This is like your typical 2-story US house "eating" a baseball. Completely trivial occurrence, cosmologically speaking, unless you're specifically looking for it.
To me, the fact that we can look at it is what's neat here. People have been theorizing how things work/behave in the universe, and we are finally starting to make observations to test those theories.
> If you're using randomized testing as "extra credit", to catch a few more bugs, or to replace traditional software testing processes, you can just tell an LLM to look for risky areas of the code and find invariants that might be violated and fuzz them. This works ok. When I've convinced people to try some randomized testing, they usually start here and find quite a few bugs they're happy to have found. Due to the nature of who's interested in trying out novel-to-them test techniques, this is often from people who've worked on some of the most well-tested and reliable code at the company and they can find bugs in their own relatively well-tested code.
Counterpoint: I just tried a few rounds of LLM-generated fuzzing on my current side project and couldn't find a single bug. Maybe try coding more defensively?
America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
Apparently my definition of tutor is so demanding that it should not be expected at all from a tutor (even if provided with information on the tutees weaknesses, tutors don't use the information effectively). However, the point of these studies are to gauge large scale effects rather than high variance small sample size effects. There's a lot more that is very interesting.
Hmm, it might be better to just go straight to what leading countries currently do (Finland/Estonia/Japan/Singapore/etc). Other factors probably play a bigger role, like school funding, school autonomy, teacher professionalism (high education level + continuing education + good pay), free school meals/healthcare/transportation etc
One major limitation is the cost. It costs lots of money to train teachers and pay them good salaries. What leading countries are doing currently might not be sustainable for the long run. Cognitive abilities also different greatly from people to people in different discipline. There is no silver bullet.
America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
The long term sustainability in at least one of those leading countries (Japan) has been shown effective for at least the period from the end of WWII to now. The principle difficulty they have is not maintaining high levels of educational success but in having enough children to keep the schools open and the teachers fully employed. But, that is a different concern than successful educational outcomes.
The average level of capability and comprehension in fundamental disciplines for students completing primary is a direct result of some fundamental differences in the way they approach classroom organization: for one middle school and high school students do not change classrooms during a school day.
Teachers rotate rooms while students remain in place and this maintains a less disjointed, less distracted transition between classes. There are still very little to zero technological advances to the teaching methods: blackboards/whiteboards, overhead projectors, hand written paperwork, textbooks.
The reasoning is simple. The fundamentals which students in primary education are in need of learning do not change much. Last years' textbooks are perfectly useful and the cost of replacement is directly carried by each student. If they damage a book, they must replace it.
Salaries for teachers are not unusually high, but they are also not low. The building and administrative costs are kept low, for one, by there not being a significant non-instructor labor expense of janitorial and maintenance workers. Schools share the pool of municipal HVAC and other trades for serious infrastructure, but janitors? Nope. The students are required to actually clean up after themselves, and to actually clean the whole school. It makes a difference, and those avoidable labor costs can be directed to proper compensation for the teaching staff.
Anecdotal observation of the overall efficacy of this approach reaches areas not usually measured as 'educational success' but also includes one noteworthy artifact. The common clerk, shop keeper, cook, or gas tank delivery driver all know that i = sqrt(-1) and that a complex number is a pair of numbers, one of which is the coefficient of (i). Let that sink in. How many people graduate with a B.A. from western schools without that?
There is not a 'silver bullet' but there are a full compliment of approaches which when applied together, consistently, and persistently, yield excellent sustainable outcomes.
Back to the falling population problem. There are pluses and minuses from the choice to provide separate boys and girls middle and high schools; one of which is lower teenage pregnancy and it's inverse, lower adult birthrates. (It's not the only reason for the lower birthrates, but it's not having zero impact.) You cant win 'em all.
Oh I don't disagree. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's always right at some point in the cycle.
I'm just saying it is cyclical. Databases => plain text => single-file databases, repeat. shared hosting => dedicated hosting => vms => jamstack, repeat, etc.
Can't sell complexity without oversimplicity or simplicity without overcomplexity.
But this is quite a long blog post, with typical blog flourishes, about not very much.
> Issues of culture are sticky. I think it could take many decades for Americans to unlearn their brand of toxic individualism. Maybe centuries.
Strongly agree. Much work ahead to change the dysfunctional American culture around hyper individualism. I hope it can be done in only a generation or two. My mental model on this is US religiosity decline.
> The results indicate that even with a number of self-described democratic socialists on the ballot, Democrats will have the upper hand heading into November’s midterm election, which is widely viewed as a referendum on Trump. It also suggests voters are warming to the idea of a more muscular federal government that provides additional services in exchange for higher taxes.
> The poll found that 32% of registered voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate if they describe themselves as a democratic socialist, while 50% would be less likely to vote for such a candidate. Twenty-nine percent of voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate with Trump’s endorsement, while 52% would be less likely. A candidate who describes themself as a supporter of the MAGA movement does even worse, with only 27% of voters saying that would make them more likely to vote for them and 57% saying it would make their vote less likely.
> Capitalism remains more popular than socialism in the U.S., the poll found, but has declined in public sentiment in recent years as socialism has gained.
> Twenty-eight percent of registered voters polled viewed socialism positively, a leap up from 18% in 2024. Fifty percent of registered voters viewed capitalism positively, little changed from 51% in 2024. Forty-eight percent of voters viewed socialism negatively, while 27% viewed capitalism negatively in the poll released Friday.
> Voters aged 18-34 preferred socialism by a margin of 18% points, while older age demographics preferred capitalism. That could reshape the electorate in the future. Or today’s younger voters could evolve their preferences as they age.
> “If these current attitudes were to persist over time, and the 18-49 year-olds of today were going to keep those types of attitudes, we’re going to have a seismic shift in terms of the national conversation and economic policy prescriptions that we see coming out of Congress and different places over time,” said Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican pollster for the survey. “The attitudes of 18-34 year-olds today are the reality of our country in 20 years.”
> Voters polled did not believe some form of socialism would be a good idea for the country, but by an extremely narrow margin. Forty-four percent of voters polled said some form of socialism would be a bad thing, while 40% said it would be a good thing — winnowing the gap by half from the last time it was polled. In a 2019 Gallup poll, 43% of adults viewed socialism as a good thing and 51% viewed it as a bad thing.
It’s not like Americans were invaded and forced to accept this. They repeatedly voted for it. Obama tried to work on healthcare, then had the largest electoral losses since Eisenhower, all up and down the ballot. Instead they voted for the real-estate billionaire. Trump has zero healthcare during a major pandemic - crickets. This country doesn’t want anything labeled “socialism”, and will hurt itself repeatedly to prove it. Last time it took a Great Depression to change their minds.
This is true but it is not the whole story. Both establishment parties have presided over and encouraged the financialization of real estate. The ludicrous CEO-to-worker pay multiple wasn’t voted for by anyone.
Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization as socialism. Unregulated capitalism always trends towards concentration of wealth/power.
Another thing I’ve noticed is Americans are extremely non-self-aware about this topic. Go ask your favorite frontier LLM to tell you about notable moments in American history when they rejected socialism, explicitly or otherwise. Overall in history, and over just the last 30 years specifically. Institutions, and the electorate itself.
The problem is not AI. It's an excellent technology. The problem is there's an underlying power grab (e.g. layoffs). When humans do that to each other they inherently dehumanize/invalidate/insult each other. Implement strong labor protections or basic income and a lot of this dog-eat-dog toxicity goes away.
AI is completely irrelevant to the power that software wields.
Implementing labor protections and basic income is not seeing the forest for the trees. What we need is a more educated public that can contribute their ideas. All AI can do is lower the barrier to entry, but it does not replace the need for education.
Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ). Just like neurons, if you don't use it you lose it and when the inevitable problems come, nobody knows the why, the how and the what. At that point someone smart would incorporate all those real costs and opportunity loses on the "automating everything" equation. But they usually don't.
Of course automating tasks is a must, but it's very far from being a black and white situation. These dynamics have been happening for centuries by now, nothing new.
<< Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ).
Management likes to think otherwise for a variety of reasons and peons such as myself know it is rarely that simple. Case in point, our team uses Jira, but Jira is not great at.. capturing efforts that are umm.. less code oriented. In fact, there are times when it is genuinely better to leave some details out for considerations that may simply not be part of coding considerations.
In other words, automation assumes proper capture of the entirety of the task, but, I have seldom seen it capturing anything but simple workflows well.
I agree with that, and that’s why it’s better to ask an AI and improve your prompt, instead of hiring a human that will disappear and you will loose all institutional knowledge
The risk of hiring a hunan is easy enough to manage. Ensure that the process is documented and new hires are trained. Any disturbance by someone leavingg is then smoothed out in the long term.
Can you show us how it’s better to use an AI to ensure steadiness over a long period of time?
You only have as much institutional knowledge as you're willing to cultivate and be liable for. Many companies already don't give a shit about institutional knowledge, indicated by how little they're willing to invest in keeping a strong team together, caused in-part by long-standing toxic incentive structures.
Ask an AI to solve a problem and it may do that, but if you don't understand why or how it works, or what to do with the information in order to keep it useful for even the medium term, then all you've done is taken away the opportunity for someone else to be responsible for something you shouldn't be.
It's not necessarily a mystery how to make good food. You can ask an AI how to make good food, follow the instructions, and you're off to the races. The question then is whether you want to be in that race.
Would you have gone to chef school? Would you work in a kitchen? Are you willing to deal with customers, or risk RSI from so many repeated kitchen movements? Are you willing to practice and be tested?
If the answer to any of those is no, then get the hell out of that kitchen and let the people who have more grit than you do their job. Do what you can to make it easier for you to pay them consistently and well on the back-end.
Yes when the sole purpose is to remove the livelihood of people in an attempt to make short term gains for selfish short term reasons....AI is a weapon when you have corporate stooge lackies who have nothing but animous towards fellow humans who dare to work...and try to live. If AI was beneficial, no one would profitize it....but lbr...you know that...
If AI is not beneficial, then those humans could be re-hired soon.
Big companies are always doing bad things, but not because they use AI, because they have legal protections which prevents small companies (which could be anyone like you and me) to compete. The same small companies who could also benefit from using AI.
Depends on the scale and the technology. If the answer is "all of white collar workers" then I would argue it's very toxic. (I don't think it can do that, but it's hard not to get the impression that it's absolutely the goal). I haven't really heard of a stable society with 50% unemployment and zero social safety net.
I don't think anyone ever really believed it would replace ordinary jobs. That angle was meant to appeal to emotion and distract the public from the shady deals and big defense spending.
Think about all the security clearances no longer required to aggregate big data into intelligence reports. The conditions and incentives for LLMs seem almost laser focused on replacing those particular jobs.
It wasn't but ~20 years ago that people were concerned about Google slurping up all the world's data into spying programs. Now that the hardest part to hide is happening, people have forgotten or assumed it already had. Many other smaller and far less capable businesses have come and gone and taken tiny bits of blame until the public was satisfied they knew who the "real" scapegoats were. What they really had were overcomplicated theories built on a nebulous cloud of debatable evidence that led nowhere. This is how it succeeds in plain sight every time.
Clearly not what is being said. If you read dehumanizing your workers and equate it with automating a job, then you're already well into the feeling that humans are fungible pawns to be disposed of, no?
Instead, you can and probably should see technology as augmenting you and your coworkers.
I don’t think humans workers should be cogs in the machine, but from my experience unfortunately that’s how people want to be treated. One simple explanation is that there is no freedom / creativity without responsibility, and the latter is extremely expensive in brain resources
Automating a stamp mill that fed 50 families does not obviously correlate with human progress. I'm sure it's nice for an auto manufacturer's bottom line though.
