I suspect religion is just a front. There are so many contradictions that suddenly make sense when you start thinking of it as a proxy for ethnic groups.
Historically, embracing a "persuasion" has been part of strategies in games of power - as in, "you are different from us so you cannot govern us".
In the context of this submission: yes, again there can be suspicions of "partitic" actions ("see, we are defending our base").
Which, if this is the case, amounts to blasphemy (again as per my original introduction, then flagged).
(And of course, with regard to the more times expressed relevance of this submission, it raises a question of "and where will this "defence" stop, also considering that we are creating pseudo-mind software?")
This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.
Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.
And maybe even become manager in some relatively small number of years. And then move to some other industry. Not that most of them do, but there is at least some career progression.
Managers at McDonalds can make $50-70K/yr. There is job security, benefits and opportunities for career advancement. Plenty of people start at the very bottom of the ladder flipping burgers and make it all the way to corporate. It's a tired meme that "McDonalds jobs are meant for teenagers". These are all incredibly in-demand jobs. And plenty of fast food chains pay significantly more, sometimes including benefits like college tuition reimbursement.
Not to mention casual employees at least get some sort of social aspect from their work life. (A slight variation on the networking you mentioned.) Most of my friends, I have through past work environments like shared offices, etc. That would be near-impossible as a gig worker.
Except when it isn't, like Peter Cancro of Jersey Mikes, who started making sandwiches and then bought it in 1975, and in 2024 sold it to Blackrock for $8B.
People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
I've heard professors call ML a form of applied statistics, and I think it's fair to call ML a subfield of statistics that deals with automatically generating statistical models with computers.
All large and successful companies head in this direction. You get a few killer products, the stakes become really high, and now you spend more time making sure the cash keeps flowing instead of trying to do something radically new. People talk about startup mentality within a company, but I think that's nearly impossible since you need leadership's attention to get things moving, but there's only so much attention the CEO of a large company can give, and only so much they're willing to delegate. I bet Google spends more time worrying about how to avoid antitrust and complying with regulation than trying to build something radically different. The one exception is AI, but ultimately that's because it threatens their cash cow.
Yeah when looking at games like Alyx it seems like the vision isn't too far off. Personally I don't mind the RTX version as I always found hl2 to be depressingly boring to look at.
Tabloid is a form factor for a newspaper - roughly defined as 'half of a broadsheet' - and not directly related to the content of the publication. It got a bad reputation because lots of trashy publications are published in this form factor but this is not its defining characteristic.
Aside from that Wikipedia is not a good source to decide whether a publication is to be trusted due to its heavy political bias. The New York Post has a conservative bias while (English-language) Wikipedia has a heavy 'progressive´ bias as is reflected by its list of what they consider to be 'reliable/perennial sources' [1] which closely resembles a political litmus test.
When you say 'good reputation' I assume you mean 'serious general news' papers?
UK: The Independent, The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian
NL: Het Parool, Trouw, NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, de Telegraaf, Reformatorisch Dagblad and many others (most of them owned by DPG)
DK: Berlingske Tidende
SE: Dagens Industri, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet and many others
There are many others, take your pick. As said these are newspapers published in tabloid format, not 'tabloid newspapers' publishing celebrity gossip and other trash although some of them do also venture in that direction on occasion.
Social media should never have entered the mainstream. Serious people like politicians should not be on Twitter. You should not be posting about your work drama on Facebook. Bluesky is not fundamentally better than either of those.
Yeah I frequently discuss difficult system design or other engineering problems with AI. I don't copy-paste it as my own thoughts, but use it as a way to brainstorm solutions. It's no different from discussing it with a colleague that has a very different brain from me. The tech secretary's use of AI seems perfectly appropriate.
I've found it very useful with organisational problems too. I had a complex issue to work through recently and tried working with ChatGPT, Claude and Grok 3 to optimise letters to some of the people involved to try to get things solved in the way I felt was fairest for all involved (anonymised, of course, with no memory on ChatGPT). One neat trick was to export the letter from one chat, then to start a fresh one, say that I am <role of recipient> and provide the letter and ask what it thinks -- basically red-teaming it.
The process of doing that clarified my thoughts and arguments so much that I never wound up having to send them -- I'd already made the right points on Slack and in meetings, and a compromise was achieved.
Like how engineers claim they are not losing skills because they are using programming tool assistants, I think there is an over-confidence thing at play here, where the user of an AI assistant doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they are also being shaped by it.
You are still being subtly influenced by something, that’s the whole issue at play here. OpenAI has incredible power in influencing the subconscious of so many people, and I think thats the thing to question here. I am not entirely against it, but we need to be honest with ourselves with how malleable our minds are and influenced we are by what we consume.
Do you lose skills when discussing things with colleagues? What if you find the answer in a book? Sure if you're just having someone else do your work or using an equation without understanding it you'll lose skills, but nothing suggests that AI is essentially worse than either of those. The government official asking for ideas about how they might improve ai adoption in the UK is a perfect example of a good usage. They are actively engaging with the AI, not having it write their policy.
Concerns about bias are bikeshedding. I am much more concerned about the systemic bias of race than I am about OpenAI trying to psyop people(I'm not concerned about race).
The only really reliable use I discovered for AI so far is rubber-ducking.
As you dig down it's often so hilariously useless it sparks my decaying intelligence to offer up a gem. Less fruitful than talking to a Junior Engineer but more useful than a physical rubber duck.
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