I wasn't banned until well after I joined Lemmy
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Confusing that they share a name with these evil things
Probably not actually impossible, just requiring identity theft so only available to criminals
Author of the blogpost seems to be fully engaged with that, but their worry is that they no longer have a professional edge over the competition because LLMs let less experienced people do all the stuff they spent years developing expertise in:
Of course, I'm still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot. But I'm just another off-the-shelf engineer now. I have no domain expertise that another Sr. engineer steering an LLM cannot match. All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.
We were taught that generalists and specialists will always have their roles. But now the market is shaping everyone into becoming a generalist. That's not a bad thing per se, until you look under the economics of supply and demand: if everyone is a generalist, the price of a generalist falls if there's no demand to match. And we all know the demand is drying up.
Opened the comments knowing this one would be here to upvote
When you deputize an AI agent to shop for you, you basically tell the computer program (or “agent”) what you want. Like: find the best running shoes under $150 for someone with wide feet, or the cheapest flight to Venice. The agent then searches multiple retailers, evaluates options based on your preferences, and completes the sale.
This sounds like it could actually be useful, since there's normally a tradeoff between perfectly optimizing getting the most of what you want at the best price and how much time you have to spend shopping around.
An AI assistant cannot be both a consumer agent and a platform sales channel.
Just needs to be actually independent, ideally locally run, maybe mostly not even AI since you don't exactly need a LLM to scrape websites and compare prices. Where AI would be useful is times when things are ambiguous, like I often want to buy the cheapest available item, but if you sort by price there are pages of accessory items that just have the same keywords in the title but aren't the thing I'm actually looking to buy, and it wouldn't be trivial to automate finding the first one that actually matches using conventional methods.
What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one certainly will not enter into any ongoing relations. This is why a direct one-on-one exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It’s all made possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability, in the form of shared pleasures, music and dance—the usual base of conviviality on which trade must always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any exchange of material goods between strangers—where neither party has no particular reason not to take advantage of the other—by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case, where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.
Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: “Imagine a society without money.” “Imagine a barter economy.” One thing these examples make abundantly clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be. 21
Why? The simplest answer would be: for there to even be a discipline called “economics,” a discipline that concerns itself first and foremost with how individuals seek the most advantageous arrangement for the exchange of shoes for potatoes, or cloth for spears, it must assume that the exchange of such goods need have nothing to do with war, passion, adventure, mystery, sex, or death. Economics assumes a division between different spheres of human behavior that, among people like the Gunwinngu and the Nambikwara, simply does not exist. These divisions in turn are made possible by very specific institutional arrangements: the existence of lawyers, prisons, and police, to ensure that even people who don’t like each other very much, who have no interest in developing any kind of ongoing relationship, but are simplyinterested in getting their hands on as much of the others’ possessions as possible, will nonetheless refrain from the most obvious expedient (theft). This in turn allows us to assume that life is neatly divided between the marketplace, where we do our shopping, and the “sphere of consumption,” where we concern ourselves with music, feasts, and seduction. In other words, the vision of the world that forms the basis of the economics textbooks, which Adam Smith played so large a part in promulgating, has by now become so much a part of our common sense that we find it hard to imagine any other possible arrangement.
From these examples, it begins to be clear why there are no societies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else’s throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever.
The basic idea is that our modern economic system has had the humanity stripped out of it in order to be an engineerable system at all. The natural way for things to work is for personal relationships and cultural conventions to come first, to the point where the way to make impersonal trade work was to make it more personal; for instance the text right before the quoted passage describes a culture whose barter meets were also swingers parties. The book has lots more examples of the ways material relations have fundamentally contradicted the idea that the natural way is to appraise things down to a numerical value and play an optimization game, for instance cultural practices of certain types of goods only being used for specific types of things like blood and marriage debts, and cultures which have strong taboos against ever refusing to give a person food.
The problems OP is talking about are specific to capitalist society and the way people in it are conditioned to think. You don't need a "system" that takes that way of thinking as its core assumption and constrains people thinking that way to act pro-socially, the much simpler solution would be to permit and enable the entanglement of personal and economic relations that naturally happens.
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I always watch subs, that thing they do in dubs where they say words in a weird cadence to lipsync better is really offputting to me.
To clarify, I'm not saying that this proves correctness of a particular economic theory, more that your (probably?) implied claim that pandemic money printing didn't have a big negative impact on the value of the dollar is very much not self-evident given how things went.
IMO the big thing is just to broadly remove corporate influence and control. Almost everything that is wrong with the internet has roots in profit/power seeking megalomaniacs thinking up ways to make the technology we use serve their needs exclusively and manipulate everyone's interactions to cater to that. Tech utopia would be everyone using systems that are designed for organic human interaction, organizing and information exchange, and the people who want to corrupt that being unable to do so.
It might not have fully collapsed (yet), but I think all the money printing had a lot to do with the subsequent relative price boom of various assets. For instance if you had bought gold and waited a few years it would have worked out pretty well. Inflation relative to stores of wealth has been a lot higher than inflation relative to consumer goods.
This is reality if you're using an mp3 player instead of a phone
No, I disabled that in the settings so I don't see it
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There is someone out there whose job is bald hedgehog masseuse
That's true but you can mess up pretty bad if you don't know what you're doing and aren't carefully following a recipe. One time I wanted a stir fry to be more filling, so I added flour, which apparently gives it a uniquely unpleasant slimy texture and is basically inedible. Never did that again but that kind of stuff can happen more often before you have much experience cooking. Even if you are following a recipe sometimes they can be ambiguous or give wrong measurements (especially for the amount of salt to use).
Are the specific suggestions made in the article "horrible UI design"? IMO it is good UI design to have a basic goal of people being able to use it without consulting with external resources, and not requiring them to know much more than is strictly necessary for the given task. The real fundamental problem is the marketshare of proprietary operating systems, not using them needs to be accessible, not a badge of computer literacy. The author is absolutely right that you should be able to format a disk and set up a network drive by just clicking through and selecting basic options about what you are trying to do.
All he's really saying is that it is important for things to be easy for people to figure out how to do, and for that you need to be aware of what mental models they already have and design interfaces with the goal that the largest number of users can succeed in using the software. A better analogy might be that if you're trying to run a political campaign, you should probably be speaking the language the majority of voters speak, and caring whether they understand you.
The examples the article gives seem like good ones. The starting point is a video of people new to linux trying to use software and failing to figure it out, acknowledging that as a problem to be solved. The proposed solutions are basically to have wizard guis that can walk users through the most common tasks for disk management and network drives. Usability matters and none of that should be very controversial.
Speaking only about the porn, I like drawings, and real images of real people usually make me uncomfortable for whatever reason. The quality and volume of the art has increased dramatically over the years, lots of furry nsfw artists are really, really good at what they do.
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So what's the reason? They are not consistent enough and changes in light/heat/radiation output would kill any life that arose?
The nice thing about rotary phones was, they didn't have to be plugged into an electrical outlet, so they worked during a power outage