I like the implication that being "trans-skeptical" is "non-progressive" and therefore to be a progressive you have to buy into the ideology without questioning anything. That does align with my current views of where progressive ideology is headed
I think the bulk of the pro-trans movement would consider themselves progressive. I think that the bulk of progressives would consider themselves pro-trans.
I don't consider myself a progressive for just this reason. I would be considered a TERF by the trans community, not because I think trans people don't exist or arent worth of love, employment, and respect, but rather because there are some hot issues (bathroom access, sports access, how to handle children permanently transitioning, replacing cisgendered terminology in medical textbooks) that I believe merit more study or nuanced approaches.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the question of who has the right to define what labels, and I think most progressives would not call you a progressive if you don't 100% accept trans rights. Of course, this demands lockstep ideological behavior, which is rarely a good thing for long. Could you be progressive on some issues and not others? Certainly! But which mix defines you as "progressive" or not is not up to me.
I had to look that up. I'm I out of touch with the times by not knowing such acronyms? I am standing here at the station minding my business and Overton Express is passing by at 60 mph. "TERF" seem to describe most progressives. But I think I lag the avant guard conscious by 10 years of something.
But anyhow, I would say NYT is very much not left nor progressive. Maybe on some tangential culture issues. It is a centre corporate newspaper.
Honestly yes. I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance
> I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance
The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off. I don’t mean anything about your company, which could be great or terrible, I have no idea. But I would expect the best performers to get new positions quickly through their networks and connections. You would not see these people replying to random offers, but it does not mean that they were not high-performers who were laid off.
> The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off.
I suspect this to be very likely the case but I don't think it changes anything here. If we laid off people that were high performers and they got taken up in the job market quickly that means things are still healthy and we are still giving jobs to people that deserve jobs. A net neutral effect on the system as a whole.
The stragglers that can't find new jobs because they were laid off for low performance AND also are low performing interviewers are not useful to the system. Now they just kind of eat up some interviewing productivity but thats probably a net-positive for the entire job market as a whole.
Not really. Nobody expected China to produce as much solar power as it does now. What makes you think we know how much renewable energy we will produce in 2040?
The growth in renewables can not meet their demands, fusion is a moonshot that probably will not happen, nuclear takes too long to build. Where will the energy come from if not fossil fuels?
Its sad for me to watch such comments.. Really. People always just focus on one particular issue/problem and try to solve it ignoring anything else. Open your eyes and look a bit broader view. Energy is NOT the only problem. Waste is another very serious one, usually ommited because.. Lets dump it to some 3th world countries and issue is gone right? Nope...
One should always evaluate why they feel such emotions. Is it because you want to or have a tendency towards doom/gloom?
> Energy is NOT the only problem. Waste is another very serious one
That's called moving the goal post. If you want to talk about waste from renewables you're more than welcome to but don't call us myopic for understanding that you can limit the scope of the discussion so that we are focused on the topic at hand.
There's always a group that's a step ahead ready to complain about the next goalpost.
First it's that we can't make enough renewable energy, then it's too expensive, then it's that we produce some amount of waste to create the renewable energy, then it's that we'll have so much energy we can't store it all, then it's that renewable energy is not public or free. At every step there's some issue that people like you want to point to as if to say we should just sit where we are born idle and do nothing, change nothing because it's not perfect or there are consequences.
People are burned by crypto, metaverse, web3, and all the other stuff the tech industry came out with over the last few years that crashed and burned. Optimism is great and underrated, but you can't sum up the same enthusiasm for everything.
And this is coming from someone thoroughly bullish on AI!
I think there's a distinction here because there's very tangible output from gen AI (content) and we can see it getting better, more advanced, more capable, and more realistic.
The applications are obvious: film making, content creation, teaching, etc. This is in contrast to crypto which was/is quite abstract (as is money in the first place) and the metaverse which required investing hundreds of dollars in specialized hardware.
In contrast, our world is surrounded by visual content so the applications and utility of gen AI seems far more obvious for the layperson.
And what we do see is terrible; bland art, more spam and political astroturfing than ever in human history, bad code, and ignorant lessons, all to the tune of a PR campaign to shift the Overton window towards praising incompetence and denigrating hard work.
The only real accomplishments of LLMs were how good the proposed use-cases sound on paper under competent implementation, and a theoretical solution to unstructured data parsing that's still too heavy to be worth a tiny bump in performance.
Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? We both know it won't benefit you and me, our role is merely transitory in bootstrapping their self-improvement under the guise of a paid product, nor had the relationship between us and these tools been in any shape collaborative in the first place.
This fantasy targets the owner class, which can finally dream of labor decoupled from the laborer, the work simply costing no more than the price of electricity, all without the demands for livable compensation or following best practice. Even if the LLMs gained above-human performance in all domains of knowledge shortly followed by institution of a universal basic income, their invention will still have only been a force of stagnation, learned intellectual helpless, and overconsumption.
Ironically, all of this means that we're not at the apex and there's still a long ways to go both in terms of algorithms and the hardware to run them.
> Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor?
Whether we want to or not, it's the apparent path that will unfold; there's no putting AI back into the box. The race is already on.
Sure, in the way that technically this is a computable problem, but maybe not a simple one. Any exponential in the real world is a sigmoid and given all major AI labs, having spent years and incomprehensible sums of cache, have arrived at about GPT-4 performance, including OpenAI's latest release being a smaller model, should tell us something. Be the limiting factor corpus size, model parameters, or an architectural defect, we're clearly loosing momentum, at least until it's to be diagnosed and solved. Deferring to hypothetical futures without meeting the burden of evidence seems ill-advised, especially when it comes to incompetent use today.
> there's no putting AI back into the box
There's also no complete undoing of an oil spill, nor the practical possibility of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The weights are public, the corps is as well, as much as it had broken the open web to gather it, the architecture is known, ergo today's open-weight models are the baseline of capability for all future models. Still, seeing that LLMs form a natural monopoly given the required compute power to enter the field, we can enforce policies like mandatory statistical fingerprinting on all outputs of proprietary models beyond a certain size. LLM detection is also getting quite good; my hope is that adversarial fine-tuning will work out like Bayesian poisoning for email spammers, only giving the discriminator new stable patterns to look for. We as consumers do have power, however small and unconcentrated, to vote with our wallets, which a study posted here shown many are beginning to do [0]. The copyright question also gives quite a nice kill switch if our society decides this whole industry isn't that beneficial, removing the commercial incentive for training new models while providing some for detection.
There's great value from transformer networks, such as state-of-the-art speech recognition, that will make its way into consumer products and will be here to stay. As for the FADs like useless chatbots in every product, that may come under question.
For the first the big difference between genAI hallucinations and people imo is that you can meaningfully reason with a person, address where they may be getting incorrect information, and assuming they're willing get them to do better in the future. None of that is really possible with things like ChatGPT at the moment. You can't teach it anything you have to wait for a new version. You can give some preambles that get it to work a little better, thinking logically or showing step by step, but it still can't count the number of Rs in strawberry.
The r's in strawberry thing is an artifact of tokenization. Ask it to spell it out with dashes between the letters or something first and it'll do fine.
It's all relative of course. But keep on mind that 700 hours is about 4.5 months of full time work. I sure have had epics lasting much longer than that. And the "concert" is just shipping/launching whole I'm already working on the next epic. Maybe later on we bug fix, but we never truly get to "own" a feature the way a musician owns a song and gets to re-perform it in their repertoire.
I'm not really trying to establish which is harder or easier. Just that the pipelines and layoffs differ immensely.
Resting ears. Ear training. Doing your scales. Training your taste. (re)learning old/new tech/tools/instrument/history/theory of music. (re)listening to known/new music from separate styles/periods/cultures. Listening to artists you work for/with. Training/mentoring others.
It killed it for me also, and really gaming in general.
If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.
Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.
Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.
On one hand, open source thrives in a very well connected computer world, on the other hand, the fact that programs can phone home and update themselves every day has redefined software entirely, and not always in a good way. We are making much less robust software today. Both because it relies on connectivity, and because we can ship it first and fix it later.
That's not really a key problem and not how insurance companies evaluate cost/benefit. We overall want a healthier population and if you think hard enough about it, you lose some subscribers and gain some subscribers so it's a win win for all health insurance companies.
My understanding is that insurance companies have fixed profit margins by law— essentially a cost plus model (just like California power companies). So Why don't health insurers wan't the least healthy and most expensive general population in the long run?
That's not accurate. The Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) created by the ACA is 80% of revenue collected must be spent paying benefits. So, 20% of revenue goes towards all operational expenses and profits. If they go over that ratio, they need to refund to policy holders.
So maximize medical costs and minimize opex for best returns.
At least opex is in the calculation, California utilities don't even have that. It goes a long way to explaining why I pay 50c/kwh in sf (CA private) vs 15c in Sacramento (municipal) or Nevada (private without cost+)
I think my larger point, that jacking up premiums increases revenue, thus increasing the opex/profit pool (regardless of the percentages) is a perverse incentive to jack up premiums as much as possible
As in a 3-5 year (which is about what I've seen with ACA premiums) doubling of premiums, thus doubling the potential profit pool without increasing opex in any way. In fact, the use of third parties to provide "pre-approval" for an increasing number of drugs, tests and procedures reduces opex, leaving more of that 20% for profits.
In fact, my insurer has consistently raised premiums while squeezing providers who are now charging separate fees (meaning additional co-pays for me) for stuff that was once included in a single fee (one example is charging an "outpatient facilities fee" in addition to the copay for seeing a doctor. Increasing my costs, while the insurance company can just shrug and say, "that's not covered, suck it up!"
Meanwhile, doctors (especially GPs) are over-scheduled (my GP is scheduled to see every patient in 20 minutes or less), allowing the practices to charge for seeing more patients -- increasing their profits -- at the expense of patient health.
And heaven forfend having multiple related issues which require more than one specialty -- you're just shunted from specialist to specialist without much (if any) communication and a shrug if something unrelated to the specialist's area comes up.
The point is that the whole industry is fraught with perverse incentives that drive up costs, reduce the quality of care and a laser focus on the wrong stuff (i.e., services provided vs. holistic health outcomes).
It's disgusting and harms people. You'd think that by now we'd have decent healthcare. But the perverse incentives pushing toward financialization of, well, pretty much everything medically related, are actually impacting the average lifespans of Americans.
While I agree there's still some perverse incentives and I'm largely a pro-universal healthcare (or at least public option) kind of person, they can't just jack up premiums and thus increase their profits. They'd have to also increase benefit payouts if they're near the cap. And FWIW, its generally a good thing for them to reduce opex, so long as quality doesn't suffer (although it often does go hand in hand in practice).
One could point out though, it kind of incentivizes them to no longer negotiate prices as hard. This makes benefits more expensive, growing the total size of their 20%.
But on the other hand, pointing out the idea of holistic health outcomes, increasing benefit payouts to those kind of processes is something incentivized by this rule. Adding a lot of these more "fringe" holistic health benefits, like telehealth nutritionists gym membership subsidies and what not, also grows the benefit payout side and then lets them take more total profit. But there's no free lunch here, those benefits are largely coming from the premiums being collected.
Also, a lot of these insurers don't even end up getting any of that 20% some years. The first few years after the ACA pretty much every insurance company had some big losses. It has been a while since I looked at the industry, but they're not always making massive money margin-wise.
Don't take my comment as me endorsing the current system. Its dumb and broken and I hate it.
>they can't just jack up premiums and thus increase their profits. They'd have to also increase benefit payouts if they're near the cap.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but other things being equal, just increasing premiums allows for a larger opex/profit pool.
20% of $100 is $20 and 20% of $200 is $40. Yes, they'd still need to spend (using my made-up numbers) $160 instead of $80 on care/benefits, but the profit pool still increases -- a perverse incentive to raise premiums.
>One could point out though, it kind of incentivizes them to no longer negotiate prices as hard. This makes benefits more expensive, growing the total size of their 20%.
Absolutely. That points up the perverse incentive to raise premiums and highlights the lack of incentive to reduce costs.
>But on the other hand, pointing out the idea of holistic health outcomes, increasing benefit payouts to those kind of processes is something incentivized by this rule. Adding a lot of these more "fringe" holistic health benefits, like telehealth nutritionists gym membership subsidies and what not, also grows the benefit payout side and then lets them take more total profit. But there's no free lunch here, those benefits are largely coming from the premiums being collected.
I guess I should have been more specific when using the word "holistic." I meant it in the sense of treating the whole person (with a focus on the outcome of such treatment) rather than just specific symptoms. I wasn't talking (or even thinking) about nutritionists and gym memberships and stuff like that. Those aren't bad ideas, but are geared toward healthy people.
Those with specific conditions (e.g., vascular disease, cancer, hepatitis, HIV, etc.) manifest with other issues that, while they are exacerbated by a specific condition, aren't successfully treated by addressing that condition(s). Addressing ancillary issues (which may be at least as, if not more, debilitating than the condition one may be treated for by any particular specialist) along with the "primary" issue in a holistic (rather than specific treatment for specific issues while ignoring other issues -- which is one of the perverse incentives of paying by the procedure rather than the outcome) fashion.
I won't get into details here, but recent events in my own life have pointed up how fractured medical care is and how difficult it is to navigate (especially when your GP is allotted 15-20 minutes with you every six months or so) side-effects of various treatments/procedures/drugs that have specialists shrugging their shoulders and saying, "that's not my specialty. I did my job. If you're not recovering/getting healthy, that's not my problem. Go see someone else."
There are no incentives for medical practices to provide comprehensive management of health issues because the only person who is (theoretically) paid to do so, isn't given the time or the resources to do so. Everyone else just wants to do their specialist thing and walk away.
That's the wrong way to do medicine.
My apologies if I wasn't clear about that in my previous comment.
>Also, a lot of these insurers don't even end up getting any of that 20% some years. The first few years after the ACA pretty much every insurance company had some big losses. It has been a while since I looked at the industry, but they're not always making massive money margin-wise.
That's absolutely correct. In fact, most insurers (at least in my area, a large, dense, urban area) have left the ACA market and those that are left struggle to maintain their viability -- mostly by screwing over their customers.
So yeah. I mostly agree with you. But that doesn't help me or the million of others who pay exorbitant premiums for mediocre medical care.
I'm pretty angry about it, but short of moving somewhere with universal health care, I'm not sure how to address that.
> Yes, they'd still need to spend (using my made-up numbers) $160 instead of $80 on care/benefits, but the profit pool still increases -- a perverse incentive to raise premiums.
So they're still not just increasing profit by jacking up premiums, they have to actually find another $80 of benefits to pay out. If subscribers don't have those costs, they can't just increase premiums. If they raise prices to $200 but only end up with $90 of benefits to spend they have to cut a refund.
>So they're still not just increasing profit by jacking up premiums, they have to actually find another $80 of benefits to pay out. If subscribers don't have those costs, they can't just increase premiums. If they raise prices to $200 but only end up with $90 of benefits to spend they have to cut a refund.
While that's true, such a situation isn't very common[0].
Only a small percentage of people receive rebates, and those that do don't necessarily get much in the way of a rebate
It's anecdata, but my premiums have nearly doubled in the past four years, with no additions to coverage (in fact, my insurer informed me that while my premiums were going up by 15% in 2024, I would receive less coverage than in 2023. The only reason I maintained my coverage with them is because I have an ongoing issue and I'd prefer not to be forced to change providers until the issue has been fully addressed.
So yes, just raising premiums doesn't guarantee more profit, but it certainly enables it and, at least in my case (which, again is just anecdata) means higher premiums and less coverage. Something doesn't seem right here.
And that something is how we've implemented healthcare in the US.
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