lll-o-lll

This is absolute gold, but Suchet is so much better here. That performance was transcendent.

Really interesting response. Is there really just “one” Indian work culture? India is this massive diverse place; surely there’s going to be very different work culture from workplace to workplace?

> People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes.

People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.

> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.

We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.

Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!

Which makes the hash the password and the hash of the hash the hash. You achieved nothing. If you truely don’t want to send the password, there are of course ways. But it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than this and no one is doing any of it because… Passkeys is what you end up with.

Yes

Learning nearly anything? You can’t learn to drive a car from YouTube. Or paint a house, or wash a dish, or code, or … Learning requires doing.

Who thinks otherwise?

Paywalled

> Doctors are caught in a web of business, no longer a noble vocation. The altruism of young doctors have been replaced by the shackles of efficiency, productivity and key performance indicators.

And later

> To some hospitals and their business, I’m not a Surgeon. I’m just an employee. Overworked, burned out, replaceable. The noble call to Medicine has been suffocated by the bureaucratic force exerting itself as the medical industry.

How much of the world has gone this way? Feels like there is something sick deep down in society that is manifesting itself as “you are not a human, you’re a set of metrics”.

Seems like this aspect could have been written by an Academic, a designer, certainly a software developer. The debasement of human dignity.

> in the field for the wrong reasons

It’s an interesting view-point. What are the “right reasons” to pursue an intellectual discipline? To selflessly further the total sum of knowledge?

> No reason to mourn them leaving

What field? Who’s leaving?

The conclusion has to be that human involvement in these pursuits is facing existential crisis. “Teach me, oh Oracle, the mysteries of the Universe”. “For a fee”.

Both the glory and joy of discovery now belongs to the machines (the owners of those machines). Perhaps that’s fine and well, but I read Anathem and feel the strong yearning to be the intellectual monk. And yes, to fight and debate and think; and obtain my place in history. The history of man.

> But there's still play. There's still curiosity. And there's still the drive to understand something for yourself.

Yes, but think about what that implies if those are the only motivations left. Gone are the professions. Gone are the ambitious.

There is plenty of space for people to work on intellectual pleasure pursuits (as there is with art and music), but the death of all intellectual based industries is still something to avoid. Or to mourn.

> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work

This is the crux of it and goes far beyond Mathematics or Computer Science. To get a bunch of humans to do anything, you have to motivate them. Kleos and Timē; renown and stuff. These AI companies threaten to rip this away from everyone but themselves, and this recent millennium prize is the perfect example.

Solving this problem as a human would have led to tremendous Kleos; my name would be written in the annals of mathematics, lecture tours of praise were mine to be had for the rest of my days. This one victory would have earned my recognition throughout history. The greatest a mortal may hope for. Ripped away.

It would also have given me great Timē. The prize money, the professorships, the book deals. Gone.

If all hope of “renown and stuff” in the intellectual realm is now taken by the AI companies, they will remove all human motivation to pursue these endeavours.

Perhaps the glory will come from slaying these fell beasts.

> "You can't debug something just by reading the code."

This is exactly how I debug things. When I first started working I was forbidden from using the debugger “you won’t have a debugger in the field”. Being able to read the code, spot the bug and tie it to the symptoms; that’s a skill. A damned important skill.

The revolving door between politician to made man (lobbyist) seems like a bit of a problem, no? These poor ex-politicians/staffers need to earn those mil+ salaries or they couldn’t effectively save these poor industries from demise? Perhaps the politician being asked to go easy on the regulations is potentially influenced by the ex-politicians rather lucrative position?

Corruption does not need to be overt to be destructive. It’s absolutely pervasive.