> This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight.
Easy to grandstand when it is not your job on the line.
Is it? My job as a frontend dev is similarly threatened by OpenAI, maybe even more so than journalists'. The very company I usually like to pay to help with my work (Vercel) is in the process of using that same money to replace me with AI as we speak, lol (https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui). I'm not complaining. I think it's great progress, even if it'll make me obsolete soon.
I was a journalism student in college, long before ML became a threat, and even then it was a dying industry. I chose not to enter it because the prospects were so bleak. Then a few months ago I actually tried to get a journalism job locally, but never heard back. The former reporter there also left because the pay wasn't enough for the costs of living in this area, but that had nothing to do with OpenAI. It's just a really tough industry.
And even as a web dev, I knew it was only a matter of time before I became unnecessary. Whether it was Wordpress or SquareSpace or Skynet, it was bound to happen at some point. I'm going back to school now to try to enter another field altogether, in part because the writing is on the ~~wall~~ chatbox for us.
I don't think we as a society owe it to any profession to artificially keep it alive as it's historically been. We do it owe it to INDIVIDUALS -- fellow citizens/residents -- to provide them with some way forward, but I'd prefer that be reskilling and social support programs, welfare if nothing else, rather than using ancient copyright law to favor old dying industries over new ones that can actually have a much bigger impact.
In my eyes, the NYT is just another news outlet. A decent one, sure, but not anything substantially different than WaPo or the LA Times or whatever. How many Pulitzer winners have come and gone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Breaking_Ne...
If we lost the NYT, it'd be a bit of nostalgia, but next week life would go on as usual. They're not even as specialized as, say, National Geographic or PopSci or The Information or 404 Media or The Center for Investigative Reporting, any of which would be harder to replace than another generic big news outlet.
AI, meanwhile, has the potential to be way bigger than even the Internet, IMO, and we should be devoting Manhattan Project-like resources to it.
If a murderer lives in your house for decades and you knew they were a murderer and were plotting more murders but you did nothing to root them out yourself, maybe you’re an accessory.
It probably doesn’t justify the death penalty, but it also doesn’t help.
I would note that no one in Palestine has chosen for Hamas to be there. They are more like a criminal organization with populist propaganda, with a focus on smuggling and sanctions evasion as a business model. Even the election they “won,” they really didn’t in the conventional sense, and there hasn’t been another in 10 years.
I’m not taking sides, as someone raised Quaker and a later life Buddhist, I know everyone killing others is wrong and there’s no excuse for everything horrible that’s happening. But no one listens to the guy in the corner saying “could we just stop killing each other?”
But it’s absurd to say that somehow Hamas is a legitimate democratically elected government and the populace has had any say in the things they’ve done in their name.
Hamas decided to do October 7 assuming Israel would do something awful so they could martyr their own people for propaganda purposes. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to volunteer the lives of the 20,000 people killed, nor the horrors of October 7.
Israel played directly, and in greater magnitude, into their stated goals of inciting Israel into atrocities. The goal isn’t to defeat Israel militarily but to destroy its international standing and by proxy the US. They wanted to end the idea of a two state solution forever and make the only options destruction of Israel or genocide of Palestinians.
The general populace of Palestine has no desire to be wiped out, they don’t want to live like this. They want to live a normal life like everyone does. But they don’t get to choose if Hamas controls their fate. Sitting in a western democracy it seems inconceivable that you can’t choose your government. But most of the world can’t, and they are at the mercy of whoever has the most guns and psychopaths to hold them.
Thank you for the color and the insight. It’s really helpful to remind myself how lucky we are to live in western democracies, a relatively new invention, and how 99% of humans who have ever lived have had no agency in the rules of the world they inhabit.
I am curious what you think should be done in this israel conflict. What are the paths forward?
So you are saying the ~14,000 women and children killed are accessories, b/c they failed to personally expel Hamas? Do you believe "There are no innocent Palestinians"?
It's also funny how the label "murderer" works, apparently not applying to Israel. Can we at least hold Israel to account for the extrajudicial assassinations conducted by Mossad?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations
"Mossad had assassinated Salameh. However, the blast also killed four innocent bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 other people in the vicinity. Immediately following the operation the three Mossad officers fled without trace, as well as up to 14 other agents believed to have been involved in the operation" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_assassinations_followin...
Hamas is a strategic asset to the current set of hardliners in control of the Israeli government. They are "the town murderer" pointed to by the authorities, but conspicuously done nothing about as a justification of why they are the only sane choice to run things. Hamas and Israel's government are thus in a symbiotic relationship.
I don’t particularly know what to think about the common separation of woman from the population in these discussions.
I understand that Palestine is probably somewhat misogynistic compared to my American sensibilities, so I might be completely off base, but it feels like women would have a lot of political influence, even if it’s soft.
Or maybe they’re just treated like property and don’t know better due to poor educational prospects and tradition.
Expand that a bit, if the murder runs into your house and then uses it as a staging ground to start killing your neighbors, there is a high risk the SWAT team is coming in guns a blazing.
> I fear the unintended side effects. Like, somebody put away on such a charge because it was easier than the more important charge. Now gonna have to be retried. For example.
I'm aware of cases like this that happened a long time ago. Domestic abusers who got put away on drug charges because it was easier than the alternatives. I still think this pardon is an overall good thing.
What if Ford made it so that their vehicles drive worse when non-Ford vehicles were on the road, and then when confronted about it told all of their customers that they should convince their neighbors to buy a Ford to solve the problem?
What are you even talking about and how is it relevant to what I'm asking? You seem to be leaping to Apple's defense as if you're taking a bullet for them but it isn't really necessary here.
I am saying that everyone makes deals with preferred customers and volume sellers. If you think you’re going to get the same pricing when you open an AWS account that Netflix gets you’re naive.
There has never been a law that a company has to make the same deals with everyone
This is some ways like Youtube and adblock. Apple is completely within their right to try to kick Beeper to the curb but I also enjoy watching a scrappy company like Beeper try to circumvent Apple's attempts to shut them out.
Because of how likely it is to be killed though I don't think I shall be adopting it personally.
Easy to grandstand when it is not your job on the line.