BurningFrog

That's slightly disappointing, but I guess for this first test run they don't need to go for 100% efficiency.

We just need to educate a lot more doctors and nurses. That would lower salaries and provide a lot more care.

Last I heard the AMA controls how many doctors can be educated.

It's REALLY important to understand that non profits have just as much incentive to maximize their income as for profits.

They have no stock holders to pay, but the people running them will pay themselves multi million dollar wages if they can!

You don't have to build your own rocket anymore. SpaceX and others sell launches at fixed prices.

The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.

This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.

Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.

When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.

That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.

When I went into software engineering in the early 1980s, several people told me that had no future, since programmers would soon be automated away.

I ignored that, in part because I had no other skill I wanted to do 5 days a week, and it's of course been incredibly rewarding.

This time it definitely is different, and maybe the profession moves into a new and very different era. If SWEs will hit harder times and job losses, I don't think we have much standing to complain, given how many professions we have automated away during the last 50 years...

You seem to suggest we should ban the best system we know in order to force the development of other systems?

I know what food I like, but that doesn't at all mean I know how to cook it.

Writing is similar. I enjoy well written texts, but that doesn't mean I can write them myself, or can tell an AI how to write in that way.

If the alternatives are as fast and cheap as lab rat testing, sure.

If not, the alternatives will cost human lives and suffering.

The "Autopilot" argument is ~5 years old. Teslas no longer have that feature.

The current FSD system has no relation to the old Autopilot, and is enormously better, and very pleasant to use. A year ago FSD was nice, but I had to take over occasionally. This year it's much better, and I've yet to see a weakness, aside from some parking issues.

It's definitely a better driver than me!

By that standard we don't have human drivers either.

Yeah, I'm supervising, and I don't think I've had to take over any time this year.

In 2025 it was occasionally driving weird. Today it's a much better driver than me.

I have a self driving Tesla, as do many others.

As a driver, that would be very hard, but the car could figure it out in a millisecond.

The "air rockets" could probably also be used as hard emergency brakes.

The obvious use case is to avoid a collision!

Single use is perfectly fine for that purpose. No one complains that airbags are single use.

I think you could "split the profession" into diagnostic dentists that recommends what needs to be done, and another set that implements the recommended procedures.

Don't know how much effect it would have, but it should cut down the suspicion.

I don't think anything stops dentists from working like this today?

This is my most failed conversation in a while...

So how do you interpret the accusation of American jew David Ellison to be a "pre-dictator" working for Likud?

I used to be an avid NPR listener, but after George Floyd it's astoundingly woke when I try listening. That's not very often anymore, to be fair.

He's donated to and voted for candidates of both parties, and claims to be a centrist.

If you ever feel lonely, think about all those little friends who come visit you!

We have a lot of experience in what happens when mosquito species are removed!

Mostly because the rich world eradicated a lot of them to stop malaria.

Of course, once we were safe we told the rest of the world they had to live (and die) with with malaria, because we had discovered environmentalism.

I'm not a fan of "you never know" arguments.

They're only applied to thing we don't want to do.

In reality, it's always true that we don't fully know, so applying the argument always means "let's not do this".

Maybe we don't really disagree on much at all.

I'm glad we had this talk :)

Sure. But if you zoom out again, you'll see that the eras before was even more peppered with wars, revolutions, and genocides.

Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.

You're right that hardly anyone hires people because they feel a moral obligation. They need work to be done and pays what it costs to hire people.

Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.

We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.

This sounds like a clever argument, but the mindset of some executives really has no impact on how differently horses and humans are treated in society.

To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.

I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

The fallacy here is that horses were never employees!

They were tools that people used to get things done.

They got replaced by better tools. Just like typewriters got replaced by computers and printers.