AI is being pushed forcefully on K-12 teachers and the effect education quality is horrible. Some teachers, including my cousin, refuse to use the AI tools but most don't. The result is that my 6th & 8th grade siblings mostly bring home assignments that are nonsensical, obviously AI-generated bullshit.
I'm infuriated to see these capable kids wasting their time working on slop a human never bothered to review before assigning and will probably never bother to grade.
Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.
Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.
A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.
So you may mean well but a comment repeating the (debatable) negative impacts of rent control really comes off as silly in a thread about the realpage cartel (price fixing is worse than rent control in every way) and hopes of home ownership (demand for primary i.e. non-investment homes is unaffected or increased by rent control).
To add to other comments, gun violence has a massive mental health component for which preventative treatment can save many lives. Of course it warrants study!
And given the well-documented copycat-killer phenomenon, modeling it similarly to an epidemic is very reasonable.
This is an important topic. I wonder what it is that makes duopoly so prevalent in tech e.g. Apple vs Google for mobile, Apple vs Microsoft for desktop, Uber vs Lyft for ride sharing.
As for the linked article, it reads too much like AI slop for me to be bothered to analyze any of its specific points. If it's not AI, someone please correct me.
Not just toothless, but also focusing on the wrong thing. Our antitrust laws haven't kept up with tech. They are still largely focused on consumer harm, which doesn't apply well when huge tech companies can offer stuff for free at a loss to snuff out any potential competition.
Instead we need antitrust legislation to look at unfairly favoring one's own service, attack bundling, and prohibit exclusionary practices/blocking access to protocols (Private APIs, basically Apple).
To use Apple as an example, we could legally mandate they provide APIs for third parties to access iMessage, AirDrop, SharePlay, etc. on their OSes so that third parties can offer accessories and services that compete on the same playing field as Apple's own accessories and services. Without mandating that openness, there can be no competitors. I can't make a smartwatch for iPhones and have it able to compete with the Apple Watch, Apple just simply gatekeeps and won't allow it - that should not be legal. Likewise for wireless headphones - no one else can make a set of wireless earbuds that can do device switching on Apple devices to the same level as AirPods, because Apple is gate keeping with proprietary tech.
The non anti-trust aspect of it with tech is mostly network effects. For mobile, the more users, the more apps, the more valuable that platform gets, starts to incur high switching costs, devs neglect or ignore any potential new entry into the market because it's not profitable to build for it, and that momentum is very difficult to overcome without regulatory action.
Ultimately the attitude of self-restraint called for in the article seems near-impossible: modern capitalism puts companies in a desperate race for dominance, and modern foreign policy puts countries in the same. From the penultimate paragraph:
"I think in all of this is implicit the idea of technological determinism, that productivity is power, and if you don't adapt you die. I reject this as an artifact of darwinism and materialism. The world is far more complex and full of grace than we think."
This argument is the one that either makes or breaks the article's feasibility and I fear the author is too optimistic.
What force of nature is it that can possibly hold its own against darwinism?
My gut is this comes down to lack of real antitrust enforcement. If your customers have no choice but to come crawling back to you then why treat them well?
One is, you want a phone with drivers in the kernel tree so you can keep putting the latest version of vanilla Android on it without relying on the OEM. Except the market is too concentrated and then nobody makes that. Competition fixes this.
The other is, if you give people the choice between a $200 plane ticket with two checked bags and lots of leg room and a $170 plane ticket where it's standing room only and you can't check bags because the airline is reselling the cargo area of the plane to UPS, customers pick the second one. And then a competitive market provides you with that option which people choose and then complain about it even though the alternative is available. Choosing differently fixes this.
Everyone loves to complain about flying but generally all search by lowest price sort, click the first one. Flying is quite cheap in inflation adjusted dollars and customers could be a bit more selective, but are not.
If you'd be so kind as to share, I'm very interested in any common threads you may see in the people who ultimately crash back down. I grew up in pretty extreme poverty, got a big break of sorts, and I do my best to avoid ending up back where I came from.
Well, in my case, I’m dealing with recovering drug addicts.
With addicts, the formula is pretty simple. You relapse into using (including alcohol), you crash and burn. Often, in spectacular fashion.
When recovering, the organization I work with, has tools that give an unfair advantage in the Game of Life. Keep on the path, and things can go amazingly well. Stray off, though, and there’s hell to pay.
I’m not especially comfortable, saying much more, in public. It’s a very sensitive and controversial topic, and folks tend to get a bit … extreme … when discussing it.
Their routers only have this feature because the internet providers who sell those routers pay for bandwidth themselves lol. If residential internet plans sold on a pay-per-byte basis you can bet routers’d still ship with non-unique passwords.
Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:
1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.
2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.
3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.
Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.
I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.
Almost 80 years has passed, some details get lost, but it is important to keep things like that alive in our consciousnesses. Even if you didn't to justice to those stories, I still read them with attention. Thanks for them!
I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut after some of these conversations. It was like history had come alive right before my eyes.
I remember having a few sleepless nights just processing the things I had been told.
I remember almost throwing up once (the night after the story about the trains). I just couldn’t believe the level of depravity was so easily able to exist with basically no questions asked.
I remember my naive younger self thinking about what I would have done had I been in their shoes. It didn’t take me long to realize that I probably wouldn’t have done much differently, mainly because their range of options were so limited (or at least perceived to be so, with detention, death, or “disappearing”being the consequence if you were wrong).
I also remember them talking about neighbors snitching on each other (probably to the gestapo, but it could have been another entity). Some neighbors with petty intentions would make up false claims about neighbors they didn’t like. This forced everyone to be on “perfect behavior”, and it sowed a lot of distrust in normally tight-knit communities. There was one story about a tattle-tale who had a come-uppance, but I can’t remember any of the details. I think that was the first time the word Schadenfreude came alive to me… it existed in that story on multiple levels.
The old quote, "first they came for ..." was written by a Nazi sympathizer -- until he was in jail by them. It's rooted in truth how it played out to him.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
And what of those who speak out against it because they find it belittling personally? What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits? Are we allowed to speak out and have differing opinions on DEI or will you compare us to National Socialism collaborators?
Do white people feel like tokens because the merit of other people isn’t considered?
DEI makes sure that everyone is part of the merit process.
It’s like how white people feel like Babe Ruth is an all time great, but say Josh Gibson isn’t because he played in the all black league. But playing in the all white league doesn’t count against you at all. No one considers them any less.
> What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits?
There were plenty of companies like Coinbase that ignored DEI initiatives and requested that employees leave "politics at the door" - and we all knew what kind of politics they meant. You could have voted with your feet.
I'm fully onboard with employees asking employees to be respectful to their colleagues regardless of gender, race, creed or color, that's just good for business.
I'm infuriated to see these capable kids wasting their time working on slop a human never bothered to review before assigning and will probably never bother to grade.