Recent submissions

Comment · 16 days ago
Disagree. Scribes, doctors, bankers, and government clerks always existed, even if the education to do it was expensive and exclusive. For the first time in history, this labor, including its knowledge content might become automated and commoditized.
Comment · 16 days ago
Think carefully. I left high school teaching to become a dev. I would never go back. Yeah, social isolation sucks. But doing a job where your students/clients/patients think you're nothing but a waste of their time is soul-crushing on another level.
Comment · 16 days ago
Are you kidding? Suburbs used to have thriving social circles around churches, golf clubs, schools, etc. Trust can be easier too because of greater cultural uniformity.

This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.

Comment · 1 month ago
Articles like this keep measuring to a red herring standard that was never achievable in the first place.

As for accountability, it always laid with the employer. You think those nameless contractors whom Boeing hired suffered any consequences for that 737 Max glitch? Using AI won't change that.

AI doesn't have to solve all these coding problems to be worth handing the reins to it: it just has to substantially better on average than humans over the long haul, which it already is, especially if you have good verification of "done" and "working" in place through automated testing mechanisms. Perhaps we might say that QA is having its moment.

It doesn't mean humans aren't needed, but they aren't writing much if any code anymore.

Comment · 1 month ago
Do you take the standard 5g or something else? What's your weight?
Comment · 1 month ago
Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town.

I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year).

Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Anyone can speculate. If we fail to pay interest in a timely manner, then presumably fewer foreign entities will buy our debt, and we will have less money from debt sales to fund what debt funds. Whether that pain is spread equally or not is anyone's guess.
Comment · 2 months ago
I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.
Comment · 2 months ago
I don't think your ancestors sat around the living room while their kids were playing threshing wheat, though. They put the plowshares down once it got dark.
Comment · 2 months ago
Nice.

May I point out that in "Crudam si edes, in acetum intinguito", that "edes" is more likely to be the future of edere/esse "to eat"? (Just guessing by context.)

Comment · 3 months ago
I honestly like the vocabulary and turns of phrase the frontier models use. Their choices of words are usually apt to the circumstance. This is a weird thing to get upset about, IMO.

The big problem I have is when they apologize and say something like "that tidbit changes my analysis substantially". I wish they'd more often prompt for questions or use language in their initial responses that suggest lower than declarative confidence given the information you supplied.

Comment · 3 months ago
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.

I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.

Comment · 5 months ago
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
Comment · 5 months ago
No one's arguing you can't stand up a good MVP.

It's when you have to iterate to handle changing business needs, scale issues, and integrate with other systems where the entropy becomes a scary concern over a long enough timeline.

And it's not just "checking" - it's wholesale rejections of code, reframing prompts to target specific classes or approaches, etc... I don't think you will take the human out planning any time soon.

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