I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
> At every commit, you need handle the possibility of a serialization exception and retry the transaction.
Yeah, but it seems so strange to me. Imagine if a database simply executed all transactions serially. Then there would be no serialization anomalies (though it would be slow, yada yada). So it seems serializable isolation presents a facade of serial execution, but only like, half a facade. You have to deal with the leak in the abstraction yourself and it's surprising to everyone who hears about it for the first time. I wonder why this choice was made.
Huh? I know nothing about cars, but to me there's an obvious difference. If I saw the top car in the street, I'd say "wow that's nice"; while the bottom one just looks like a regular car. The top one looks like it went to the gym, the bottom one looks like it was puffed up through a straw. Idk if that justifies a 20x price difference, but that's my immediate reaction.
I'd like to see a "pimp my ride" that focused on making the bottom car look as nice as possible - new wheels, disc brake upgrade with colored calipers, some cleanup, I think it could look significantly better.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
There seems to be a "spot the LLM" game happening on HN in particular in which literally every damn linked post has a comment accusing it of being written by an AI. Do we not understand that definitionally every AI "tell" comes from humans? Hell, Sam Kriss's article complains about florid writing and then goes on to cite Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy as examples of writers who "pull the same cheap tricks" as AI and with all respect to Mr. Kriss I just can't even. The theme of this article veers dangerously close to "if you use a weird metaphor you're probably using an LLM because surely no human would ever write 'I'm literally the size of a dry martini.'" I'm sorry, Sam, but humans have written weird fucking shit for a very long time without LLMs.
And what "tells" are in this article, anyway? It reads very straightforwardly; it does not, in fact, have any weird metaphors. Em dashes are not actually a tell, but using the wrong characters for em dashes (the article uses " - ", e.g., space hyphen space) seems pretty human. Last but, I would argue not least, I am willing to give the author of an article about not wanting to program with LLMs the benefit of the doubt here. "The orphan-punching machine fills me with existential angst and dread, and the only way for me to communicate this to the audience is to let it punch a few orphans for me."
Now, if you'll excuse me, all this is making me need to be literally the size of a high-proof daiquiri.
I'm not sure. It might be a real person, just writing in an LLM-like hackneyed voice. Anyway here's three specific paragraphs from the post, each exhibiting that voice and the "rule of three":
> Throughout all of these experiences, and so many more than I have time to share, it was the human connection that made it special. The laughter that helped me get through a hard problem. The sleepless nights that reminded me I was not alone. The selflessness of others to get on stage or behind a camera and teach people they didn’t even know, often for little or no cost, just so that others would be enabled to build and have an influence.
> They don’t laugh with me when my code fails to compile after I swear “this is the one.” They don’t help me develop an understanding of my software, so that when someone says “how does this work” I can pour my heart out with passionate explanations. Most importantly, they don’t turn their head and smile and participate in the inexplicable elation of saying “we built this!”
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me. I miss taking what I learned from those struggles and sharing them back out as a blog post or presentation, encouraging the next person to overcome the same challenge.
Whoa there. What's wrong with "undercutting labor markets"? Last I heard, when a profession (e.g. doctors) decides to limit the number of practicioners in order to charge a higher price to the public, that's a bad thing. It benefits the people currently employed in that profession now, but it hurts others who wants to join, and it hurts the public who wants to get the service (e.g. healthcare). The sum of hurt is greater than the sum of help. Cartels are harmful; they don't stop being harmful just because there are borders involved.
I mean, it's one thing if you think immigrants commit more crimes or use more taxpayer money. These are both false, but at least the argument could hypothetically work. But if you say that even perfectly law-abiding, non-welfare-using, good-work-performing hypothetical immigrants shouldn't be allowed in because they would "undercut labor markets", that's plain nonsense. Such nice hypothetical immigrants should be invited in large numbers and everyone would win from it.
If someone has no specials skills beyond what a current citizen college grad has, why is there a need for that individual to have an H1 or related visa? Many visas get issued to people that take the equivalent of a University of Phoenix degree.
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