Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time, long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a "well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.
For all the recent hand-wringing about the U.S. becoming less welcoming to immigrants, the U.S. is still far, far ahead of any European country in terms of immigration opportunities. If you're qualified to come to anywhere in Europe, you were qualified to come to the United States years or decades ago.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
banning coal is quite cheap even ignoring the emissions and pollution side effects. England has already shut down their last coal plant and without 6 years of Trump, the US likely would have or would be planning to within the next couple years. Coal is expensive, not flexible, and horribly polluting even compared to natural gas.
> full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors
I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.
I can’t stand people putting a man on a pedestal just because they are ‘rich’. Lots and lots of men pimp others to do the work, mafia style. You don’t need to be clever to do that, just nasty and in his case very dirty.
This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.
This is all relatively new in human timescales. My parents as children saw the start of modern advertising, with ads targeted at them. But they did not see entertainment engineered to sell them product. I think in the 60s you started seeing bands manufactured and aggressively marketed to youths (such as The Monkeys), because companies wanted their share of Beatles money. And 70s, when George Lucas and Kiss realized how much money was in branded merchandise. And late 70s, when He-Man reversed things and media was created specifically to sell merchandise. On human timescales, the results are starting to come in on this experiment.
Pretty disturbing to me how many people _on here_ are cheering for this. I thought that at least here of all places, there might be some nuanced discussion on "ok, I see why people are emotional about this topic in particular, but it's worth stepping back and putting emotions aside for a minute to see if this is actually reasonable overall..." but besides your comment, I'm not seeing much of that.
There's pro-AI censorship and then there's pro-social media censorship. It was the X offices that were raided. X is a social media company. They would have been raided whether it was AI that created the CSAM or a bunch of X contractors generating it mechanical-turk style.
Or does it just seem that way because you've had a whole lifetime to digest it one little bit at a time so that it all seems intuitive now? If "easy to understand and get started with" were the bar for programming capability, we'd have stopped with COBOL.
... and the biggest problem is that the people who _do_ know how hard it is to build software are the ones whose input on the matter is most likely to be discounted as "sour grapes"/"fear of obsolescence".
As always, the only way anybody has ever thought of to "plan" software is:
1) write down everything you're going to do
2) write down how long that's going to take
3) add them all up and voila! You have a schedule!
The ways this breaks down in practice would be comical if not for the fact that everybody takes it so seriously. The biggest problem is that step 1 takes longer than the actual software development task all the time, every time. That might not be _so_ bad other than the fact that it's also always completely wrong.
reply