I'm always surprised how even the people I consider incredibly intelligent get pulled into bad ideas.
Readit Newscodexb commented on Launching the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative blog.codinghorror.com/lau... · Posted by u/d4ft
Even that short changes the original source:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-u...
I bookmarked the series which looks exactly like what everyone in tech is saying ISN’T happening:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job
But I’m sure somebody will blow this off as “it’s only three examples and is not really representative”
But if it is representative…
“then it’s not as bad as other automation waves”
or if it is as bad as other automation waves…
“well there’s nothing you can do about it”
Anecdotally I was in an Uber yesterday on the way to a major Metropolitan airport and we passed a Waymo. I asked the Uber driver how they felt about Waymo and Uber collaborating and if he felt like it was a threat to his job.
His answer was basically “yes it is but there’s nothing anybody can do about it you can’t stop technology it’s just part of life.”
If that’s how people who are being replaced feel about it, while still continuing to do the things necessary to train the systems, then there will be assuredly no human future (at least not one that isn’t either subsistence or fully machine integrated) because the people being replaced don’t feel like they have the capacity to stand up to it.
There will always be value in doing work that other people don't want to do themselves or that requires expertise and skill that isn't conveyed all that well through books or pictures. The economy used to be full of stable masters for horses and carriages, and manual typists, and street lamp lighters, and television repairmen, and any number of jobs that don't exist anymore.
I'm pretty sure we'll survive.
That's like saying "the problem isn't the unmaintainable cost of healthcare, it's that we haven't eliminated all diseases and aging". I.e. the latter is a long way off, and might not ever be 100% feasible, so it's horrifying and inhumane to imply we should allow the suffering caused by the former in the meantime.
I think it's a stretch to call having to make a living in a career other than your preferred job "suffering". Even before AI, there were surely millions of people who grew up wanting to be an artist, or an astronaut, or an architect, or any number of things that they never had the skills or the work ethic or the resources to achieve. I'm sure before cars there were people who loved maintaining stables of horses and carriages, and lamented the decline of the stable master profession. It's no different now.
Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.
The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.
At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
I'm curious what you think the solution is?
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
License plate holders that obscure the license plate on private property.
I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
Look at any hobby and there are lots of beginners and casuals and far fewer people who are very skilled at it. The Maker hobby is no different. It's certainly not a problem of the microcontrollers available. Arduino is the simplest, but there are plenty of others.
The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.
The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.
Wow, I can't believe this is still around! I'm glad to see artifacts from the past like this are still out there on the internet.
Makes me miss Google CodeJam though.
Sounds more like people need to de-UK. It's going to be a problem with any company or technology.
I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes:
Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives.
A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily driver for everyone it is certainly the route that needs to be taken.
I'm still unable to use it because is not easy to break away from Android, but is a platform that I think about almost every day, because I do not want to use Android anymore and I'm willing to sacrifice certain aspects to have an open and friendly platform on my hands. And if it is not PostmarketOS then let it be another project.
We need these kind of projects, not kneeling down to a company like Google and begging for Android to be open. Effort needs to be put elsewhere. That's how major projects like Linux, BSDs and open source projects have flourished and taken the world.
I agree with you, but that only works if people value it and are willing to pay for it.
Look at email. It’s technically open, but in reality there are a few large players who control the majority of it.
The only way open source phone software succeeds is if there is real money behind it and there is an attractiveness to it that makes people pay for it.
IMO, access to DeepMind and Google infra is a hugely understated advantage Waymo has that no other competitor can replicate.