“Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.”
That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.
Well... there is historical evidence that centrally planned dictatorships are not a very responsive form of government.
Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know.
If you don't think there are competitions in dictatorships you are extremely sheltered. The competition in a dictatorship is whether you stay alive or not, just like in a corporation is whether you become homeless and die or keep a roof over your head.
If there is an increased demand in healthcare jobs that will increase wages in healthcare which will pull people out of other jobs and into healthcare in a healthy labor market. I’m not saying whether or not the labor market is healthy, but this adjustment wouldn’t help you figure that out.
Also Gen X isn’t that much smaller than the boomers, and millennials are the largest generation ever. Plus all generations aster the baby boomers have fewer children per couple to take care of them, so demand for healthcare jobs isn’t going to drop anytime soon.
I don’t know anyone who uses ChatGPT who cares about that stuff. Most people just use it as a Google replacement.
I actively hate it when it brings in some nonsense it thinks it knows about me. I told it my income once in an attempt to use it to find the perfect rewards credit card mix. Now anytime I try to get it to search for a deal it brings up some nonsense about “as a high income individual you don’t worry about saving $X, you care more about reliability, so you don’t need to look for the lowest cost” or something similar.
there is the option to opt-out of personalization, opt-out of using your conversations for training, and in that process reduce or eliminate any memory the system has of your personal preferences and context. If these actions don't erode your particular use-cases for ChatGPT, and if you think you can trust the model to follow these options this might be of use. I'm not trying to say "you're using it wrong" but that taking a more active control of the instaces facing you as a user might be of some benefit.
I have iterated through different option configurations to reach a level of 'customization' that more or less conforms to my own use case, and this does include opting out of any and all lasting memory between instances and across chat sessions; and adds a selection of single initialization prompts which shape the chatbot's behavior to my requirements for that session's objective. these trim most if not all af the sycophantic interactions, reduce outputs to the specific formats and contours as defined and omits any of the 'explanations of the underlying reasons behind...' which is just noise. This also has enabled some pretty useful results without ever spending a dime on a paid account: the premium behavior presented to 'potential customers' as a lure continues to work for me, and for iteration across instances and accounts is possible with machine-ready yaml context file when a single sessions hits the 90% wall : one emit and ingest cycle rotation across account profiles in firefox and i pick right up with a fresh limit.
Bouncing between ChatGPT and Claude, and between models for discrete subsets of larger tasks has really been impactful for my particular needs; but as i am not working in regions of knowledge that are beyond my own expertise and because I require the model to limit responses to very specific parameters, the logic space for unchecked hallucinations is low (but not zero).
The most useful project results for me have been in developing an air-gapped private menagerie of multi-domain models which uses an operating structure not dissimilar to OpenMythos; but then my background includes HPC environment development for NUMA, unikernels, MPI and bare metal hypervisor design - so getting a design plan and functional code without requiring a team of programmers and months of time in order to even start using models under my control which have zero public facing risk for the projects i'm working on is a much better place to spend limited budget on. Last gen hardware in the V100 class is perfectly capable of running and delivering the physics calculation optimizations as required and I would rather buy and/or install solar+storage to supply the electricity for token generation than rent the same from any of the frontier models AND trust that "don't train and learn from me" preferences are and continue to be followed.
If your use-case is a a 'lifestyle shopping assistant' then just turning off customization might be sufficient to stop it from telling you how to live your best life.
My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.
> people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.
They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You're spot on.
This says nothing about quality, however. Quality of HTML/CSS is purely subjective. A website's presentation layer cannot meet any technical standard metric for quality in engineering or manufacturing such as durability, reliability, efficiency, or safety.
I’m not going define away blocks of HTML inside of php scripts as not writing HTML by hand, but if you want to do that then sure most people were never writing HTML and CSS by hand.
I agree, I wouldn't classify PHP as "not writing HTML by hand". But that's not what I'm talking about. Most websites in the last 20 years have heavily leaned into client-side rendering, picking up with jQuery circa 2006. It's only recently with htmx that the pendulum has started swinging back toward server-side rendering.
I was around for all of this. Websites using jQuery were almost all using hand written HTML or HTML generated by something like rails web templates or PHP.
SPAs didn’t go mainstream until almost 10 years after 2006. And even at their height they never represented the majority of all websites.
But also most SPAs aren’t any less HTML by hand than using PHP templates are.
You can't become a licensed electrician without doing x hours of apprenticeship under licensed electrician. And each licensed electrician doesn't need more than one or two helpers at a time, so...
Hollywood is the same. Want to join SAG? You need to get cast in 5 SAG productions. Oh, but SAG productions only cast SAG actors? Oh well...
Meanwhile, all us nerds were trying to teach anyone interested how to write software. Look where that got us.
Yeah that’s what I meant. White collar jobs are 45% of all jobs, and they are much more than 45% of all work income because they pay better on average.
If AI really does come in and destroy all that no job is safe. Blue collar households don’t hire tradesman at anywhere near the rate that white collar households do.
In a major economic downturn like that new construction dries up. The commercial work will dry up to as all those white collar companies close their offices.
The end result is that existing tradesman will be fighting over a much smaller pie. Plus they’ll be dealing with competition from all the unemployed knowledge workers trying to change careers. In some states and some trades new entrants will be less of an issue, but most trades in most states aren’t supply restricted like the above poster’s electrician example.
My point is getting to the trades isn’t going to protect you from AI taking your job unless AI takes over a small percent of jobs and stops. I don’t actually think AI is going to take all that many jobs myself, but if I’m wrong we’re going to have to completely rework our economy.
I know enough of trade business owners to know that a business worth $10 million is rare.
Just using some back of the envelope math from numbers I found. On the high end a plumbing company is valued at 5x EBITA. A very very good plumbing company has a 20% net profit margin (and no debt, no corporate taxes or anything so that net income and EBITA are essentially the same), and a good plumbing company makes $350k in revenue per truck.
So a $10 million plumbing company would need to have 30 trucks, all with high performing employees. They’d need to bring in $10 million in revenue at best in class profit margins.
That’s a huge operation. Very few plumbing businesses owners will ever get to that level. There are 3 times as many doctors in the US as there are business owners with business that do the kind of revenue in the above example. If you’re capable of running an operation like that you can probably succeed at plenty of other things.
I am not in the business of valuing small businesses, but one thing that seems off to me is that an EBITDA multiple is usually also dependent on the overall size of the business. That is, a business with only $1 million in EBITDA may only be worth 3-4x that, while a business with $10 million in EBITDA might be worth 8-10x EBITDA, on the theory that larger businesses will be more stable and less likely to have key person or large customer risk (some examples, https://raincatcher.com/ebitda-valuation-multiples-by-indust...)
That said, I agree with your overall assessment that $10 million single-owner plumbing businesses are rare, for the simple reason that $10 million single owner anything is rare. If it were not rare, by definition you'd have a lot more folks worth $10 million (and, in this case, a lot more people lining up to be plumbers), and then $10 million would probably not be worth very much.
I’m not a plumber but from spending 20 minutes looking into it, it looks like the primary thing that changes the value multiple is how involved the owner is in the business (your key person risk). 5x was also on the high side of the multiples I saw.
The thing to keep in mind though is we’re talking small business, once you get to $10 million EBITA, you’re probably talking $50-$200 million in revenue and 200-500 employees. Thats firmly into mid sized business territory and I think revenue growth would be the or primary driver of the multiple.
From your source a 10x multiple would require very high revenue growth. That makes sense because you can get 10% average return with index funds, so you need to significantly beat that ROI.
I don’t think the OP is discussing mind-body dualism. There are many materialists who believe that consciousness maybe a non-computational process.
But it is worth pointing out that something like 80% of the world (it fluctuates depending on the survey but its around that) believes in some non-physical spirit, life force, or soul.
It’s a very HN bubble thing to start a discussion with the assumption that everyone must be a materialist.
I acknowledge and understand that many people believe in the existence of souls. But I hope they just say it rather than try to wrap the concepts in layers of jargons.
Again I don’t think the person you were talking to was doing that.
But one of the reasons that people might do that is because on a forum like hacker news they’ll be attacked as a lunatic. Just look at some of the comments on this article. I saw one where someone said that dualism is so ridiculous that it can’t even be considered philosophy.
> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution
“Fundamentally inherent from”
is such a broad statement that it’s difficult to argue with, but the US constitution predates the French Revolution.
> so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule
If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
“Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.”
That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.
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