polpenn

I agree with some of what you listed here but a few I think are critical to being human. What's the point of not having needs?

Desires are what makes us human. I have kids and family and friends that love me and them in return but I don't believe that makes me weak. In fact it is the opposite, they give me the strength, confidence, and motivation to power through life.

I supoose not having any needs and desires would be an asset for a hitman.

Here’s something I sometimes do to avoid boring content when using LLMs: I type out what it gives me and tweak it as I go instead of copy/pasting directly.

It helps me spot the bits that feel flat or don’t add much, so I can cut or rework them—while still getting the benefit of the LLM’s idea generation.

Life expectancy was probably in the late 30s to early 40s during this time so you’re basically working for the rest of your life.

I think the impact of AI is not between good jobs va bad jobs but between good workers and bad workers. For a given field, AI is making good workers more efficient and eliminating those who are bad at their jobs (e.g. the underperforming accountant who is able to make a living doing the more mundane tasks whose job is threatened by spreadsheets and automation)

Why should people who don’t own cars pay for highways?

Why should cyclist have to pay for public transportation?

Also children now will be your future doctor, nurse, bus driver, scientist, plumber, etc. so probably worthwhile making an investment in public goods that support their development.

Great work! I work in financial services and built a similar tool for sentiment analysis and topic modelling on transcribed earnings calls. The idea was to identify topics at a speaker-level (analyst, management, etc.) and evaluate the sentiment around that topic. For example, perhaps "foreign exchange" was discussed negatively by a given company in an earnings call, which would alert the analyst to review that call in greater detail.

Are you guys thinking about incorporating something like this into your product?

Something I’ve always wondered about the programming / software development profession: do people buy insurance for their hands?

My sister is a denturists and she has insurance for her hands. Curious if this is something people in our profession have considered to protect from incidents like this.

My wife is a nurse. She became one because she needed something that would help her make money quickly to help her family.

If she did not face this constraint, she could have taken the traditional route of going to university and, possibly, becoming a doctor.

How much harder would it be to build an ebook reader?

Current company knows his worth. New company doesn’t so your teammate has informational advantage and can negotiate a higher salary.

Why not repurpose the rigs for residential use?

Life, by default, is suffering.

The surprise is not the fact that there is suffering around the world, but how we managed to achieve the level of prolonged peaceful co-existence that we have today.

We should act in such a way that suffering or chaos is reduced---however small such reduction may be.

Suppose you had a choice between watching T.V. and washing the dishes. Watching T.V. means, perhaps, that your spouse will need to do the dishes. You can reduce overall suffering by choosing to do the dishes instead of watching T.V.

Given that the default path of most processes is chaos, we should always act in a way that prevents this.

> Social scientists don't really analyze images much, but that might be the next big thing.

Satellite images have been used in research in economics to estimate poverty and deforestation.

1. is an issue with external validity (i.e. does the findings generalize to other groups). But the comparison being made in the study is within a given group with similar socioeconomic status (all Harvard males). Assuming that they only vary in the quality of their personal relationships, any difference in happiness because of this could, assuming it is causal, be interpreted as a generalizable effect of relationship quality.

Note that what they reportedly found is a stronger positive correlation between relationships and happiness than between money and fame and happiness (just based on the article):

"Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed"

So going after fame and money doesn't necessarily lead you to become unhappy (if we interpret the results as causal). Quality personal relationships just makes you even happier.

Also, I'm curious to what extent cultivating meaningful relationship serves as a coping mechanism for people with little money or social status (alternatively, focusing on making money and acquiring high social status to compensate for poor personal relationship development skills). My impression, based on my observations from people I've met in developing countries, is that low income / social status people tend to have richer and active communities and personal relationships. High status individuals tend to be lonelier. But this could just be confirmation bias.

Thanks! Noted.

Okay! Let's do it! I want to start a start-up. What do I do?

This is a wonderful idea. I know at least three people in my family who do all of their computing on their smartphone. My fiancee is one of them. She only uses a computer when she needs to edit some documents. I think this would be an ideal accessory for her, but she uses an iPhone.