science4sail

"Broken windows" economic theory applied to public health!

I imagine that soon we'll see recommendations for seniors to spend their last years in long-term care facilities rather than at home or with their families. After all, it's good for the GDP - we need a way to "mine" all of that Boomer wealth before their heirs can inherit it.

That doesn't mean that they're wrong. You can take a look at early 20th century literature to see the sorts of mental math humans (especially humans employed as "computers") were capable of.

Even further back, you can take a look at how good human memory was in oral-tradition, preliterate cultures. All of those extremely long poems had to be memorized by bards, skalds, griots, etc.

The phrasing of that sentence is weird. It brings to mind the image of an undead lich Zuck ruling the Metaverse centuries after his death.

> And other shareholders can decide whether it's worth it to them to help him pay the tax.

Not in Meta's case. Facebook voting rights are set up so that Zuck always controls a majority of the votes (even if he doesn't control a majority of the shares). Some stocks are more equal than others.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.

> Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

You can escape the market by becoming a subsistence farmer or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island. Might involve a reduction in standard of living though.

Will AI create abundance for everyone though? I can certainly see how it would benefit both business owners (no more annoying office employees!) and blue collar workers (cheap professional services for everyone!), but it's hard to see how it would benefit most white collar middle class folks, who spend most of their time moving information around.

My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.

I think that the author's doom was probably taking a career break to get a hobby degree.

There's nothing wrong with self-cultivation and education, but such breaks are risky even if you're doing them as part of an approved sabbatical. You need to go into them with a backup plan just in case the job market collapses while you're out (switch careers, lean on a strong social network, FIRE, etc.)

I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).

I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.

I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.

What's in this AAA battery? Antimatter?

From the paste, it's pretty obvious that they're using Linux with a custom llama.cpp fork. The Framework Desktop uses the AMD Strix Halo chipset, which is a unified memory system with an integrated GPU. I think that it goes for around $3000 in these inflated times.

     Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee

I would argue that there's still an important role for human employees as compliance ablative armor.

The human's purpose is to keep an eye on the LLM, occasionally intervene/interfere with its work, and most importantly, incur social/legal liability for anything that the LLM does wrong.

Kind of like the backup drivers used by self-driving cars.