strken

I was saying that any group which has a lot of kids is going to have a disproportionate impact on the future.

I very carefully did not say "ethnic" or "replace" because that's just the great replacement conspiracy theory, which is mostly wrong and not useful or interesting. One group that's still having a lot of kids is the rich: Elon Musk has 14 children. Another is sperm donors.

Instead of replacement, what's going to happen is that the political movements of the future are going to be increasingly framed around these groups. This includes opposition to them as well as support.

I said this in reply to a comment about how humanity would rally together and resist a Wall-E future where we do nothing except consume. My point was that there are already people out there who are resisting a Wall-E present day, and if mindless consumption becomes even more tempting then they're going to inherit the earth.

I think we're going to have a much weirder and more conflicted future than people realise, given that at some point all the world's democracies are going to be populated mostly by the descendants of groups which have a lot of kids.

Yeah, sure, maybe some of us will Wall-E into oblivion. People already do that with opiates and video games and it's reasonable to expect more might do the same.

Do we really think the Amish are going to do that, though? They might even ban AI from providing goods and services to them. And then consider the kids of the Amish, who are not all going to be Amish but who might learn a thing or two and pass it along to mainstream culture. Then do that for every group that's still reproducing.

They sell reliable cars with a good AWD system and drivetrain and decent ground clearance.

If they sold reliable PHEVs or even BEVs with 220mm+ ground clearance and some branding around torque and traction control, and they had any kind of advantage over Toyota in that niche, they'd probably do alright in the "I don't want a Land Cruiser BUT" market.

(Yeah, yeah, EJ head gaskets, just don't buy anything with an EJ series engine.)

I've got a 2020 XV (Australian Crosstrek nameplate) and it has relatively few annoying EU-mandated safety features.

It won't start unless I've done my seatbelt up, which is annoying when I'm e.g. driving in a cow paddock at 10km/h and trying to get through multiple gates, but it doesn't do lane assist or have a driver-facing camera or anything like that.

Regarding the "this approach sucks" voice, there's an important difference between humans and AI which I've noticed and which I didn't explain well.

The general human approach to programming at most companies I worked at prior to 2024 was to head off in vaguely the right direction and refine the approach as we went. There might be a design and a plan, but at some point we just winged it and fixed our work after the fact.

This seems to be the worst way of getting an AI to do anything. They do better if they can one-shot an implementation from a clear spec then only need to fix bugs. Better models can handle a less clear spec but they still can't really iterate in a major way. To have an AI model build a bigger thing, you one-shot increasingly detailed specs and decompose them into smaller ones.

...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?

For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.

It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.

This is basically just being a manager in the before times. "My engineer said X!" "Well, mine said Y!"

Which is fine, whatever, I guess this is how I pay the mortgage off instead of having any clue what the hell Claude is actually writing. Hopefully I can semi-retire soon and go study dunnarts or take up welding or something else that's more rewarding than this nonsense.

If the number of job openings go up, but at the same time the average job opening has worse pay and conditions, I don't see the connection to the lump of labour fallacy.

As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.

Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.

If I were interpreting the statement charitably, I'd say there was a sliding spectrum of capital vs labour and most income sources sit between the two at varying positions.

In which case, yes, owning a plumbing business is closer to capital than working at one, which is in turn closer than doing unskilled manual labour on a job site. And on the other end, maybe owning an Airbnb which you clean yourself is closer to labour than owning a portfolio of ETFs.

If AI was a presidential candidate, it would be in trouble.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...

4chan and Kiwifarms are "centralised" in the sense that they're both a central site, but the underlying imageboard or forum are beyond easy to set up and are usable from about ten active users upward.

Why would a movement which started as nerds buying mosquito nets to stop malaria be "a bunch [of] post hoc justifications for bad behaviour"? You say this like it's an established fact or at least a common argument, yet I've never heard it before.

They keep buying ten of the houses I want to live in, knocking them down, and building a single tasteless McMansion on the combined block, and then lobbying for building and zoning regulations that won't let me build another house.

Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.

The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.

I disagree in some cases. Code is a means of communication. Sometimes it's more efficient to write code and bring it to your team than to discuss it in the abstract.

An example of this might be adding load shedding. You could spend hours talking through it, or you could say "I'm going to add a load shedder to the blah service as a proof of concept" in standup then take an hour to implement it, and have the team critique it from there.

I agree that whether they're a useful gate is debateble, but they can be a useful means of expressing an idea to be approved or rejected.

It sounds like you work at a company where the responsibilities of engineering are split across at least three separate roles, things move slowly and in a structured way, there's a large amount of coordination work, and a PR is a methodical translation of some step-by-step process. Perhaps you have bi-weekly meetings to review RFCs or similar.

At a much smaller company, you might find that a single person does part of the job of a BA, PM, and engineer, that they can produce a PR much more quickly as a result, and that it's more common for a PR to prompt the first detailed discussion about how something will work. A small team has quicker turnaround time on PRs and design, and can thus position in-depth reviews later in the process because less work will be thrown away in the case of a rejection.

Land is a little different from shares because you can meaningful affect the value of your land by spending your life improving your community if everyone else does too. You can be a good neighbour much more easily than a good shareholder.

I picked up some rubbish from the street on my way home yesterday. That act probably raised all our property values by some microscopic fraction of a cent. Then global macroeconomic conditions affected the property value by a huge amount more. It would be incorrect to attribute any gains to picking up rubbish, but it would be a very understandable human mistake, I think.

From my cursory look at this last night, the US doesn't like that the definition of "harm" is so poorly defined. They either don't care about the broader concept of opting out of an algorithmic feed or aren't willing to criticise it.

I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.

What picture do you think is being painted here? I'm pretty sure that actual self-identified Marxists would be insulted if you accused them of believing in profit or thinking Adam Smith was correct.

It's not Marxist at all, otherwise it'd be talking about the labour theory of value and wouldn't admit that profit through innovation is possible. It seems to be Georgist.

I was under the impression that if you go back far enough to a millennium ago, peasants weren't trading for iron or having a miller grind their grain, and they were definitely spinning their own yarn.

I would welcome correction.

Speech writers and shadow writers in general are writing on behalf of other people, but they're not writing the same thing. They can't! Usually they're writing something better, with the proper voice and authentic to the views of the person, but still not the same as what they would have written.

If horoscopes and homeopathy can generate tests, then call me a Pisces and pass me the singular molecule of deadly nightshade toxin.

Seems like you're thinking of "extra care" as some sort of life extension, while the GP thinks it means things like help showering and cooking, and the GGP is ambiguous and could believe anything.

The inevitability of death is a philosophical question. I read the GP and maybe the GGP as talking about the more practical question of whether it's moral to let broke old people die from bedsores and starvation or whether we pay for nurses.

Not for out of copyright work, right?

If you have 100k people who don't smoke cannabis and 100k who do, 1000 of the non-smokers and 1400 of the smokers will have schizophrenia.

How do you detect schizophrenia in the 400 people in the non-smoker category? The answer is that you can't. They don't have schizophrenia. This is what it means for something to have an environmental trigger.

I get that you're making a point about ableism and environment, but in order to do so you're confusing two things: the onset of autism (at a very early age or even before birth and triggered by who knows what), and the occurrence of any specific symptom of autism (at any age and triggered by things we generally understand).

No, but per my earlier reply, it's one behaviour typical of severe autism, among other forms of self-harm. Pretending that broader society only wants to reduce the severity of autism symptoms for their own convenience is ignoring the very real suffering that's happening.

That study measured a drop from 83% to 17% in severe autism, and one behaviour typical of severe autism is slamming one's head into the wall, among other things.

I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.

Schizophrenia is known to have genetic factors that can increase its likelihood, but is also linked to environmental factors like cannabis use and stress. The group without the environmental factors has a lower incidence of schizophrenia, so it's generally believed that the onset of schizophrenia is triggered by them.

Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.

I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.

The Twixxer thread seems to be arguing that an AI can't do research into novel pathogens without people, which is probably true. I haven't met anyone who is worried about that and I think it's either mistaken or a strawman.

I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.

In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities.

Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.