The "or else" is actually on rather shaky grounds considering the national debt. For the sake of argument if certain countries decided to stop buying US treasury bonds the federal state would be insolvent about 5s later. Certainly a default of that size would destroy the economy in every single country pretty much except maybe Cuba and North Korea.
The EU (and Europe) will have to lean East until Germany remilitarizes. US will find itself alone with enemies on all sides.
With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything.
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
And in 2032 everyone just crosses their fingers this doesn't happen again? Unless 2029 includes a structural overhaul of the entire government I really don't see how the US regains it's status as the capital of the world. We are doing everything in our power to permenantly isolate ourselves from the rest of the world at the moment. Attacking a nato state, even threatening to attack a nato state really, is not something everyone will overlook in a years time. The wheels are turning now to divest from the us.
My optimistic take is that we will learn from the mistakes we are making now to make sure it does not get repeated ever again. Trump will be gone and will be too old to have any influence. But Elon Musk and people like Marc Andreessen will continue to be a problem we need to find a solution for.
And what do you expect the rest of the world to do? Pretend it never happened? They were willing to give another chance after Trump I, I highly doubt that it will be the same this time around.
The American people did this twice in fairly quick succession.
Unless there's a serious reckoning afterwards, the rest of the world is gonna operate on the assumption that it can and probably will happen again soon.
I wouldn't count these chickens before they hatch.
I keep wondering where the line in the sand is for the wider GOP base. We keep crossing what I think "this is the line … right?" and nope, that wasn't it, either.
I really hope so but honestly, what lessons have Democrats learned so far that will allow them to take the votes of those who are not right-wing radicals? Because there was a lot of unnecessary stuff that was going on that pissed off those who don't lean too far either side. Trump exploits this by, say, "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" and scores high not just on the right. This theme will be very difficult to deal with by the Democrats.
And on the foreign front, well, the trust has been broken and I don't think it can be repaired easily. The remaining NATO allies are very stable, they understand mutual respect and collaboration is the foundation of their survival, whereas attacking each other breaks trust completely. Even if a new fantastic president is chosen that understands his huge responsibility both for Americans and the world, other countries learned their lesson hard and understand there is no guarantee in a few years the USA become their enemy again.
Yes, Democrats have to move towards the center. But that's not enough. You can't have one good party and one evil party. Both parties have to be basically good, even if they disagree on policy. You can't have the country decline each time Republicans gain power.
> We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
Don't count on it.
Some people may be willing to uproot their lives and move continent in the hope that 4 years later you won't re-elect another one like Trump, but it won't be as many as before. Heck, there was a brief window where I had the opportunity to migrate to the USA, but just the US electing Trump the first time ruled it out for me.
Not that I'd call myself "the best", but I was good enough if I'd wanted to. But I do also know some really good Cambridge graduates who were expressly asked by their American employer to relocate to the US, declined.
I think people generally vastly underestimate the negative effect of "nativism"/anti-immigration rethoric on desirable foreign workers. Even if those desirable foreigners are completely unaffected by actual policy.
I personally know at least two highly qualified STEM workers that went back to Europe after Brexit/Trump2 and from what I can tell this was at least 70% pure "spite" (instead of being affected by actual anti-foreign regulation or somesuch).
I used to live in Cambridge. Only one person I knew there was pro-Brexit, call him C. In the run-up to the referendum, I'd already told C I was looking to move out of the UK due to the entirely native political choices of the UK. The domestic political nonsense was necessarily only going to get less constrained by a policy decision (Brexit) specifically about getting less constrained.
One of my last memories of C was that a group of us were in a local pub discussing it, one said they were worried Brexit would make Cambridge smaller. C shouted "Good!".
Given my plans, obviously when C shouted "Good!" at the idea of Cambridge shrinking, I was shocked, took it somewhat personally. Then the referendum came, and I was both angry with him and far too busy, so I stopped talking to C entirely.
Other people report that C was very confused by this, did not understand at all.
All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.
When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up?
When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just better of reallocating your resources from the production quality towards the the shouting match of marketing and try to win by finding ways to be more visible than the others. (SEO hacking etc shenanigans)
When you drive down the cost of doing something to zero you you also effectively destroy the economy based around that thing. Like online print, basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles but alternative revenue streams (ads) are needed. Same for games too.
> When it became cheaper to … did the quality go up?
No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism).
Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.
Well yeah more people can afford shitty things that end up in the landfill two weeks later. To me this is the essence of "consumerism".
Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.
But in the context of softwares, the landfill argument doesn't fit exactly well (well, sure someone can argue that storage on say, github might take more drives but the scale would be very cheaper than say landfill filled with physical things as well
> Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.
This problem actually runs deep and is systemic. I am genuinely not sure how one can do it when the basis of wealth derives from what exactly? The growth of stock markets which people call bubbles or the US debt crisis which is fueling up in recent years to basically fuel the consumerism spree itself. I am not sure.
If you were to make people wealthy, they might still buy cheapest of cheapest crap just at a 10x more magnitude in many cases (or atleast that's what I observed US to do with how many people buy and sell usually very simple saas tools at times)
Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert!
Maybe my opinion is just biased and I'm in the comfortable position to pass judgment but I'd like to believe that more people would be more ethical and conscious about their materialistic needs if things had more value and were better quality and instead of focusing on the "price" as the primary value proposition people were actually able to afford to buy other than the cheapest of things.
Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?
> Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert!
I hear ya but I wonder how that reflects on Open source software which was the GP request created by LLM let's say. Yes I know it can have bugs but its free of cost and you can own it and modify it with source code availability and run it on your own hardware
There really isn't much of a difference in terms of hardware/electricity just because of these Open source projects
But probably some for LLM's so its a little tricky but I feel like open source projects/ running far with ideas gets incentivized
Atleast I feel like its one of the more acceptable uses of LLM in so far. Its better because you are open sourcing it for others to run. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their freedom but you built it for yourself or running with an idea which couldn't have existed if you didn't know the details on implementations or would have taken months or years for 0 gains when now you can do it in less time
It significantly improves to see which ideas would be beneficial or not and I feel like if AI is so worrying then if an idea is good and it can be tested, it can always be rewritten or documented heavily by a human. In fact there are even job posts about slop janitor on linkedin lol
> Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?
Yes but also its far from happening and would require a real shake up in all things and its just a dream right now. i agree with ya but its not gonna happen or not something one can change, trust me I tried.
This requires system wide change that one person is very unlikely to bring but I wish you best in your endeavour
But what I can do on a more individualistic freedom level is create open source projects via LLM's if there is a concept I don't know of and then open sourcing it for the general public and if even one to two people find it useful, its all good and I am always experimenting.
> Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but, if the principle is broadly applied, then what is the difference between these two? (I agree that, if it can only be applied to a limited population, making a few poor people wealthier might be better than making a few products cheaper.)
I think you found, but possibly didn't recognize, the problem. When availability goes up, but the quality of that which is widely available goes down, you get class stratification where the haves get quality, reliable journalism / software / games / etc. while the not-haves get slop. This becomes generational when education becomes part of this scenario.
When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.
When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living.
The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity.
When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.
Today the situation is very different and I'm not quite sure why you compare a time in history where the average person was illiterate and (printed) books were limited to a very small audience who could afford them, with the current era where everybody is exposed to the written word all the time and is even dependent on it, in many cases even dependent on it's accuracy (think public services). The quality of AI writing in some cases is so subpar, it resembles word salad. Example goodreads: the blurb of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237615295-of-venom-and-v... was so surreal I wrote to the author to correct it (see in comments to the authors own review). It's better now, but it still has mistakes. This is in no way comparable with the pasts goes down a bit this is destroying trust even more than everything else, because it this gets to be the norm for official documents people are going to be hurt.
One of the qualia of a product is cost. Another is contemporaneity.
If we put these together, we see a wide array of products which, rather than just being trash, hit a sweet spot for "up-to-date yet didn't break the wallet" and you end up with https://shein.com/
These are not thought of as the same people that subscribe to the Buy It For Life subreddit, but some may use Shein for a club shirt and BIFL for an espresso machine. They make a choice.
What's more, a “Technivorm Moccamaster” costs 10x a “Mr. Coffee” because of the build and repairability, not because of the coffee. (Amazon Basics cost ½ that again.)
Maybe Fashion was the original SEO hack. Whoever came up with the phrase "gone out of style" wrought much of this.
I think for 'technical' writing, there is going to be some end-state crash.
What happens when all the engineers left can't figure out something, and they start opening up manuals, and they are also all wrong and trash. And the whole world grinds to a halt because nobody knows anything.
>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up?
...yes?
It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality.
It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time.
I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc)
In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money.
>people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints
Isn't this the exact point I was making...? I get you're arguing it's only a single factor, but I feel like the point still stands. More hobbyists, less financial constraints
The problem is that with the amount of low-quality stuff we're seeing, and with the expansion of the low-quality frenzy into the realm of information dissemination, it can become prohibitively difficult to distinguish the high-quality stuff. What matters is not the "total quality" but sort of like the expected value of the quality you can access in practice, and I feel like in at least some areas that has gone down.
> but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier
I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before?
If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point.
If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not?
As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers.
Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software.
> When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up?
Obviously, yes? Maybe not the median or even mean, but peak quality for sure. If you know where to look there are more high-quality takes available now than ever before. (And perhaps more meaningfully, peak quality within your niche subgenre is better than ever).
> When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
Yes? The quality and variety of indie games is amazing these days.
> When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
This is the case where I don’t see a win, and I think it bears further thought; I don’t have a clear explanation. But I note this is the one case where production is not actually democratized. So it kinda doesn’t fit with the digital goods we are discussing.
> basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles
Is this actually true? Substack enables more independent career bloggers than ever before. I would love to see the numbers on professional indie devs. I agree these are very competitive fields, and an individual’s chances of winning are slim, but I suspect there are more professional indie creators than ever before.
Do the people rushing off to outsource their work to chatbots have a plan to explain to their bosses why they still need to have a job?
What's the play after you have automated yourselves out of a job?
Retrain as a skilled worker? Expect to be the lucky winner who is cahoots with the CEO/CTO and magically gets to keep the job? Expect the society to turn to social democracy and produce UBI? Make enough money to live off investments portfolio?
It's more like just pondering out loud how automating ourselves out of a job in an economic system that requires us to have a job is going to pan out for the large majority of people in the coming years.
As someone who has been pondering this very question since 2015, I'm starting to think we have been:
- underestimating how much range humans have in their intelligence and how important it is to productivity.
- overestimating how close LLMs are to replicating that range and underestimating how hard it will be for AI to reach it
- underestimating human capacity to become dissatisfied and invent more work for people to do
- underestimating unmet demand for the work people are doing that LLMs can make orders of magnitude more efficient
I was pretty convinced of the whole "post scarcity" singularity U mindset up until the last year or two... My confidence is low, but I'm now leaning more towards jevins paradox abound and a very slow super intelligence takeoff with more time for the economy to adapt.
The shift in my view has come from spending thousands of hours working with LLMs to code and building applications powered by LLMs, trying to get them to do things and constantly running into their limitations, and noting how the boundary of their limitations have been changing over time. (Looks more like S-curve to me than exponential takeoff). Also some recent interviews by some of the leading researchers, and spending a few hundred hours studying the architecture of human brain and theories regarding intelligence.
As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.
While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.
Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
Windows has its own sharp edges, such as the crashes the author of this article experienced.
It's hard to evaluate fairly. This author, for example is fed up with specific issues on Windows and new to Linux. He is likely be more forgiving of sharp edges on Linux, recognizing that it's normal for something unfamiliar to be more challenging. On the other hand, someone content with Windows might think of its sharp edges as just how computers are and consider every way in which Linux is merely different to be pointless aggravation.
Most publications covering Windows have a bunch of articles about how to tinker with Windows 11 to keep it from spying on you, showing ads, and forcing the use of an online account. One might argue life is also too short for that.
I feel there's also a fundamental difference in tinkering to get something working vs. tinkering to remove user-hostile features. In the first one the goals of the OS and user are aligned, in the second one not.
I’ll echo this. I keep at least one secondary machine booting Linux and periodically try moving a main one over, but the experience definitely is not yet without significant pains, depending on one’s needs.
This is not to discount the tens of thousands of hours of hard (often volunteer) work put into the ecosystem, but a substantial amount of work remains on things like battery life and UX (both for devs and more typical end users).
For example, why does getting virtualization under Fedora working require a whole stack of commands? Elsewhere, the most that’s needed is ticking a checkbox (if that). Worse, the mode of failure if you haven’t done the correct dance is unintelligible errors in e.g. GNOME Boxes that don’t even point the user in the right direction.
There’s all sorts of somewhat low hanging fruit like this that I suspect hasn’t gotten attention because it’s not particularly sexy or interesting.
I don't think I have ever had a system upgrade break my system on any Debian derived or Fedora I used. Also upgrades are not forced upon you like they are in Windows, with its dark patterns nudging you to upgrade.
I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.
I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
Hello, very similar story here. Been weight training for 30 years and focusing on natural body building for the past 5 years.
I struggled a lot with my nutrition and eating "regular food" always mad me fat. I tried various keto and low carb variants but never made it work and always hit a wall after 2-3 weeks. UNTIL I discovered intermittent fasting. After having done the intermittent fasting for about 5 years I started another low carb/keto journey but this time I went all in on fat and protein. No holding back. And I also cut excessive vegetables (especially the raw stuff). So now I'm eating all the eggs, meat, butter, bacon as much as I want. About a year in. The results so far.. dropped 4kg body fat and put on 2kg of muscle.
The fat is an excellent source of energy though and it's very hard to get fat by eating fat because it's essentially hormonally inert. I.e. eating fat doesn't precipitate insulin which is the hormone that enables body fat accumulation.
So the problem with steak isn't the steak itself it's the "steak dinner" where the meat comes with sides such as french fries and drinks such as beer.
Steak is actually an excellent source of protein (and fat, if you get the fattier steak as you should).
Just because vegetables, lentils or nuts contain protein it doesn't mean it's the same/equivalent to the protein in an animal product.
Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has no downsides to it. All vegetables on the other side contain plenty of anti-nutrients such as folate and oxalates.
Everything in human body, skin, connective tissues, tendons, hair, nails, muscles is essentially built out of protein and collagen. Fats are essential for hormone function.
> Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has no downsides to it.
In moderate amounts, sure. But frequently eating red meat (more than two or three servings a week) is terrible for you. There's "a clear link between high intake of red and processed meats and a higher risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death": https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...
Not to mention how high heat cooking of meat, which is common for a steak via frying, brings health risks from Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs).
AGEs are also present in vegetables and legumes, but certain meats like bacon contain unbelievable amounts relative to other foods. (Interestingly: Rice contains almost no AGE's.)
"We put a bunch of meat derived products with high amounts of artificial additives together with actual meat and then concluded that meat is the problem"
I really take issue with studies like this that put meat and meat products together.
Unprocessed meat is what humans what have been eating for hundreds of thousand of years.
Meat products are commercial new inventions and contain stuff like preservatives, volume expanders, flavor enhancers and coloring agents. They also typically contain added sugars, sodium, malto dextrin, corn syrup.
One can't seriously put these together and call them the same, make a study where participants might be eating SPAM and then conclude that "red meat is bad".
Given the choice between "Domino's vegetarian pizza", "IKEAs meatballs" and "steak that is fried,salted and peppered" which one do you think will be the healthiest option?
It's a good point, and maybe Broccoli isn't then as compelling as something like tofu, which contains nearly as much (and nearly as bio available) protein/calorie as lean steak.
I guess I'd challenge the 'no downsides' claim. Few people stick to super lean grass-fed cuts, and the picture on the site is even a ribeye steak :P
The protein density (g/kcal) of a ribeye steak is basically the same as tofu (I think like 14g/100kcal vs 11g/100kcal in tofu)
I know I'm moving the goal posts slightly (I admit I didn't know about bio availability, and see now that I have more to read up on e.g. Broccoli), but am learning as I discuss rather than arguing a fixed point.
Bioavailabilty is a bit of a non-issue. It's measured as if the food you are measuring is the only food you eat. So if it is slightly low on one amino acid, the "bioavailabilty" drops, but noone eats like that. Once combined with other foods, the total "bioavailabilty" tends to increase.
The bigger problem is nutritional density. I tried meeting the 1-1.5 g/kg protein level through a vegetarian whole grains diet and it's a lot of flipping food. Equivalent of like 3kg of chickpeas a day to make it.
It was definitely eye opening on the sort of ancient benefit of meat. It's really hard to reach your muscular potential without it.
An adult who weighs 75 kg, so is targeting about 75 grams of protein intake per day, would only need to eat 833 grams of cooked chickpeas (which are 9% protein by weight) to get there. That is indeed a lot of chickpeas! But a lot less than you claimed, and you probably shouldn't be getting all your protein from chickpeas anyway.
You're probably talking about dry weight. My can says 6g protein / 130 g. I'm about 100kg and to hit the 1.6 g protein/kg I need 160g of protein. 6g/130g * 3500 g is 161 g of protein.
- Canned, drained and rinsed: 7g protein / 100g [1]
- Boiled: 9g protein / 100g [2]
Not sure what explains the discrepancy (though the second number is much older), but both are considerably higher than what your can says. Sure you aren't reading a per-serving amount?
After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
The EU (and Europe) will have to lean East until Germany remilitarizes. US will find itself alone with enemies on all sides.
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