micromacrofoot
micromacrofoot on Hacker News
I have the same thought on all these "I don't use AI" posts: I would like to not use an LLM too, but I'd soon be out of a job if I didn't. It's an exhausting place to be and I wish I were closer to retirement.
They're all just vibecoded, so whenever you need one just spend an hour doing it yourself I guess
so like every video game ever created? at what point do people decide it matters? just because it aligns with personal feelings about ai use?
"We surveyed 319 knowledge workers who use GenAI tools (e.g.,
ChatGPT, Copilot) at work at least once per week, to model how
they enact critical thinking when using GenAI tools, and how GenAI
affects their perceived effort of thinking critically. Analysing 936
real-world GenAI tool use examples our participants shared, we
find that knowledge workers engage in critical thinking primarily
to ensure the quality of their work, e.g. by verifying outputs against
external sources. Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill
for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s
ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.
When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking
shifts from information gathering to information verification; from
problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship. Knowledge workers face new challenges
in critical thinking as they incorporate GenAI into their knowledge
workflows. To that end, our work suggests that GenAI tools need
to be designed to support knowledge workers’ critical thinking by
addressing their awareness, motivation, and ability barriers."
but then you have states coming back around to place minimum wage on gig workers too, so the whole "we're laying them off so you can pay gig workers less" ends up completely pointless
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
Just decades of statistics and a good number of quotes from numerous politicians that validate the efforts. Like this reported from John Ehrlichman, White House legal counsel under Nixon:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
We're literally in a thread about the FBI trying to get Martin Luther King Jr to commit suicide, and you're waltzing in to claim that there's no evidence? There are piles of it! at least pretend to be arguing in good faith.
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
A lot of the gains are in things like consumer electronics though? food, healthcare, education, housing and transportation are more expensive relative to median income gains.
So what measure of "prosperity" are you using? income alone can't be it.
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
Yeah instacart isn't limited to specific stores, you can even order from multiple stores and group them
The food theory doesn't align with the fact that it declined from 2000 - 2022...
“The data showed that the age-adjusted incidence rate fell from 55.2 per 100,000 in 2000 to 36.7 in 2022, then rose to 38.3 in 2023.
This is the first time that we have seen an increase in the overall rate since in more than 20 years,”
Please for the love of all things, stop the kneejerk attribution... or at least read the article first.
Sure but keep in mind that most of these people pay taxes into a system that they don't actually benefit from (social security for one), so by doing so you're actually causing more economic damage than you think you're fixing.
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
We don't actually live in a representative democracy, we live in a constitutional republic — with things like caps on representatives, the electoral college and gerrymandering, your vote is likely worth a lot less than someone's vote in Ohio or Alaska.
The prosperity is NOT evenly distributed, or even distrusted in a shape that follows historical precedent (until you start looking at the gilded age, which was quite problematic!) mid 20th century America had a very healthy middle class that is now rapidly dwindling. Ironically this is often the time period people refer to as "great" but decry the tax policies that made it possible.
The average person (you and me) are much more productive, but have actually lost our share of wages relative to our productivity compared to our parents and grandparents. That extra production we're doing is almost entirely captured by the top 1% of the population, it's literally been taken away from us.
And contrary to our "billionares create jobs" friends, what billionaires do by and large is hoard wealth and power of a scale most people can't even begin to grasp.
this is a very weird perspective that you haven't done even cursory math on, if we're talking a million millionaires... that's a million houses, two million cars, a million tuitions...
has elon musk made it possible for a million people to own houses, cars, and pay tuition? no! does he own multiple houses, cars, private jets, yachts, and other bullshit himself? yes!
he employs maybe 200k people directly? likely a lot less... so we're not even talking quarter of the same economic benefit reach
he also wielded his wealth as power to dismantle government systems single-handedly that lost many people jobs and didn't even scratch the surface of the country's debt
people really need to start thinking critically about billionaires, they are not doing anything for you personally
this is such a tired argument, we'd probably be better off splitting musk into a million millionaires than having it all bottlenecked into one person
The only consistent feature that has allowed people to work less and see more of the benefit of productivity is organized labor, and it's not even close.
Nope, I would strongly disagree — kids don't roam anymore and screens fill the time at home, but the social fabric of the US has been collapsing long before smartphones and arguably even the popularity of the internet. Devices have perhaps accelerated the problem, but they're far from the cause.
The dual-income household expectation and collapsing middle-class (lost share of productivity) would be the most to blame from my perspective... there's also a major daycare shortage because of this, the lifestyle changed and surrounding factors haven't caught up. There are kids regularly staying at after school programs until 6pm because parents are working and no one wants kids wandering around on their own, even in teen years. My local mall has banned kids under 18 unsupervised as yet another example.
they weren't operating heavy machinery or flying in a tube no one can leave or has any control over, that's for sure
Unfortunately "Sorry I'm an hour late, I had to sit at the side of the road until my kid stopped crying" isn't going to fly at work pretty much anywhere.
Yeah and where do you think the stereotype of a child crying the entire flight came from.
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
have you spent any significant time with a child under 6
spent significantly more time at home and with their community, "it takes a village" isn't just a cute phrase
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.