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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2023

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  • I think it is that its not useful for the end customer. Every anecdote I’ve heard about LLMs helping someone with their work were heavily qualified with special cases and circumstances and narrow use cases, resulting in a description of a process that was made more complex by adding the LLM, which then helped them eliminate nearly as much complication and effort as it added. These are the stories from the believers.

    Now add in the fact that almost nobody is on a paid service tier outside of work, and all the paid tiers are currently heavily subsidized. If it has questionable utility at today’s prices, the value will only decline from there as prices rise to cover the real costs to run these things.





  • I think that Microsoft will continue in some form regardless of what happens with this bubble because they have huge amounts of physical assets and cash on hand.

    That said, their market position in any given sector they’re in might not be as invincible as it seems. There are corporations that were titans of their industries, including technology, that either don’t exist or are ghosts of their former selves all in far less than a lifetime.

    Kodak, Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, and Yahoo all looked like unstoppable juggernauts when I was a kid, and my own kids haven’t even heard of some of them.


  • One of the initial promises of capitalism included the alignment of altruism and profit, like providing a good or service to the community that they need and did not otherwise have, and they all pay you enough to live, meanwhile they all do the same with other goods and services, creating a big virtuous cycle.

    I know that has largely broken down and been perverted as more and more market segments collapse into monopolies like black holes, but I think you can still see some of that “making money doing something good” spirit out there, even on YouTube. The first YouTuber that came to mind was “Dad, How Do I?” for example. I am pretty sure that guy’s getting monetized and he’s wholesome as hell.



  • I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

    Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

    For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.






  • Its true that there’s no way to enforce a law like that directly, and I don’t think that I agree with the requirement to carry documents at all times, same as you.

    There is some use for laws that are not directly enforceable, though, just not in this case. For example, a government may reasonably want to limit citizens’ ability to operate a vehicle carrying a hazardous chemical. They may not be able to justly stop him and check for things with no reason, but if that is discovered because he got in a wreck, they can then punish the illegal transport crime.

    I know its often repressive or at least unhelpful to make laws that aren’t directly enforceable, but there is some room for them. It is important to disallow legal overreach of law enforcement trampling civil liberties trying to enforce those laws like you pointed out, though. That’s something that my country (USA) unfortunately has a checkered history with, as have a lot of others.

    ETA: To be clear, making it illegal for a person to not physically have something at all times seems patently absurd, regardless of how loosely enforced. All of the reasonable requirements of being a legal resident are met by simply being registered with the government of the country you are visiting.


  • I can understand why some would think that, as I once did.

    Physical therapy is similar in that it matters very little why you have pain. You can improve or eliminate the symptom by appropriately exercising the affected areas.

    Similarly, the behavioral treatments can take advantage of all humans’ natural adaptability to teach them to model and normalize more socially healthy behaviors.

    I’m totally out of my depth in these fields but I have been convinced through firsthand experience via physical therapy. I’m sure it is not a catch all solution to just attack the symptoms, but it does have positive observable results and it therefore seems at least noteworthy.



  • What I personally would do is:

    • implement a progressive income tax that scales to 100% at the highest tier.
    • include all income from all sources, including inheritance and capital gains (especially those in fact) in income such that it counts toward the progressive taxation model in the previous step.
    • implement a public fund for the retired and disabled paid into from the income tax base from all taxpayers (my country already has this called Social Security, but it is undermined by corrupt tax policy).

    That isn’t the hard part, though. Like i said, there are a ton of solutions to THAT problem that can work, including yours. The really hard problem is that I am not sure how to protect a government from allowing officials elected under false pretenses from dismantling the solution for disingenuous reasons, like is happening throughout the entire developed world in real time right now, despite their varied social, economic, and governmental structures.

    ETA: I would also include people with debilitating mental health as among the disabled for purposes of eligibility for the social fund aid.


  • I’m sure that’s true, but again, the positive outcomes you’re describing are the result of the poor peoples’ increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don’t believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.

    And you are again correct: there is no way to “dry run” new social programs fully. You can only create small “labs” to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we’ve seen really used in the real world.

    The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn’t necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).