Yeah, the CS head at the small college I went to was also the Philosophy head (he got his doctorate in philosophy). The same formal logic class was a requirement for the CS, philosophy, and law degrees.

Some big tech companies pay that, theoretically, in total compensation for entry level. These companies make about $1 million per employee.

I think it’s the same in all developed nations; constantly needing more skills to achieve the same standard of living. I think a lot of it is from nearly all resources getting more expensive to extract (oil, wood, iron, etc) due to us having already extracted all the low-hanging-fruit, and needing to move on to more resource-intensive methods like offshore-drilling, fracking, importing lumber long distances from harsher climates. The other drivers are the attacks on labor and executives/shareholders taking more profits for themselves instead of paying their workers more.

The Zapatista territory is pretty large and has a population of somewhere around 300k. It’s a network of autonomous municipalities, so it kind of like a bunch of communes. They have their own schools, doctors, and hospitals; but they are quite poor (they’re mostly indigenous farmers).

Meh, it’s more efficient to make less trips to the store and buy all you need in one go, than to go to the store often (less fuel/electricity/time). Some people have large families and multi-generational households as well.

A good cashier/bagger is much faster than self-checkout. If I only have like 10 items or something, I use self-checkout, otherwise I go to the cashier. Granted, I rarely get a fast cashier/bagger anymore; makes think the company does that on purpose.

The Zapatista’s aren’t exactly communist, but they have an interesting system of federation, rotating “leadership” (I think people are randomly selected for most leadership roles), collective decision-making/consensus building, community justice, etc. I think a lot of communes have systems to avoid hierarchy as well. From what I’ve seen, they have their own, different problems, but many have been around for long time, so they “work,” in a sense.

I think I read the RLHF kind of makes these logprobs completely unusable too.

I think it’s driven by the investors. In the case of big tech, the large institutional investors are rewarding companies any time they say “AI” and lay off workers. In the case of startups, VCs are almost exclusively investing in startups that use “AI,” and have a lean or offshore workforce.

I find it hard to believe the true numbers are this low. Every job posting gets many hundreds or even thousands of applicants. It’s a shame so much talent is wasted by so many people being unemployed and doing “unproductive” things like spending months applying to jobs.

IDK about most. But, I’ve seen many OS contributors say they’re looking for work. Seen one recently saying he won’t be contributing much to the project anymore because he’s housing-insecure. Seen maintainers for popular projects get laid off and are now looking for work. Seen people with 10+ and 20+ years of experience not being able to find a job after many months.

Does Snowflake still work in China? Thought I read they’re now able to detect and block it.

I think 300KB/s is around the max possible in the current implementation:

Encryption, latency, and how a tunnel is built makes it quite expensive in CPU time to build a tunnel. This is why a destination is only allowed to have a maximum of 6 IN and 6 OUT tunnels to transport data. With a max of 50 kb/sec per tunnel, a destination could use roughly 300 kb/sec traffic combined ( in reality it could be more if shorter tunnels are used with low or no anonymity available). Used tunnels are discarded every 10 minutes and new ones are built. This change of tunnels, and sometimes clients that shutdown or lose their connection to the network will sometimes break tunnels and connections. An example of this can be seen on the IRC2P Network in loss of connection (ping timeout) or on when using eepget.

https://geti2p.net/en/about/performance

Seems out of date. I think Peterson and Shapiro “fell off.” Didn’t know Trevor Noah was still doing stuff. Don’t know who the fuck Russell Brand’s audience is. I guess basing it off subscriber accounts biases it toward channels/influencers that have existed a long time, and many subscriptions may just be ignored or tied to inactive accounts. I agree the right dominates the online ecosystem, but different influencers dominate now.

Highly depends on area. $1 million is about 16 years of the median wage. It can be hard to survive on the median in some cities, but can be OK in rural or extremely economically depressed cities/towns. I don’t think federal minimum wage is enough to survive anywhere without assistance.

I’ve used AI by just pasting code, then asking if there’s anything wrong with it. It would find things wrong with it, but would also say some things were wrong when it was actually fine.

I’ve used it in an agentic-AI (Cursor), and it’s not good at debugging any slightly-complex code. It would often get “stuck” on errors that were obvious to me, but making wrong, sometimes nonsensical changes.

There’s a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It’s taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI’s new model is a regression (I don’t know, I haven’t really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of “eureka” moments which can’t be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It’s possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).

China leads the world in scientific publication, even when only taking into account reputable journals and high-impact publications. There’s no doubt in my mind the US will decline further with the current attacks on science and education, and anti-intellectualism in general.

Which will then cause a panic.
And I think that leads to calls for one or more of the following:

• Redistribution of wealth
• A hurried UBI implementation
• A nationwide ban on foreclosures and evictions
• A law saying you can’t use AI employees
• A law saying you can’t fire anyone
• Etc.

Is he implying these are a list of bad things? I mean the term “AI employee” is nonsensical, and people should sometimes be fired with-cause if the cause is bad enough, but the rest is OK. No need to worry about any of this happening any time soon though given the populace’s politics, media/propaganda consumption, and the people currently in power. In the event of severe economic downturn, we’re more likely to see the rich buying up everything on the cheap and trying to implement their fantasies of labor camps, company towns, network states, corporate city-states, or whatever other stupid ideas they have.

Not sure the downturn will start in a few months, but an economic downturn under this admin is a certainty. I don’t think it’ll officially be called a recession, and the official economic data will be fake…

This image seems right-wing coded. Also, nobody has to invade, it’s for sale.