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Is that true? I’m not so sure. In the 1950s I could have been optimistic that asbestos won’t give people cancer.

“Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to make” -also Elon Mush probably


Those people are generally for higher taxes on the rich. Tariff are a flat tax that dis-proportionally affects the poor.

Every tax ever implemented by government has been initially sold as a tax on the rich. The people voting for it assume they will never be taxed because they aren't currently rich. But, there is never enough of other peoples money to spend. So, taxes expand and/or increase to include more people.

The original income tax was sold as 1% on mid income and 2% on high income. At the time more than half the country was not going to pay any tax.


Maybe because the rich consistently lobby and weasel their way out of paying their fair share so the burden on everyone else continues to rise?

Or, no amount of money is ever enough for government and taxing income is a dumb value to collect revenue.

Southern states supported an income tax because they believed it would make it possible to collect revenue for indigent people. Exactly opposite of "taxes the rich".


More than half the country still doesn't pay any (income) tax.

That is a bit of a lie. Getting a refund does not mean you didn't pay. Even getting more back than you actually paid does not mean you didn't pay. Money is taken from every paycheck. When you file your taxes the IRS decides what you get back.

Which is why the current administration and their (very rich) backers prefer tariffs to income taxes...

Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to play SimCity than the environment.

Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.


> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.

Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.


Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would go a long way towards leveling the playing field with carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil fuels.

We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?

> Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning

Urban planning of the SimCity sort isn't particularly difficult. The associated politics are the issue.


Hence the "or it may be nothing"...

Humanity in the past has acted to eradicate Polio through global vaccinations, fix the Y2K computer bug, allow the Ozone hole to repair by banning CFCs, form a United Nations to prevent WW3 among other things.

We are actively making noise about pulling out of groups like the UN/NATO.

We are actively undoing regulations to reduce pollutants while promoting "clean" coal.

We are actively undoing vaccinations policy.

We does not necessarily equal humanity at this time, but it sure feels like it if you are under the We administration.


That’s true. WTF happened to those competent people?

Install vim for Windows. I just use gvim as a notepad replacement. No plugins or anything required.

There's also good old edit... ;-)

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

Yeah, it's a re-creation of edit, but it's pretty great... also runs outside windows.


Wouldn’t it be awesome to live in a world where powerful people were held accountable for the shit they say?

Because it’s not a forgone conclusion that it’s going to happen in our lifetime.

We should probably not be making decisions based on the assumption that super intelligence is coming.

If it does come, nothing we do now really matters. If it doesn’t come and we cash a bunch of checks assuming it will, we are screwed.


The AI maximalist are really out in force in this thread.

But why? Even if you could have an AI do that it’s, if anything, a waste of cpu cycles. If you have a battle tested library that works and has been tested for trillions of request cycles why would you even want to write a new one that needs testing and maintenance? No matter how cheap code gen gets it doesn’t make sense. For something like a UI library, sure build something specific to your needs.

Libraries are really built for human beings, not super intelligent machines. ORMs are built because I don’t like to and can’t write complex sql with every edge case.

Same with a lot of software, software libraries are designed to work with the deficiencies of the human mind.

There’s no reason to think ai needs these libraries in the same way


Even in your scenario LLMs could write super optimized libraries (not intended by for humans) to do common tasks and share the code between them.

I’m not saying the future can’t get to an ai just producing everything. I’m saying it’s just plain inefficient to keep solving the same problem over and over.


I agree with part of this (see my comment above). That said our limitations were also how we produced mathematics. Categorizing world into fixed concepts is valuable i'd say.

That's not really what he article said at all. More like "Singularity is when the computers are changing faster than humans can keep track of the changes."

The article didn't claim that humans were getting dumber, or that AI wasn't getting smarter.


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