- plastic-enjoyerIf it turns out that Chomsky was sexually abusing children would you start disagreeing with Chomskys positions you agreed previously?
- Do you have an example where Chomsky might be right but you disagree with him because of his moral depravity?
- > But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.
Why would it devalue his criticism assuming he was right?
- > The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t.
For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excessive use of AI will lead to the loss of important skills on the one hand and create dependencies on the other. Who benefits if we end up with a generation of software developers who can no longer program without AI? Programming is not just writing code, but a process of organizing, understanding, and analyzing. What I want above all is AI that helps me become better at my job and continue to build skills and knowledge, rather than making me dependent on it.
- > But I use most of my free time writing software. I also tend to do that in "bursts."
I feel like this is, at least for me, a time problem. If I write software, then I have to neglect reading books; if I read books, I have to neglect writing software. Doing both seems not possible for me, so I have to do this in bursts.
- > they are better at empathy and conversation than most
Imagine the conversations this guy must have with people IRL lol
- > But for the majority of us, work means work.
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
- This article is AI slop
- This sounds interesting! Do you have some good introduction to N64 decompiliation? Would you recommend using Claude right from the start or rather try to get to know the ins and outs of N64 decomp?
- EA is a neat philosophy to make greed and fraud seem principled.
- This may be true, however, then upskilling should not be a way to solve economic issues as this line of thinking will not bring us further to solve the Is-Ought-Problem. I think most people can accept that a future where we don't have to exchange labour for money is a desirable future, right?
- > If enough people shift then it affects jobs.
Yes, but again, the goal of automatization should be to reduce the need for people having jobs to secure their livelihood and enable a dignified life. However, what we are seeing in the Western Hemisphere is that per capita productivity is rising while the middle class is eroding and capital is accumulated by a select few in obscene amounts. 'Upskilling' does not happen out of personal motivation, but rather to meet the demands of the market so that one does not live in poverty. The idea of ‘upskilling’ to serve the market is also absurd because, in times of ever-accelerating technological development, there is no guarantee that the skills you learn today will still be relevant tomorrow. Yesterday it was “learn to code” but now many people who followed this mantra find themselves in precarious situations because they cannot find a job or are forced into the gig economy. So what do you do with people who couldn't foresee the future, or who are simply too old for the market?
- > The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
But why do I have to? Why should your life be dictated by the market and corporations that are pushing these changes? Why do I have to be afraid that my livelihood is at risk because I don't want to adapt to the ever faster changing market? The goal of automation and AI should be to reduce or even eliminate the need for us to work, and not the further reduction of people to their economic value.
- > All my chat services under one parent application. WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Messenger.
There was a time where one application for multiple chat services was a thing, e.g. Pidgin, Trillian or Miranda. With thw death of ICQ, AIM or MSN this is pretty much history.
- Oh dear
- > Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions.
There have been enough studies about this and the result is mostly the same: it's difficult to nearly impossible to reliable decode neural recordings that differ from the distribution of neural recordings that the decoder was trained on. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, electrical activity being insufficient is not one of them.
- Smartphones and LLMs will be the lead of our generation
- > My feeling is that birth rate could be solved in properly authoritarian country. With policies that won't fit to most "western" schemes.
Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.
- > Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc.
> Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.
Yes, because people post openly their hot takes to the whole world. Their internet personality is completely tied to their real-world personality. One of the best things of the internet was the anonymity you had. But at one point people started to think it was a good idea to throw this away.
- > The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.
Yes, and no. I think a problem is critique in the form of action. There are movements such as the indie web (e.g. Neocities, Nekoweb, Agoraroad) that long for the old web in their nostalgia and form a counter-movement to the current state of the web. The websites and communities that emerge from this are more or less an imitation of the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. My problem with this is that the indie web primarily defines itself by simply being the opposite of the web 2.0. It exists primarily as a counterculture, in which “counter” is more important part than "culture". This movement is cynical in that a better future for the internet and the web no longer seems possible, and the only way out is to escape into a nostalgically romanticized past. For me, this is more of a confirmation of the Dead Internet Theory than of the Alive Internet Theory.