towards unbinding their self-worth from public recognition, they'll be alright!

AI seems to be revealing a lot of people get into industries like software engineering or math for a base external validation of their intelligence through their pursuits. The author realizes this and kind of handwaves it away in the last paragraph with some spurious generalizations. If you're not someone who organizes their self-esteem around being "intellectually necessary", this and all the handwringing reads as nonsense. AI hasn't taken away understanding for its own sake, local usefulness, arbitrating taste, or pure play. It's not an existential threat to the human need for community - only to the temperaments of a certain, vocal, subset who will need to evolve.

Democratically elected officials acting in the interest of domestic labor <> tech CEOs burned by a dictator

Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.

Literally all it takes - why would you ever believe otherwise? Marketing?

>a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers’ projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration.”

Why is this bad? The Administration is democratically elected so nominally represents the viewpoints of the majority people - why should taxpayer funding go to disfavored research?

>The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.

More weird fascist technocratic fantasies from academia. Why would you be constitutionally entitled to continued public funding?

Shows that — as always — the moat is domain fluency.

Zuck was in roughly the same position and they didn’t put out a statement skipping that IPO. The valuation criticism is more valid but this line belies political motivation.

Can you give a specific example, ideally that would not have been solved by people-hours amounting to less than the token costs?

Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…

It was a public safety disaster that the country is still trying to recover from.

In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.

"Once you've been to [the Netscape ISP Homepage], you'll never stop wanting to beat [front-end Javascript frameworks] to death with your bare hands."

After thousands of years of research we still don’t fully understand how humans do it, so what reason (besides a sort of naked techno-optimism) is there to believe we will ever be able to replicate the behavior in machines?