And Fiorello La Guardia was (in terms of beliefs and enacted policy) even more socialist than Mamdani is even though he was technically a Republican when elected.
> Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.
Worked for gambling.
(Not saying this as a message of support. I think legalizing/normalizing easy app-based gambling was a huge mistake and is going to have an increasingly disastrous social impact).
Because it's still relatively new. Gambling's been around forever, and so has addiction. What hasn't been around is gambling your life away on the same device(s) you do everything else in today's modern society on. If you had an unlimited supply of whatever monkey is on your back, right at your fingertips, you'd be dead before the week is out from an overdose. It's the normalization of this level of access to gambling which gives me great fear for the future. Giving drugs to minors is a bigger crime than to adults for a reason. Without regulation and strong cultural push back, it's gonna get way worse, unless we make huge leaps in addiction treatment (which I am hopeful for. GLP-1s aren't yet scientifically proven to help with that, but there's a large body of anecdotal evidence to suggest it does.
> We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
My experience matches pretty closely with FireBeyond's.
But I also think its worth noting that there's a difference between the group of people who are legitimately not political (don't really think or talk about politics) and the group of people who proactively identifies themselves as "independent" or "apolitical" when not specifically asked.
It is the latter group of people who (in my experience also) are very likely to be conservative.
My experience aligns strongly with yours (self-declared 'independents' being almost universally conservative leaning) but anecdotally I also think a significant part of the growing number of people who identify as "independents" recently may be left leaning folks who are simply fed up with Democratic party leadership (or lack thereof) and the inability of the party to act as a true opposition party as our democracy falls apart.
I've been programming since 6502/6510 assembly language and all compilers I've used were deterministic (which isn't the same thing as being bug free or producing the correct output for a given input).
Honestly its kind of horrifying that if "Frontier" LLM usage were to become as required as some people think just to operate as a knowledge worker, someone could basically be cast out of the workforce entirely through being access-banned by a very small group of companies.
Luckily, I happen to think that eventually all of the commercial models are going to have their lunch eaten by locally run "open" LLMs which should avoid this, but I still have some concerns more on the political side than the technical side. (It isn't that hard to imagine some sort of action from the current US government that might throw a protectionist wrench into this outcome).
There is also a big risk for employers' whole organisation to be completely blocked from using Anthropic services if one of their employees have a suspended/banned personal account:
From their Usage Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup
"Circumvent a ban through the use of a different account, such as the creation of a new account, use of an existing account, or providing access to a person or entity that was previously banned"
If an organisation is large enough and have the means, they MIGHT get help but if the organisation is small, and especially if the organisation is owned by the person whose personal account suspended... then there is no way to get it fixed, if this is how they approach.
I understand that if someone has malicious intentions/actions while using their service they have every right to enforce this rule but what if it was an unfair suspension which the user/employee didn't actually violate any policies, what is the course of action then? What if the employer's own service/product relies on Anthropic API?
Anthropic has to step up. Talking publicly about the risks of AI is nice and all, but as an organisation they should follow what they preach. Their service is "human-like" until it's not, then you are left alone and out.
Yup, the main goal of customer support for almost every Internet-based company for over a decade now is to just be so frustrating that you give up before you can reach an actual human (since that is the point where there is a real cost to the company in giving you that support).
I'm not really sure LLMs have made it worse. They also haven't made it better, but it was already so awful that it just feels like a different flavor of awful.
Thats not really the case here in Europe, where good vs bad support is often what separates companies that build a loyal customer base from those stuck with churn they cant control.
> In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.
Software CEOs think about this and rub their hands together thinking about all the labor costs they will save creating apps, without thinking one step further and realizing that once you don't need developers to build the majority of apps your would-be customers also don't need the majority of apps at all.
They can have an LLM build their own customized app (if they need to do something repeatedly, or just have the LLM one-off everything if not).
Or use the free app that someone else built with an LLM as most app categories race to the moatless bottom.
One thing I learned working on a system that did train positioning for the 7 Line subway in NYC is that train systems are a lot more complicated than just straight lines. They are complicated networks with custom signaling and the trains don't necessarily travel on the usual side in the usual direction at all times.
That said, in this particular case it basically was just two straight lines side by side and one of the trains derailed and travelled into the path of the other track.
Trains don't often derail on straight sections, likely either someone fucked up really bad on rail maintenance or someone sabotaged the rail.
And Fiorello La Guardia was (in terms of beliefs and enacted policy) even more socialist than Mamdani is even though he was technically a Republican when elected.
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