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I am very similar. I am a software engineer, trying to make the transition to full time writer. A year ago, I "finished" a first draft of my novel and I used AI to write some of the prose so I could get to that completed draft.

Now I've finished the third draft, and I think I've finally eradicated all of that slop from the text. It was terrible writing. Prose is my strength, it's what I was best at, why would I pass that off to a clanker, when it's the thing I was born to do in this world?

There are lots of other ways AI is helping me write, though:

- Hard Sci-fi - it creates simulations of various spacecraft configurations and allows to me see how it would play out. - Research - Consistency Checking - Simulated Reviews from different perspectives. Not as good as human reviewers, but still very useful. - Notes organizations - Speculation tracking and canon differentiateion

I will never use AI to write prose again. Even if it got really good, the point isn't the prose. The point is that I have something to say, and I'm going to use my own words to say it. If an LLM wrote this prose, even if it was at the level of winning a major literary prize, it still wouldn't be the words I would write, and it isn't satisfying.

One of the most uncomfortable truths about our profession is that there is literally no floor to how shitty software can be and yet still make people billions of dollars.

Yes, I think you've got the point.

They are serving different needs.

Are those the iridium satellites? They are doing something completely different from starlink. For one thing, they are in much higher orbit, increasing both latency and coverage. They also have much less available bandwidth.

I'm not sure they are competitors. They could be, but these networks are serving different purposes.

> I would also add that you can't make any more money selling drugs to people you have killed.

That assumes that people are playing a long game. If you're looking for your payday and exit, and there are many people out there who are only looking for the next payday, this argument falls apart.

> Moreover, a relatively small number of dangerous flops will tank your reputation with consumers.

One success the anti-vax people have achieved is to muddy the waters around this. Your public reputation is no longer correlated to actual performance.

> Liability means that you are incentivized to be quite cautious in pushing a potentially dangerous product

There's a long list of people throughout history who do not have this caution at all.

You seem to be taking a theoretical economics approach. Reality is different. People are not perfectly rational actors, and consequences are not consistent.

Look at what actually happens in reality.

This does not ring true for me at all. I'm very left wing and one of the things that pulls me left is a love for all humans, regardless of borders. I have never heard any of the left wing people I follow or who are in my life use pejoratives for immigrants. I've only ever heard it from conservatives. it's one of the most off putting thing about them to me.

A "popular content creator" is not a useful datapoint. They are doing things for attention, not actual work for building an inclusive civilization.

Wish I could have that hope. I don't believe he will ever experience consequences for the vast majority of things he's done. Even if he does finally receive some justice for one thing, it's a practical impossibility that he will experience justice for everything he's done.

And I honestly see no reason to believe he's simply delaying consequences. He was out of the presidency for four years during which time he was convicted of multiple felonies. Is that a consequence? Was that justice? It didn't end up meaning anything.

I have never heard the word transplant use that way. I prefer to simply use "immigrants."

I have heard liberals emphasize "undocumented" instead of "illegal" which makes sense to me.

That doesn't make it exempt from being dehumanizing. Indeed codified dehumanization is one the primary mechanisms by which it is realized.

If there is something the president has truly shown me is that just because consequences look inevitable, does not make them so. He exemplifies the ability to avoid consequences and responsibility.

I only trust that consequences will arrive when they actually arrive.

It is more contextual than a simple binary, especially the emotional context. If the event triggers their shame more than their identity, you get the larger than required apologies. If their identity is the primary thing that is triggered, they will get defensive and double down. It's not just a rural thing.

Forests aren't really interchangeable like that. Massive changes in the eco system in one area cannot be offset by preservation in another.

Yep, this is sooo true. Washington and Oregon are especially terrible. I tell you what, you're going to be sitting in traffic in Seattle just as much as you do in LA. And it's all very expensive. Texas is a much better decision.

You're talking about some kind of projection in hard power. it's likely that the US will continue to wield the most hard power for the foreseeable future (though this war with iran has exposed logistics issues in that, as well as drained important armaments that will take years to recover).

The bigger loss is in soft power, the power that comes from economics, having the worlds reserve currency, and even the trust and respect of our allies.

> a break-up of the US is now imminent.

There is no way this is happening. The logistics alone will be killer and as bad as things are, there is nothing that would be gained by this that would be worth the pain it would cause.

To the extent that there are geographic differences, it is not between red states and blue states, but rural vs. urban. Even in texas the major cities almost all go blue.

There are many things for which a 1-year time horizon is too short, especially in large scale ecologies.

Not the OP, but it's because the value has got to ultimately be recognized by humans.

You can make llms perform judgement, and maybe that will get you some progress. But ultimately the value is going to come from engaging with other humans.

I have no doubt that it can be a deterrent for some. The question is more about whether this is the optimal strategy for addressing the problem.

It's not well known, but in February of 1983, there was a finch in the Galapagos that was found to be numberwang. And of course there was the famous incident in the 1994 World Series where a homerun was overturned because it turned out it was a wangernumb hit into the stands, and not a standard baseball.

There are quite a few people who murder despite the risk of incarceration. I would love a system that approaches it more like: "you've lost trust of this civilization to act in good faith, and now you will be contained in a way that can rebuild that trust, and you will not be allowed to re-enter this civilization until you have indeed rebuilt that trust."

We'll probably never get there.

This is a risky path. If you internalize it in unhealthy ways, you're empowering your shadow, and it will find inconvenient, self-defeating ways to express it.

It's likely there is, though it might be difficult to find. One place you can look is the local unitarian universalists. These can vary widely, but often you'll find them open to all religions (including non-religious), and full of open, curious, non-judgemental people.

One thing about UU's is that it's not dogma based. There's nothing you have to believe to be a UU. Instead, it's covenant based. You are in the community when you adhere to the agreements of the community. These are usually things like mutual respect, deep listening, etc.

Talking to bots can induce psychosis in some individuals. This isn't a solved problem, nor is there a universal solution.

People need connection, but the varieties of connection are vast. What works for one person, can be terrible for another. Maybe talking to bots gives you what you need, which is great for you. But projecting your solution to everyone else is not a rational step to take.

Why does "there's lots of evidence that shows this is harmful" get reduced to "You don't like it?"

I'm not taking a stance here. I'm just noticing the rhetorical move you made. There is lots of evidence that some of those things are harmful. Cocaine, gambling, and alcohol have all destroyed many lives.

I'm not in favor of banning those things, or banning social media for that matter.

It is intellectually dishonest to reduce the arguments for those things to "oh you just don't like them."

The thing about this type of thinking is that it often requires risking millions of dollars and a major distraction from your primary goal in order to find out if it's true or not.

This is an unexpected yet welcome application of the fundamental attribution error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

There are three things programmers bring:

Salience - Agents only know what we bring to their attention

Judgment - Agents cannot make decisions in the larger business context

Responsibility - Agents do not care if they crash the system

Extend it to scan papers from pre-2020. That should give you a better baseline accuracy for your detection system.

How did it kill the product? It's still cranking along pretty good.