w10-1

"Productivity growth" just means same revenue for fewer employees. It would be ironic if that were the measure. (And no one argues that every business would benefit as expected when using the entire index as a signal.)

AI in medicine has become pervasive, resulting in less time spent fighting IT or staying up-to-date and more time with patients; no one need be fired because you can always do better work.

It's the opposite of enshittification: quality has gotten better without any visible economic difference.

Play with them, and show how play involves observing the play and changing it.

> the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what

Because this models how to go from oblivious to aware, through investigation and evaluation, while maintaining our own orientation - key to any limited being navigating a world with others

"while maintaining our own orientation": each organized teaching has their own world view (religious, open-liberal, science/art for its own sake, training to combat or fleece the world, etc.). It's extraordinarily difficult to learn and care deeply about any subject without being programmed for these enduring social franchises, adopting dissonant work/home/private or us/other personas, etc. in service of the franchise.

Society will deluge young people with this programming. Parents I hope teach maintaining yourself, the practice of observing yourself and addressing your limits, which would mean being ruthless in pruning delusions, kind about mistakes, and able to retry and/or get help. Indeed, if you teach only that, you'd be expressing a lot of faith that they're unique and good and self-sufficient, and they'll make their way; you believe it, and they will, too.

Yes, once they have learned the usual anecdotal lessons (but before college and life decisions), they'll need intro to systems thinking, to identify ex ante fruitless objectives and cost difficult paths, to game and deconstruct the franchises and make life-decisions based on prospects as well as interests and values.

But play is the most enduring lesson: that (per Nietzsche) after camel-carrying what you need and lion-clearing your workspace, you settle into creating what's interesting.

So teaching should reflect self-observation to be teaching for living your own life, but the goal activity should be creative play, to learn and make life worth living, for yourself and others.

I think the comment was to not play actively.

It's like arguing with God: he's got better info that you.

The Scion project seems like a great example of identifying and addressing scaling issues (just in time, it seems). Just 7 engineers! It makes me think I'd pay Anthropic $300K/year to work on such problems.

But it's a sad example, for open-source and for small engineering companies. Instead of infrastructure being more easily shared with the collective, or valued enough to build a business, now companies can tailor even major infrastructure to their own needs, and avoid all that coordination.

I'm glad they publish their notes to encourage others, but I suspect we're entering an epoch where confidentiality matters most.

Anthropic's problem was merging code at scale, but the scale problem I have with SCM is really merging all the related docs; these get lost in a stream of a forest of comments, PR's, and documentation, all of which (like a wiki) goes rapidly out of date before anyone notices because none of it is automatically correlated.

The service is mainly in the image analysis to characterize the type of acne, which is reviewed by a doctor (100% initially, then 10%).

> title is rather misleading

Your summary is misleading. Acne is diagnosed, prescriptions are written and applied, initially with Dr review and then only 10% reviewed by doctors.

Medicines are topical and said to have mild side effects - so I guess no retinoids (or accutane pills).

fwiw, physician assistants generally work under a doctor, who's supposed to review about that many of their cases.

> They're staffing up and investing in... something

You're suggesting "investing" is like R&D?

Investing is when you buy stocks or bitcoin and hope. Except for 1 year, their "investments" have always lost, last year about 50% of total assets:

-908 -4,374 3,970 -1,946 -10,273

"Investing" is traditionally how money is skimmed: something's sold to a friend at an inflated price that only becomes recognized as such years later amidst some other cover/crisis (if not after a statute of limitations). The other option is sweetheart deals - unneeded property leases, jobs for friends, etc. - but those are a bit more traceable, while investments can have multiple shell-company layers and complex derivatives.

Citation not required; the premise is not required to be true because the conclusion is independently verifiable (albeit overstated): "we’ve built an ecosystem for ourselves that is predatory to every single one of our desires and weaknesses"

But I'm not sure the attention economy is different in this respect from civilization's traditional franchises: the hope and protection rackets run by religion, governments, militaries, businesses, etc. We've been trading beer for labor in the oldest recorded history and probably before. But how would understanding that help?

So: not "citation needed", but back to TFA: can {proposal-x} help liberate people from predation (and self-destruction)? It's fruitless to wish there were no predatory human systems or realize everyone's out to get you; the question is how to cope.

The commenter is suggesting that counter-programming might not be the answer to programming. I would go on to suggest deprogramming, reducing the reactivity of any reward system, and then targeting the deepest values. Traditionally this is occasioned by failure (as a lesson) or getting old (heeding the older wise elders), or breaking the ego (in recovery, severe trauma (war, moral injury), etc.) so it's mostly a no-go zone, but in rare cases of excellent therapy or practice or great relationships one can make progress.

Tracking systems (joyful or otherwise) I think help not in the day-to-day reward hacking (any drug results in resistance) but to give a concrete picture of the value of time and habit: when I well and truly realize how little I do actually contributes to my/y/our future, I am motivated to really look backwards from the future.

To read Ben is to glimpse the AI divide: he's honestly and emphatically choosing based on whether it makes it easier for him to use his AI agents, even if that means ditching Apple for the Zuckerberg's melee. It's that important to his personal productivity. AI-native product streams will separate from what came before, as will the people who master them.

That said, I disagree on Apple: while the UI can be perfect, it has always imperfectly been trying to do the right thing technically in concert with developers and users, which puts it in the position of imposing constraints that developers and users can relax to varying degrees: wearable and home devices (not at all), iOS (somewhat), macOS (mostly).

wrt a hacker's future: I'm still traumatized both by decades of windows reboots and virus scanning, and by decades of squeezing into Linux (just don't sleep, avoid these displays...). I'm glad Apple stuff mostly just works and ordinary people still have access to unlocked, general-purpose computers, but that might not last. Cheap AI coding might remove any financial incentive to support users programming on their own, and we'd be left with locked devices as consumers or work-only access to programmable computers (at least for the latest hardware of note). If a 40% premium for mac hardware is the price we pay for continued access, so be it.

> the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.

the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.

If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.

"My family" - a nice anecdotal frame. No worries here. After all, labor savers for production has evolved for millennia. And you should only worry about the impact to yourself, and be glad your lot is better than your ancestors'.

But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).

The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.

That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.

Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.

The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.

> Made impossibly expensive

huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.

> You wont want or need associate attorneys

In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.

And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake).

So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).

first line of the open-source readme: ~download the binary for windows~ -- paved with good intentions?