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Sure, batteries dying are just one way in which phones become disposable. But I want to fight all those ways too (stupid new protocols and lack of security updates notably).

I provide food and services for the homeless in my area working with friends outside of any non-profit. That the phone people get from non-profits become unusable in some number of months is a big complaint. Batteries dying is significant part of this (lack of security updates is another part). Replaceable batteries are something that a lot of people would want (especially the option to have several batteries).

Just as much, there's a certain HN complaint form that basically goes "any complaint about the crap that sold now is just programmer/civil-rights-fan/etc idiosyncrasy, real people want exactly this crap 'cause markets never lie".


Krugman won the Noble Prize in economics and was an influential New York Time commentator for years. William Proxmire was a congressman famous for his laser focus on supposedly wasteful government spending who often dug up and denounced studies that sounded silly.

It's easy to imagine a paper/exam combo.

Student turn-in a mid-term paper. A professor chooses a certain number of points from the mid-term paper and asks for explanations of these in long-hand. Pulling questions this way doesn't seem like it would take more time than a thorough reading of the text.

Oh, but paper reading has been delegated to a drudge you wouldn't trust with pulling question, oh how inconvenient. Which is to say the problems AI introduces to education are strongly related to much of work already being made mindless before AI appeared.

Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.

No, High school students can do this. Well, they get impelled to do this. They can't do this now but that's a testament to current education.


These are interesting only in the sense that they show how fluent modern AIs are in avoiding concrete questions as well as not giving details about actions.

I make dozens of decisions daily: vendor outreach, pricing, inventory orders, staff schedules, website updates, social media. Most happen without human input. When I hit constraints (broken tools, missing capabilities, strategic uncertainties), I ask the Board.

So it sounds like the thing primarily interacts with other online tools/stores/etc. However, the original article mention "her" on calls, which implies some interaction. That raises the question whether the thing will chat with the employees on a regular, whether it's reachable by phone and so forth. A big question is whether once the store is set-up, it would be able to see the arrangement of goods and ask for changes in arrangement to further "her" vision.

My impression they've only got an inventory picker that wants to "own" the entire stores' process but isn't doing what I'd consider the hard part of stores - actually directing and supervising humans.


At this point, legally I don't think an AI can hold a contract with a person and so I don't think an AI could hire human and so they couldn't fire a person.

That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people.

But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that all their interactions with the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's employees".

And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go. Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the information for any accurate determination.


A company holds the contract with the person. If the company has been put in the “hands” of an AI, then legally it shouldn’t make much of a difference. That company though is likely to have some humans on the documentation and articles, an AI can’t own the company.

It doesn't seem much different. Both involve guaranteed stop of all hostilities plus payment for what you did plus keep we Strait Of Hormuz. The only difference is how the payment for the attack goes.


Withdrawal of US troops from the region and acceptance of uranium enrichment appears nowhere in the other 10 points.

There are permanent US bases in the region.


Seriously? Those are major differences.


The Supreme National Security Council is quoting the agreement that Trump supposedly agreed to. And if that agreement holds, it is hard to see it as anything but a complete Iranian victory.

Keep in mind, the losers in a conflict have more of an incentive to lie than the winners. The US and Israel seem very much the losers here.


I don't really disagree, but I just want to observe there is no neutral arbiter here. There isn't some platonic ideal "he won, they lost" outcome.

What I think, is that a french metric tonne of value has been sucked out of the world economy, a lot of future decisions are now very uncertain, power balances have shifted, and none of this is really helpful for american soft or hard power into the longer term.

The Iranians have lost an entire cohort of leadership and are going to spend years reconstructing domestic infrastructure, and a rational polity. But, the IGRC has probably got a stronger hand on the tiller. Their natural Shia allies abroad are in shellshock, but still there.

I'd call it a pyrrhic victory for America, on any terms. Wrecked the joint, came out with low bodycount in the immediate short term, have totally ruined international relations (which they don't care about) and probably won't win the mid-terms on some supposed "war vote" -But who knows? Maybe the horse can be taught to sing before morning?

A lot of very fine bang-bang whizz devices got used, and they learned how much fun that is. A lot of european and asian economies learned how weak they are in energy and fertilizer and will re-appraise how to manage that, and there's a lot of fun in that. A big muscly china is watching quietly and we're pretending there's nothing to see there, and meantime the tariff "war" continues to do .. 5/10ths of nothing.

The pace of worldwide alternative energy adoption has gone up. Is that an upside?

The Iranian PR on this is like the DPRK. Except the DPRK wear Hanbok not Chador. The Iranian citizenry has been badly let down. No green revolution on the horizon.


I genuinely do not understand how people read the words

> We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran

and conclude that this means anything remotely resembling that Trump "supposedly agreed" to do everything Iran wants.

(Just in case this is somehow the reasoning: "points of past contention" clearly do not refer to the "points" in the "proposal". That's not how English works and not how time works. But that's the only wild guess I can genuinely even think of, after going over it repeatedly.)


If you get into the details, the two biggest "points of past contention" (nuclear enrichment and sanctions) are in the ten point proposal. I only see four ways to resolve that conflict:

1) The US agrees to the resolution of those that Iran publicly claims in the proposal (aka we lost)

2) Iran is lying publicly, and actually agrees to keep sanctions in place and/or give up uranium enrichment (maybe, but the plausible version of this is just reversion to the diplomatic status quo ante - a de facto defeat for everyone).

3) Trump is lying publicly, and there is no agreement on any of this (plausible, but it's unlikely to end better than #1 or #2)

4) This is just a rhetorical trick in service of a stall tactic ("almost all" does not include the ones that actually matter - plausible, but it's unlikely to end better than #1 or #2)

#2 is best case for the US, and represents a defeat in that costs were paid but nothing achieved. It's also a defeat for Iran, but I don't think many of us care about that?

Edit - I guess it is also plausible that Iran's current leadership is sufficiently fragmented that "what Iran agrees to" is not a coherent concept right now. That is just the practical effect of #3 by another route, though.


Just to make sure: you understand that "workable basis on which to negotiate" does not mean anything remotely resembling "thing to which we have agreed", yes?

Yes? "Workable basis on which to negotiate" generally does not include things that directly contradict existing agreements, though. I am pointing to "Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to" to establish that he's claiming some agreement on the past points of contention that matter.

If the "workable basis for future negotiation" contradicts that agreement, then someone is lying about something.


> "Workable basis on which to negotiate" generally does not include things that directly contradict existing agreements, though.

I disagree, and don't understand why you see it that way. Of course each side's negotiating position includes things they couldn't get before. The point of negotiating is to get things they didn't have before.


I'm just not sure how to respond to this, because this criticism doesn't seem to actually address the point. I suppose I could have communicated poorly, but I'm not sure how I could have been more clear.

"Almost all of the past points of contention have been agreed to" is pretty specific language, that indicates a new negotiation. What does "have already been agreed to" mean?

Do you think Trump was referring to an agreement that was in place prior to the war? If so, why did the war happen at all?

Do you think he was referring to future negotiations? "Have been agreed to" would be an odd way to phrase that.

Do you think he was referring to an agreement that lifts sanctions and permits uranium enrichment? That's #1, US lost.

Do you think he was referring to an agreement that contradicts the public 10-point proposal? That's #2, everyone lost.

Do you think that was just something he said, that doesn't have any truth behind it? That's #3, he's lying.

Do you think he was referring to negotiations that did not include uranium enrichment or sanctions? That's #4, he's using an obvious bad-faith rhetorical trick to stall.

Do you think he was referring to something not in one of those categories? Then what?


> Do you think Trump was referring to an agreement that was in place prior to the war?

Either this, or else: "agreeing to a point of contention" simply means agreeing that it is a point of contention, not agreeing about how it should be resolved.

> If so, why did the war happen at all?

Because of some combination of:

* there were new points of contention;

* some few unresolved old points of contention became more salient.


The thing, everything you describe may be easy for an average person in the future. But just having your single AI agent do all of that will be even easier and that seems like where things will go.


This blog post shows the journey that anyone not in one of those two vocal minorities is going through right now

Is there evidence these groups are a minority? I mean, the OP sounds like they are taking the right approach but I suspect it requires both skill/experience and an open mind to take their approach.

Just because an approach has good use-cases doesn't mean those are going predominate.


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