waisbrot

Scams, maybe? "I can restore your Meta account for a $100 service fee because of my insider contacts." Then you just take the money and ghost.

AI can automate that, no problem.

At pre-AI scale, StackOverflow was largely able to handle this traffic-flow. It was a bit frustrating for everyone, but that was kind of the norm on SO. Ultimately, a lot of support questions did get answered and the AIs trained on that, so when it's not telling you to email journalists you can thank SO for the tech support ChatGPT gives.

You'd think so, but mostly there is not.

I don't think "bans don't work" is the correct take-away from the USA's "war on drugs".

Maybe it would be fair to say "you can't just ban something." For example, tobacco-sales are restricted to minors in the US. And smoking among minors did drop sharply (until vapes came along). There were several controls used: outlawing sales, raising overall prices (so that teens generally couldn't afford to smoke), education campaigns, and making smoking more difficult in general.

In contrast, the War on Drugs mostly involved incarcerating vulnerable drug-users. Some similarities to the current war on immigrants.

I think a tobacco-style attempt to ban AI would look like: - A large electricity surcharge to inference-providers, who would pass the cost to customers, making AI far more expensive. Maybe it would be worthwhile to drop $10M/year on code-assistance or slide-deck clip-art, but not for an individual to ask how to restore their Instagram account. - An education program telling people that they sound cringe when they write in AI voice, and which contexts it's appropriate/inappropriate to do that. (Don't AI your wedding vows.) - Certain types of harm would be the responsibility of the provider. Maybe if the AI medical assistant fills out the form incorrectly then the provider is liable for the malpractice suit. Or if it tells a teen to kill themselves the provider is liable for wrongful-death. These would likely result in the provider trying to cut off access to any of the groups where they couldn't shift liability.

It's written from the perspective of one of the masters.

> The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient.

So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.

Don't they force you to sign up for a Google account to be able to gate access to a Google Drive file?

That's an interesting topic you might meditate on. Microsoft would never hold such a vote. Would you be better off with their OS? Debian is one of the more free-as-in-speech distributions; would you rather run your VMs on one that had tighter integration with for-profit groups?

The article appeared to state both the facts and the assumptions being made off of them pretty clearly.

> Insurance was illegal at different times in history because it was considered gambling.

And it was, in fact, gambling. You could take out a life insurance policy on anyone without any relationship with them.

I want the setting to steal YOUR focus

In my experience, ORMs save a little bit of writing SQL and then cost an unbounded quantity of time in debugging mysterious problems because knowing why a query is slow now requires understanding the DB, your own code, and also the ORM.

This is an excellent distillation.

Yes, in practice you may find that one or two of these don't apply to your own special start-up. But probably they all actually do.

Developer community. "Open source" historically implied that an interested developer might hack on the code and submit their changes. But if the entire code-base is rewritten by the maintainer every year, then there's no developer community.

An easy example: you need 5 minutes of planned downtime (which is entirely within SLAs) to execute a major upgrade, but the system is also used by Sales for demos to major new clients. "We're going to take 5 minutes of downtime on Wednesday evening for an upgrade. Contact me ASAP if this is a problem for you." If you don't hear from the team, then it's OK to go.

Are Seattle, the Rust Belt, and upstate NY examples of higher taxes driving wealthy job-creators out? I think they were the opposite: the market moved and then the wealthy people left to follow it.

NYC has always been extremely expensive, and people have largely decided that it's worth the price. I don't see how a little wobble in either direction changes that. Everyone could have already moved to Miami, or Salt Lake City, or even cheaper places if they were actually price-sensitive.