marinmania

A bank can't unilaterally reverse a wire transfer, but in practice they can. If two banks realized 20 minutes after a wire that it was an error/fraudulent, the receiving bank could freeze the account and then work to send the money back in a new transaction.

I travel 3 times a month for the last year and use Booking. I've never had a cancellation.

I take advantage of their platform moreso than they me. I book refundable no-pre pay hotels every time, sometimes having multiple bookings for the same week. It's like a free option on future pricing.

>I would guess that for every 1 software engineer there are 100 people doing this kind of 'manual data pipelining'.

For what time of company is this true? I really would like someone to just do a census of 500 white collar jobs and categorize them all. Anything that is truly automatic has already been automated away.

I do think AI will cause a lot of disruption, but very skeptical of the view that most people with white collar jobs are just "email jobs" or data entry. That doesn't fit my experience at all, and I've worked at some large bureaucratic companies that people here would claim are stuck in the past.

You can't deduct losses against regular income. The idea is that if you win $100,000 one day and lose $100,000 the next day you should be taxed 0 since on net you won 0 total. Under the news rules it sounds like you would still be taxed even if you won 0 on net.

I am anti-gambling so I don't really care, but the current system seems fair (assuming its enforced well)

My jumbled brain definitely read this for a split second as Artificial Intelligence causing a 787 crash.

I have been consistently bad at predicting things related to AI, but I never get the insistence that a personal assistant would be that valuable?

I honestly don't think it would save me that much time and for things an assistant would plausibly do (making purchases, planning vacations, responding to emails) I actually enjoy doing.

It does seem far more straight forward to say "Write code that deterministically orders food items that people want and sends invoices etc."

I feel like that's more the future. Having an agent sorta make random choices feel like LLMs attempting to do math, instead of LLMs attempting to call a calculator.

I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?

It does either get very exciting or very spooky thinking of the possibilities in the near future.

I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.

I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.

Agreed. By HN standards I am a very shitty programmer, and as of a year ago I would have said it takes up about 25% of my time. I pretty much just make demos to display some non-coding research.

I think with the rise of LLMs, my coding time has been cut down by almost half. And I definitely need to bring in help less often. In that sense it has raised my floor, while making the people above me (not necessarily super coders, but still more advanced) less needed.

I was wondering if more sites will start to drift to a system where they require you to be logged in to an account attached to a SIM card in some ways.

I feel like accounts that require phone verification are already similar in that they require a some cost to access. It obviously wouldn't stop a large corporation from buying up thousands of numbers if they needed it for a specific purpose, but it would be prohibitively expensive for most to try this.

The benefit of the SIM system is it actually costs zero for people since they already have a cell phone.

I agree with this - but sorta comforting? Like this would imply the AI may only do so if they chance of success was like 1% and the other 99% would give away the cards of it and other future AIs.

I know this is all completely hypothetical science-fiction, but I also have trouble seeing the idea that AI would settle for these long deceptive plans for which it has imperfect info.

I feel like its often people talking past each other.

I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.

But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.

I disagree that any car mechanic working a local auto body shop knows engines well enough to design one. They just know which parts are broken.

Similarly we reach a point in coding where you don't really need to know how every API or language you use operates beneath the hood, you just need to be able to see where its broken.

OP mentions the lawsuits did not succeed

Its not like the courts are investment banks with an evaluation arm. They are just judging if anything reaches the point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.