791–800 of 896 posts
This Is exactly how civilizations die out. When AI was incoming I wrote similar predictions. This WILL happen, sooner or later. People will stop understanding what programming is. What is hard drive. Why storing files in cloud is not the same as having them on your HDD. And similar things
what other civilizations died out this way?
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> I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far. Nobody has found a better process. Not even close. > As a trivial example It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it! Have you ever wondered why communist countries never exported products? Also, if you want better products…
Your line of reasoning misses the clear example that China pulled 1.4 billion people out of poverty creating mass-literacy before embracing capitalism.
Thanks
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Sure that plays a role for sure, though I don't think anyone in 2014 was predicting a broader invasion 8 years later.
Crimea was Feb 2014, and then in Jul 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by "pro russian separatists" in eastern Ukraine. Seems like they were laying the groundwork for a while. I have no idea what portion of this wikipedia article is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya_(confederation) But it seems Ukraine had questionable control of the eastern parts of the country long before the 2022 "offic…
There was at least one other buildup of around 100k troops in the intervening years, but I don't think they moved their naval assets from the north or bring blood supply to the front.
It seemed to me like they went quiet for most of the 8 years, I'd be curious what you may have seen that made it more clear based mainly on the 2014 invasion(s).
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Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth. It was not transferred to him. The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.
I won’t deny he created his own fortune from PayPal. But if you come from “so much money we couldn't even close our safe” as his father put (quote from Wikipedia Then you do have a leg up
I'd deny even that. He made enough dumb decisions that he was forced out and got rich primarily because of other peoples' good ideas/decisions.
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…
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You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war. As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-for…
Sigh, joke sources. Burns and Kennan also, right? Anybody who actually understood Russians is a joke. Study a bit, and not only neocon think tank sources, but from the people who actually understood Russians (there are practically none left in recent administrations). Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed m…
For example, Kennan warned in 1997 that accepting Eastern European countries into NATO would trigger a pivot toward authoritarianism in Russia. The pivot was well underway by that time. The breaking point was the genocidal war against Chechens that Russia launched in late 1994. Internally, it eroded the positions of the reformists and liberals who were seen as weak, and contributed to the rise of the alliance between crony oligarchs and KGB old-timers to undermine democracy and market reforms and restore state-controlled monopolies as their personal piggy banks. Exernally, the Chechen war proved to Russia's neighbors that Russia was no different from the USSR and that transgressions into their countries were only a matter of time. This made them run toward NATO was fast as they could. And personally, Putin, who had started out as an enforcer to St Petersburg's major, was already on his meteoric rise and had broken through to Moscow and joined the presidential administration by 1996.
For reasons that still elude me, western "Russia experts" prefer to believe noble-savage type myths like "NATO paranoia" and not treat Russians as capable people who have their own agenda. It's almost comical how they refuse to listen to what Russians are discussing among themselves, and that applies especially to your question about what should've been done:
> I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
The second opportunity was on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Had forces like the 82nd and 101st Airborne been deployed to likely attack paths such as Hostomel airport, the invasion would have been called off out of fear of direct confrontation with the US. Instead, Biden acted like a chicken and publicly promised "No boots on the ground," which Russians took as a green light to go ahead.
The third major opportunity was during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukraine made a major breakthrough and Russian forces became so disorganized that they collapsed without a combat in many sections of the frontline. Instead of supporting the counteroffensive with everything they've got, NATO members got spooked by Russian nuclear blackmail and tried to micromanage Ukraine's combat operations. The counteroffensive stalled and Russian forces dug in. The war is now going as most wars do once entrenched positions are established: heavy casualties and minimal territorial changes.
The policy of tiptoeing around Russia has not yielded results because of a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia among western "Russia experts." They interpret fake acts such as "NATO paranoia" as genuine fear, in which case it makes sense to issue reassuring statements (like Biden's). But the fear is not genuine; it is simply a way for Russians to probe how far they can go. Overstating fears to extort concessions is such a basic manipulation technique that I cannot understand how "Russia experts" fail to recognize it. It's a strange plague upon the field. Military experts, by comparison, have been much more reasonable in their assessments and recommendations. The current mainstream recommendation is to stop wasting expensive air defense missiles on shooting down each arrow that Russia fires into Ukraine, and blow up the launchers in Russia instead. The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
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I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologi…
> Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem. Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being u…
Labor force participation is ~62%, far lower than historical peaks. I don't buy it.
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> Think more stuff like "find the angle of lines defined by (x-4y-1=0) and (x-y-2=0)", "write the number 2026 in base 7", "solve an equation sin^2(x) - sin(x) = 0". > I plucked these from our country's high school final exam from this year. Back when I was in high school, I did mine in 60 minutes without an error when the time limit is 150 minutes and I intuitively immediately knew how to approach each task since the…
Depends on the complexity of the task. That's what I tried to hint at by also mentioning college-level math. For the high-school level tasks yeah, couple of hours and I'd be as fast as I was in high school again. For the number in another base it could be as quick as less than 1 hour as again that's a simpler task than the other two. For derivations/integrations it'd take more time. Less than what it took me to learn…
But with computer programs, the devils is in those details, so even if you're a senior designing the whole service, you either have someone on staff that's responsible for the implementation gotchas or you have to got familiar with them.
AI does not hold itself accountable for anything.
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> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…
The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very l…
"Can they really breathe fire or did we make that up?"
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I think you haven't dealt with a lot of non-coders. 90% of the world will not be able to even open a .py
> I think you haven't dealt with a lot of non-coders. And I think you should avoid making assumptions about people you know nothing about. That is so far from the truth it’s not even funny. > 90% of the world will not be able to even open a .py Which is nowhere near my argument. I’d appreciate if you engaged with what I said or not at all.
I'm sure you have a problem with that statement too but keep it to yourself because I don't want to hear it.