akst

You can insist something is economically rational all you like but that doesn’t demonstrate it is

Think through the logistics of maintaining power after a sudden transfer of institutional power to an oligarchs where humans come obsolete and are being lined up to be exterminated? Do you think those people just disappear? Do you think jobless, aimless people, or the new poor have historically accepted such reversal of economic standing?

History almost suggests this leads to a complete breakdown of society

Do you think this is gonna be enforced by robots?

Do you know how much power comes from the fact that energy come companies reliant consumption?

Think, do you think of that power they built on goods sold to consumers stays around after the consumers disappear?

Calling this economically rational probably goes hard if you have a rudimentary understanding of second-order effects, and an understanding of economics built on YouTube videos & hot takes online.

Something you learn in most introductory economic classes, is slave labour is less efficient than free salaried workers, an observation that goes as far back Adam smith & Richardo.

It leads to the same thing (but probably better spells it out), but the answer is entry barriers to competition which in the long run translates into less competition in the long run and greater profitability

Either way, he’s a dickhead. He’s clearly throwing around words he doesn’t really understand.

It wouldn’t be economically rational to do this. Nations have a monopoly on violence (policing, military & enforcement of through force) within their own borders, and nations are in competition with one another, even during times of peace.

It does not make sense for anyone nation to start culling people who do not get onboard with some radical social engineering programme. Through the stroke of a pen these companies are under the control of the government.

Say you want to make an even more pessimistic argument, say the oligarchy in one country get control of this monopoly on its violence. That country is still in competition with other countries.

Russia still has nukes, and thanks to their little war, they lack the technological expertise to go to toe to toe with China and the US on AI. Countries wanna mobilise what resources they can to survive this strategic competition and that includes humans.

Say the oligarchs are smart enough to maintain the status quo in foreign policy, and they seek to enslave their entire country. There is no amount of resources in the world that would prevent the amount of disenfranchised people from revolting and over-throwing any such government that didn’t give them a fair social contract, especially one that’s already gone through higher levels of economic development.

I've enjoyed ink displays, but my kindle has been dead for some time and it was always kind of a pain to load stuff on too, most papers would require some kind of zoom as well although I'm sure they're better these days.

I do love an e-ink display, but I just like holding a sheet of paper, and not having to jump through menus to read something especially if I'm actively referring to it and revisiting it. Plus I can use my coloured fineliner on it, whereas the PDF viewer on my iPad crashes sometimes crashes if you look at it funny.

I do it for reading sometimes mostly papers, I just find it a bit easier to read through something without distraction and easier on the eyes. That and it sits on my desk until I actually read it.

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

I mean not too surprising, it's a specialised model that trained on relevant quantitive/qualitative inputs.

LLMs are very general and flexible, by all means they can do well on non-text based specialised problems, but it also does well because their harnesses know how to defer to the right tools a lot of the time, and produces good answers from inspecting the output. Like if you ask Codex/Claude Code to transcribe a videos, it's going to create a script that uses whisper to extract the transcript not manually process the binary. If you ask it for demographic information it'll pull census data and write a script which produces the summary stats and report it back to you (I imagine much of the recent math stuff relied on this).

Sometimes it'll pull a number from its training data but the strength of an LLM is its ability to autonomously seek out the right answer even when it doesn't know the answer initially.

You could definitely use train an LLM to utilise these efficient specialised models, by it may be more cost effective to ask the model to build a special purpose application with a new UI over the top of the efficient specialised model.

Doesn't sound like the liability lies with the library maintainers, sounds up to the government agency to do their due diligence, but also sounds unenforceable as well

My point was that there isn’t some kind of universal generalised way of explaining for these things like economic class, some jobs are just less resilient to certain kinds of change.

It has more to do with the demand for the specific skills. Jobs in Western countries had more demand for workers in the service industry, but had less demand for labourers, as globalisation took place. And here we have less demand for software engineer labour because an alternative is available here to an otherwise expensive hire.

We all speak from experience, I’ve had shitty bosses and had shitty workplaces. By all means we should validate the shit people go through, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of the underlying forces

Definitely keep experimenting

I guess also, what’s happening in the top right is cool but I think as a user you’re preoccupied on figuring out how to view the other content it’s difficult to appreciate and I imagine that’s where you put a lot of effort

> I'd like the visuals to do most of the talking

If you’re aiming for a more curated experience, it might be worth limiting content that is likely to confuse the user for what the intended experience is meant to be. Many users have preconceived ideas of how some parts of the UI behave & which might get in the way to delivering the experience you’re trying to deliver.

I think this is really cool website and love this topic

But I think you might want to test this page on smaller screens, just very limited screen real estate for the content of interest, the top right half lots of padding, the scrollable content basically has 1/3 of the available screen space, the left hand side kind of has another 1/3

Look your website your vision, I get it and I respect your trying something different with the UI but if your goal here is to communicate your ideas, as a reader I'd appreciate having more screen space for the content, when I clicked on the link to see this specific post I'm just not interested in your other posts (or at least until I've read the one I went out of my way to read).

FWIW, I'm using a macbook air right now.

During the transitionary period between WW2 and 2000 we saw massive unemployment in many typical blue collar jobs in the western developed world, yet women weren't impacted to the same degree, why is that?

Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?

Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.

> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).

This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors

> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.

This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).

We're not talking about capital/labour share, we're talking about which professions are destabilised by technological innovation which are not.

Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.

Possibly, but I was between classes and really caffeinated lol