641–650 of 752 posts
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the main problem with UBI is it makes people even more dependent on the state, and therefore more easy to control by said state.
Well, that and the utterly insane cost (and therefore inflation).
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Right, because Europe is so innovative. The mother of invention is idiomatically necessity, not comfort. Ultimately, increased levels of competition should lead to higher levels of innovation. Btw, what is "the GCC era" a reference to?
Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US. China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment. GCC = global consulting compa…
Also, China is 3rd, behind South Korea & Japan
That & the differing levels of patent application per capita across Europe suggests that patent applications are directly related to work/life balance & perhaps some sort of infonomic aggregation & doesn't seem to support any correlation with quality of life.
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Maybe even moreso VCs who advised their startups to become AI native products even if customers weren’t asking for or using those features.
The problem is entitled, lazy, sociopathic bastards who think everyone else is an idiot who should be killed and replaced with a robot. They're seeing a thing which confirms these biases, and reacting predictably. Unfortunately people like this are found in higher concentrations the further up the class hierarchy you go.
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There are hundreds of thousands of developers here including me who would vouch that AI does make them vastly more productive.
And AI skeptics are waiting to see the proof in the pudding. If we have a new tool that makes hundreds of thousands of devs vastly more productive, I expect to see the results of that in new, improved software. So far, I'm just seeing more churn and more bugs. It may well be the case that in a couple years we'll see the fruits of AI productivity gains, but talk is cheap.
I think it's very hard to convince AI skeptics since for some reason they feel more threatened by it than rest. It's counterproductive and would hinder them professionally but then it's their choice.
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> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad r…
This is very revisionist. While they have been catching up quickly there was no master 4D chess strategy here. Google was incredibly late to this game - Sergey had to come back from retirement because most of the research team had a Sarah Connor complex and couldn’t ship. The saving grace is that AdWords picked up the tab again and founders shook the place up when it became clear the golden goose was being cooked.
What, you don't want to ship the Torment Nexus? You're fired! We must ship a Torment Nexus, we must maintain our market share even if it means our destruction!
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I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…
Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter…
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I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…
Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter…
The common theory I've heard is that the rest of the developed world was still recovering from WW2.
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Problem is that in case of divorce, the stay at home partner financially suffers the most
What do you mean, they typically get half the assets and a sizable chunk of the other partner’s salary in alimony that they don’t need to give up if they do become employed, and then if childcare is needed typically this would be an extra child support expense that both parties pay for even if the erstwhile stay-at-home parent has full custody. How would the stay-at-home parent get a bad deal here?
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> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value. > Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down. People are more willing…
It doesn't help that new builds seem to focus on the high end for housing (because that is where the profit is). If we keep building more expensive housing it shouldn't be surprising that the average cost of housing increases.
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It's not that the AI models or products don't work. It's how much money is being poured into it, how much of the money that is just changing hands between the big players, the revenue, and the valuations.
to be fair, they don't work