It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.
Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.
A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.
This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.
I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.
Rest personal opinion.
I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.
Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.
> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments
Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.
Singapore also has
1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.
2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.
3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.
I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...
Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.
To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.
In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths.
Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.
The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.
Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.
But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.
Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.
The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.
Mens rea. Typing that into a word processor is obviously not using the false pretext to gain anything. Doing it to Claude could be construed as an attempt to gain information, which checks some boxes for fraud and impersonation of government officials.
For reference, I think this is one of the relevant sections of the USC (18 USC 912):
Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
IANAL but I can see interpretations where telling Claude you’re the FBI would qualify. It’s probably unlikely anyone is prosecuted for it, but there’s a chance
The reason this kind of impersonation is illegal is because people are more likely to feel compelled to comply with an official and get taken advantage of, as well to preserve the authority the position (if anyone could claim to be an official with no repercussions, the claim would lose its weight, since the claimant could easily be an impersonator). If you pretend to be a government official with an LLM, the LLM is not going to have its opinion of people claiming to be government officials tainted, nor does it have access to any sensitive information that's not available by other means, nor is it possible to cheat it out of something that rightfully belongs to it.
Additionally, mens rea refers to the cognition that one is doing something wrong. It's not at all clear that lying to a person and lying to a computer program are subjectively equivalent or even similar to the liar, and given the previous paragraph I'd argue they are not. Why would someone feel guilty about doing something that can't possibly have repercussions?
It really depends on how you define a software engineer. If you mean software engineers doing what we do today, the market probably won’t.
If you just mean “people who make software in any capacity”, it will probably grow (or has already grown) via product, marketing, etc folks making internal tools with AI (which may not work out, we’ll see).
Presuming we keep seeing LLM improvements, SWE will move up the stack like they did in the past. They used to work directly with hardware and software. Ops folks sprung up to do the hardware, and SWEs do basically all software using abstractions over hardware. This will be another step up where SWEs no longer work directly on software, but rather on the tooling that writes software which they hand over to marketing, HR, etc.
Again, presuming this all works out the way the AI folks plan.
It would also be nice to include a shaded area for the first standard deviation over a relevant period of time to get an idea of how far outside normal it is.
In my unhinged pipedreams, we’d have some sort of standard for conveying the data directly so users could use browser settings to decide how to display the data. There like a dozen people in the world that would use it, but they’d really really enjoy it I bet.
It's usually intentional so they're not going to show more information to reveal that their narrative is weak or wrong. It's up to the reader to think critically because journalists are constantly trying to fool them with true facts presented in a misleading way.
Readers are guilty too - they like to see wiggly lines wiggle. Nobody wants to see a graph that's just a horizontal line or shaded band. We want to peer harder at it to tease out any sort of signal that can tell our emotional brains "good" or "bad".
Does the computer running the agent have production DB credentials on it anywhere? If it does, the AI has access to the production DB.
This is part of why I'm bearish on the new hotness of "don't write tools, just write a Markdown skill and let the LLM write its own bash commands". It does work, for the most part, at the cost of it being entirely capable of changing its environment and executing arbitrary commands. Approvals exist, sure, but I've never seen anyone manually approve a command past like the 3rd permission dialog.
SWE's are expensive; median salary is $133k (not counting health insurance, payroll taxes, etc). If you can shave off an hour of dev time with $40 in LLM credits, that's $26.50 cheaper than having them do it without.
I'm not entirely convinced it works out that way so far, but that's the theory.
Trying to bring down LLM costs is sort of a double-edged sword, because the dev needs to be cutting LLM costs by more than what you're paying them. If it takes them a day to bring costs down by $1 an invocation, then it takes almost 2 years to recoup the salary costs. It's worse because LLMs currently change so much I wouldn't be confident that their solution won't be broken before the 2 year period. Will we still be tool calling in 2 years, or will that be something new? Will thinking still be a thing, or will it be superceded by something else? I don't think anyone knows, even the frontier providers.
Yeah, that's part of why I said I'm not entirely convinced. 1 hours vs 2 hours is an unrealistic example. I do still think it can make sense, but the extra actual productivity is probably more in the vein of "getting an extra hour on a 10 or 20 hour project".
Being the reserve currency props up our currency conversions because everyone wants USD to trade with. If we lose that, the value of the USD falls relative to other currencies (and especially relative to the new reserve currency). Our GDP would presumably be measured in whatever the new reserve currency is, and that alone would cause a GDP drop just due to unfavorable currency conversions.
Being the reserve currency also makes imports cheap but exports unappealingly expensive. Losing that means the inverse; imports are expensive and exports are more appealing internationally, but our economy is set up for cheap imports and not exporting much. It would take a while to realign to doing manufacturing for domestic supply and GDP via exports.
We desperately need some sort of anti-retaliation provision added to chargebacks and CFPB complaints. They get off saying they won't give it back because how willing are you to get banned from Anthropic? You're like 3 legitimate chargebacks with vibe-coded companies to be banned from all the frontier models.
Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative.
Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They are the same object to the Copyright Office because one produces the other, in the same way that converting an image to a PDF is still the same copyright.
LLMs don’t do that. The stuff coming in may not be copyrighted, and may not be copyrightable. The stuff that comes out is not a rote series of transformations, there are decisions being made. In common use, running a prompt 10 times might yield 10 meaningfully different results.
I’m dubious the outcome will be “any level of prompting is enough creativity”.
Possibly; I'm not going to hazard a guess on what the Supreme Court will decide the exact bar is. I just don't think it will be either extreme. "Nothing is copyrighted" is too damaging to the economy, "everything is copyrighted" has weird impacts on non-LLM copyrights that conflict with precedent.
I think this is sane washing their idea in the modern context of it having failed. I think at the time, they thought VR would be the next big thing and wanted to become the dominant player via first mover advantage.
The headsets don’t really make sense to me in the way you’re describing. Phones are omnipresent because it’s a thing you always just have on you. Headsets are large enough that it’s a conscious choice to bring it; they’re closer to a laptop than a phone.
Also, the web interface is like right there staring at them. Any device with a browser can access Facebook like that. Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t mess with that much without causing a huge scene and probably massive antitrust backlash.
I think headsets might work, but I think Meta trying to use their first mover advantage so hard so early backfired. Oculus, as a device, became less desirable after it required Facebook integration.
It's kind of like Microsoft with copilot - the idea about having an AI assistant that can help you use the computer is great. But it can't be from Microsoft because people don't trust them with that.
Interaction feels like the issue with headsets. You either need a fair bit of space for gesture controls, or you have to talk to yourself for voice control.
I think VR has more niche uses than the craze implied. It’s got some cool games, virtual screens for a desktop could be cool someday, but I don’t see a near future where they replace phones.
The risk/reward tradeoff of helmets is potentially dying, and we still had to make laws requiring people to wear them.
Glasses also have a pretty compelling reason to wear them.
I don't think VR has as compelling of a reason, at least so far. Even if it does, you need people to get far enough in to see that reason which is a hurdle when it involves a device they don't want to wear.
It’s premature to say that the idea failed; The flashy controversial “metaverse” angle where you can live your whole life on the Quest or whatever isn’t happening, but their investment into AR/VR has definitely started to show real payoff potential with their glasses.
They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).
Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.
I don’t mean that VR failed entirely, just that the metaverse as a concept is basically dead. VR will live on in the niches where it makes sense.
If you’re talking about the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I wouldn’t really call that a successor. There’s no AR or VR to them that I can tell; just glasses with speakers, a mic and a camera. It’s a neat product, but not a platform in the way VR was meant to be. They also have real competition. I do actually own a pair of the Bose headphone sunglasses, which are practically the same product without a camera (which I’m sure they could add if they wanted). Unless people suddenly care about the Meta AI integration, and again; Bose or someone else could add a phone companion app.
I was taking your comment to mean that the metaverse movement (as in the rebranding to Meta etc., rather than the specific concept itself) is dead, which apparently you did not mean so that’s on me.
They have two current Meta Ray Ban options, the “Gen 2” and the “Display”, the latter of which does have an AR component.
> the web interface is like right there staring at them.
True but the an app gives Facebook much more user data for targeting which dramatically increases revenue per ad. Persistent user data that's largely unconstrained by privacy safeguards is the holy grail. The mobile browsers are also controlled by Apple and Google, so despite the web being 'open', when one of them makes even minor changes to increase browser privacy defaults, it can have major impact on Facebook's revenue.
As someone who was there: nope. This isn't sanewashing.
Apple was directly (and IMO arguably illegally) shutting down Facebook teams and products by playing app store chicken on refusing to allow Facebook to publish updates on a week-to-week basis. Literally would throw down and refuse unless some features were blocked. It came to a head where Zuck literally called Tim Cook during a keynote to push it through.
They also literally had reverse-engineering teams cracking open the Facebook app on a regular basis, which we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection. There was a chicken-and-egg problem and they eventually developed facilities to automatically instrument private method invocations to comprehensively defeat clever static analysis circumvention workarounds.
Also, VR hasn't failed, but it's gone silent and coasted when investing in VR growth took the backseat to investing AI. They made a couple of bad bets in VR but a lot of good ones so it was warranted, but not exactly a failure.
> we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection.
Apple trying to block Facebook is different than Apple trying to prevent Facebook from violating App Store standards. There was a time where the Facebook app was practically malware with all the tricks it tried to pull to Hoover up data.
I don’t know in what world I would describe Metas VR as anything but a failure. There was a brief period where I knew a few people with Quests. Most used them for the novelty and dropped them, a few played games on them, and I don’t know anyone that still owns one. I’m deep in the gaming community and haven’t heard anyone mention a Quest in years. Steam VR is almost equally quiet other than occasional nostalgia.
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
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