Reminds me of this news story of footballer John Terry who's house was robbed because he posted a picture of him on holiday. The insurance company tried to use a 'reasonable care' clause of home insurance to deny his insurance claim.
FYI the source you posted never claimed that John Terry's insurance tried to deny the claim, only mentioning that "some" insurance companies warn of it. However even that claim is questionable, because it isn't even from an insurance company, it's from a content marketing piece by an insurance comparison website.
Wouldn’t that mean all celebrities are uninsurable? If politician/singer/athlete has a public away event, there is little they can do to obscure that fact.
We prescribe alcoholics with medicine to help them curb their alcohol intake, but if they do not learn the discipline to not drink then they can end up back where they started after getting off the medicine. But I don't think either drugs for alcoholism or obesity should be denied to anyone. However there are other tools to supplement with to help learning discipline.
>However there are other tools to supplement with to help learning discipline.
The current FDA guidelines support your assertion that GLP1s should be prescribed in addition to other tools to help people change their eating habits.
What the FDA does not prescribe is moralism, which is what “help learning discipline” tends to imply. If you didn’t intend to frame your argument in terms of moralism, you might consider a different word choice.
In English, we “instill discipline” in children. When we talk to and about adults, we talk about the confluence of factors that influence habits and help people change them. Discipline implies that an adult, who is otherwise fully functioning and subject to the demands of the world, is lacking an essential attribute. Whatever you might feel about this explanation, we already observe from science and medicine that “instilling discipline” on its own has not stalled the obesity epidemic.
And Trump said he knew nothing about project 2025 before the election. Yarvin has been close to Thiel for many years, is his advisor in some capacity, has invested in Yarvins companies, likely even friends. Vance worked for Thiel and his political career was bankrolled by Thiel. And you believe they barely know each other?
Is it plausible? yes. So far evidence directly from Yarvin contradicts this and there's no hard evidence pointing to them being good buddies so I'm willing to accept his account.
> "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.'"
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
> "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.'"
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
To contextualize that claim, I'd quote the article:
> "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.'"
In this context, three years ago, Vance was describing Yarvin as his "good friend" (when he was campaigning for a seat in the US Senate, which he won), while four months ago, Yarvin is saying he barely knows Vance. If you're suggesting that the apparent discrepancy is a result of strategic dishonesty for reputation preservation, that would mean that either:
1. Yarvin wants to distance himself from Vance because he fears reputational damage from being associated with the US Vice President. (But from other evidence, cited in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out, this seems implausible.)
2. Vance wanted to exaggerate his closeness to Moldbug in order to enhance his own reputation. This doesn't seem plausible either; it's implausible that more than 0.1% of the Ohio electorate had any idea who Moldbug was, and at the point that you're a plausible candidate for a US Senate seat, your reputation will no longer be enhanced by being associated with a little-known blogger.
A much more likely explanation is that Vance admires Moldbug and wants to encourage his followers to read him.
You've left out the fairly obvious possibility #3, which is "Yarvin fears reputational damage to Vance that might prevent Vance from helping him advance his ideology". This, after all, was Thiel's concern in the quoted exchange.
#2 gets a lot more plausible when you remember these folks often care more about the backing (especially $$$) of someone like Thiel than the regular public, too.
Pride and the opportunity to get your ego stroked makes people do dumb stuff all the time.
On the other hand, Yarvin may also be making the decision that any publicity will drive readers to him and net him more followers overall and that the risk of damage to Vance is less than the perceived benefit of new followers.
Goodness I hope to never buy house someone used to hack into a smart home. I don't want to inherit anyones bugs or try to understand their mental framework for setting things up.
If you are going to inherit something, it's certainly a better position that they were using something open like Home Assistant than if they were using a bunch of proprietary / cloud based things.
At least you have the capability of getting things into a working state without the original owner, which may be impossible otherwise.
Now of course the best case scenario is when the "smartness" is only additive to the home, and not required for it.
In my case, if Home Assistant isn't working, the house just works like a normal house with all the wall switches functining as you would expect.
If I ever sold the house, I would give the new owner the Home Assistant instance, disable all my automations, but also tell them that I'm not going to help them at all with supporting it. The most likely scenario is that they wouldn't want to use it or care about it, but at least the house works just fine without it.
My house’s automation is pretty much additive but recently I’ve started getting more and more annoyed at the smart light switches. I bought a hodgepodge of switches from different manufacturers. They all work but have different amounts of delay and none of them have the determinism of a dumb switch that physically changes positions.
Someday in the far future when someone buys my house, the small but noticeable differences in light switch behavior is going to drive them crazy. I did keep all the original switches for the next owner, if they are motivated to swap them back in.
Yeah I’ve been wondering what to do if I ever sell.
Unlike some others in this thread, the 350 devices I have don’t require too much maintenance (have to replace the odd light bulb, and I do some upgrades once a week), and work flawlessly most of the time. I also designed it so that it works without home assistant or any controller.
But what I am going to do - some of the zigbee lights are permanently fixed, but are on manual switches so I guess thats ok. But the irrigation system, some of the lighting systems which are switched automatically, the built in speakers and even the networking might be beneficial to stay.
Would probably have to do an audit and take a couple of days.
If I ever sell the house, I’m taking everything with me. Nothing I built is permanent to the house, so aside from having to paint over some 3M tape here or there, it should be fine.
I’d never buy a “smart house” though. I have to set up everything myself, that’s part of the fun.
I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.
The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent.
A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.
> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.
That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.
More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.
It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?
The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.
Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.
The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.
Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
I fully agree with you - the practice of price discrimination is illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act and Google should be penalized for violating this law if they have been found to do this. I am only trying to push against the notion that Google (or any company) should be broken up just because they are big. This is the nuance that makes these discussions important IMO
My position is basically that enormous market power is like a ticking time bomb. It's not going to work to try to patch over it with specific prohibitions like the one you mention, because big companies will always find loopholes, use their market power to exploit them, and use their wealth and "too big to fail" status to drag out any attempt to enforce the rules. It is an endless game of whack-a-mole that can never work. It's better to just limit the total power of companies to do anything; doing so will also limit their ability to do harm of any kind.
You have to explain why and how you are rejecting it.
The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.
And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).
Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true.
In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).
This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.
I think if I ate a lot of eggs, and egg cooker could be very handy.
If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.
I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).
But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
>I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).
Maybe they've got a big kitchen.
>advertising is not the right tool for discovering this
What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.
>advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative.
Customers know this. You're underrating how smart customers are.
>If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh? Of course advertisers wouldn't do such a thing. It would be terrible for brand equity.
> What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that speed is a major concern here. Even if it becomes harder to introduce new product categories, that would be a small price to pay for stopping the huge waste of money (and CO2) that advertising tries to induce.
Most likely, professional product review sites are a better solution, with a good enough legal framework to prevent them from becoming direct advertising or attack sites. Ultimately, what you need is an impartial expert trying a product and reporting their experience.
> You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh?
No, I just think systematically lying to people is a bad thing and should be legally discouraged. False advertising is a huge problem, even with laws that try to punish it.
And sure, maybe they wouldn't put those specific claims on every product, but you can bet that without false advertising laws, you'd see much wilder claims in every single ad than you do today.
It can't be that objective if there are multiple schools of thought. Getting two economists to agree on why what happened yesterday happened is hard enough, let alone getting them to agree on what we should do today to have a specific outcome tomorrow.
> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets
What does this mean?
> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?
There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?
I can certainly think of some, but that doesn't mean that removing Google would result in lower prices. It could be that replacing automation with manual work could even raise prices.
>getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent
That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.
Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?
> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.
And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.
> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.
No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.
Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.
I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.
Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.
* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.
* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].
Which freemail service isn't ad- or surveillance-supported?
> suggests that something vital has stalled
Why does it have to be a technology-driven limit? I dare say Google thinks that anyone with more than 15GB of email is a serious enough user to pay for it.
> 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later
The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.
It could also mean that you can't invest indefinite amount of storage to ever growing user base, if storage metrics would not improve indefinitely. There is a break down and 15GB cap is nothing comparing with Google Photos cut, which is a strong sign that storage is the problem even for behemoths.
Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.
Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.
Fair point. Maybe I'm too young and have bought into the narrative that Google was the first widely available and free email. Still I think though, the plethora of their other services widely available for free (maps, drive, sites, youtube) were extraordinary for the price, at least for me.
I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.
That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.
The data is not just used to manipulate you, but everyone like you. Also you are giving away data from everyone that contacts you. You are non consensually making that decision for everyone in your inbox (and, I suspect, many others too).
if you think a bit harder, you shouldn't be. the data on you isn't just used to manipulate your choices on the market, it also ends up being used to manipulate your choices as a citizen -- politically, socially. You might think you're above such psychological tactics (and perhaps you are, but many many people are not, and whether you believe the democrats accusations of electoral fraud in 2016 or the many accusations on both sides since, there is absolutely no doubt that the corporatization of the internet has played a giant part in the most repugnant aspects of american and world politics since 2016)
Democrats didn't say there was election fraud in 2016. It was that the Russian government had workers on social media posing as Americans supporting Trump's campaign, and that they also got access to thousands of DNC emails due to a spearphishing campaign targeting DNC employees.
What they are probably referring to is that the Clinton Campaign in one of the Rust belt states asked for a recount as "claiming election fraud." The votes were close and within the margin for the campaign to ask. They asked, it got recounted and Trump ended up with slightly more votes after the recount. Then that was it. You know, what normally happens. The Clinton Campaign did not send someone to go do a press conference outside of the Four Seasons landscaping to repeat over and over claims that were repeatingly found false in courts.
You’re not actually paying with attention—attention isn’t money. Google’s customers are paying for your attention and you are paying for more expensive products. All of the money in Google’s pockets comes from their customers and we all end up eating that cost as participants in the global market sooner or later.
This is a reductive view of the economy: one pays for something whenever one trades something of value to one’s counterparty to something that’s of value to oneself. In many cases, in fact, it’s preferable to do this sort of “bartering” to reduce the expenditure of money you might need for other things.
Finally, I have, in fact, benefitted personally from products that were advertised to me on the basis of user tracking data so a bit ambivalent about the anti-tracking argument.
Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.
Firefox existed before Mozilla's contracts with Google. Firefox was actually funded by AOL (to the tune of a couple million in sending off money when they shuttered Netscape) and Mitch Kapor (hundreds of thousands because he's a great guy who saw the potential) with some other donations from IBM, Oracle, and a few more big tech players.
No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.
> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.
People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.
Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.
And then...
> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
> Google Fi
> Google Fiber
> Google Pay
Yes, no one will notice.
> Google Groups
It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.
> Google OAuth
Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.
I didn't know that about Maps and Chrome. I did know Android was an acquisition, and that YouTube was, but in both cases I think Google's put in enough work not to dismiss them as Google projects.
almost no one ever paid for email, there were many free providers and people got accounts from their isp
google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed
you're acting like google invented ad supported online services
the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."
People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?
> "They are all FREE too, mind you."
No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.
You can't state with such certainty that all these things wouldn't have happened without google. For all we know there would be 20 free or cheap alternatives to each service if google hadn't outcompeted them all with subsidies from ad revenue.
Those service are certainly not free. Google doesn't offer them just to be nice: they make money from them. The costs to the consumer are hidden and indirect, but they are costs nonetheless.
YouTube is profitable though. If their Google ties were severed they could still be ad supported, but they'd be able to pen deals with different ad networks and platforms.
Further, if a student can get a diploma without work, then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the labor market will turn into noise.
If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?
I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
In a medieval guild, to be admitted as a master, an apprentice had to create a chef d'oevre, or masterpiece, so called for this reason.
In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.
A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.
I think software developers might be somewhat of an outlier. Industry wants good programmers but universities teach computer science which really should be called "computation science". Much of what we learn in university will hardly ever be used while many practical skills are at best learned as a side effect. Dijkstra favorite said that computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
So degrees have been a weak signal for a long time. Several of the best developers I've worked with had no CS degree at all. As a result we have interview processes that are baffling to people from other industries. Imagine a surgeon having to do interview surgery, or an accountant having to solve accounting puzzles. AFAIK we are very unusual in this regard and I think it's because degrees are such a weak indicator and the same is true for certificates in our industry.
> while many practical skills are at best learned as a side effect.
I strongly disagree, that’s the intent not a side effect.
It’s IMO a common misconception that early algorithm classes are just designed around learning algorithms. Instead basic algorithms are the simplest thing to turn abstract requirements into complex code. The overwhelming majority of what students learn are the actual tools of programming, debugging, etc while using the training wheels of a problem already broken up into bite sized steps.
Ramping up the complexity is then more about learning tradeoffs and refining those skills than writing an ever more efficient sorting algorithm or whatnot.
That is true, in the sense that the 100/200 level classes are covering programming basics in addition to whatever algorithmic theory is being presented. But beyond that that, programs really seem to differ pretty strongly on applied projects and software engineering practices (basic stuff like source control) and more theoretical/mathematical concepts. One type of capstone style class commonly seen is compiler design. To a certain extent, a good school will teach you how to learn, and give you enough of a background, class projects, internships, electives with applied options, that you get a well rounded education and can quickly ramp up in a more typical software organization after graduation. But as someone who has hired many new grads over the years, it always surprises me what sort of gaps exist. It rarely is about programming basics, and almost always about "software engineering" as a discipline.
My experience is graduates of schools focused on the more practical aspects tend to make better Jr developers on day one but then stagnate. Meanwhile graduates of the more theoretical programs people pick up those same practical skills on the job leaving them better prepared for more demanding assignments.
This then feeds into the common preference for CS degrees even if they may not actually be the best fit for the specific role.
Interesting. I did my undergraduate in Germany and my graduate in the US, so my experience might be unusual here and different from what you get in the US. My undergraduate algorithms classes in Germany and my advanced algorithms classes in the US involved zero actual coding. It was all pseudocode as you'd find in the Knuth books or in Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest.
And they were supported because they were useful labor. Even an unskilled, brand-new apprentice could pump the bellows, sweep the forge, haul wood and water, deliver messages. If it frees up the master to produce more valuable output, that’s a win-win. Then they can grow into increasingly valuable tasks as they gain awareness and skill.
IMO one of the big problems is that we’ve gone too far with the assumption that learners can’t be valuable until after they’re done learning. Partly a cultural shift around the role of children and partly the reality that knowledge work doesn’t require much unskilled labor compared to physical industries.
I was somewhat aware that in medieval period most started out as an apprentice in mid teens. Essentially work slaves in the house of a master. Then after a decade or so of toiling and gaining the skill they would go on to become individual business owners.
But I wasn’t aware about the master peace. Thank you for sharing that!
By the time one is early/mid 20s they would be nearing master level in skill. Would have faced the real world for 7-8 years, know how the world works in terms of money, dealing with customers, and so on.
Compare that with today, by early 20s one is only getting out of college undergrad. About to start the real world job training.
Yeah, they are different domains. I don't mind options for those who want to pursue an acedemic approach compared to a practical one. But for most fields we just don't have that choice anymore. Getting hand on experience? Gotta be recruited from acedemia first.
More reason to vye for labor protections. If they realize they can't just rotate out people every 6-20 months they may actually go back to fostering talent instead of treating acedemia like a cattle farm.
Honestly, a future where diplomas are just noise and employers stop caring about them and thus young people stop wasting years of their lives "learning" something they don't care about sounds like a huge improvement.
LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.
They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment, and we could potentially see more erosion in technical abilities and work quality. You don't know what you don't know, and without learning things that you don't care about, you loose the chance to expand your knowledge outside of your comfort zone.
> They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment
I graduated university around the turn of the century, long before the current AI boom started, and the majority of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're only taking that class because you have to because every adult in your life drilled into you that you'll be a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the costs of employing the professors teaching you, could offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at the end of the class.
The real lesson I learned during my time in university is that the two real edges that elite universities give you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the children of the rich and leaders in the field that you can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on your resume. You can't really get the first at a state school or community college, and you definitely can't get the second at a state school or community college, despite learning similar if not the same material in a given field of study.
It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.
I don't think diplomas have mattered for decades, at least in tech. Let's not pretend anything improved with the introduction of chatbots.
Annyway, any advantage is entirely offset by having to live in a world with LLMs. I'd prefer the tradition of having to educate retarded college graduates. At least they grow into retarded adults. What are we gonna do about chatbots? You can't even educate them, let alone pinocchio them.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship taking place of college, but the last couple of places I worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know this person from open source projects/working with them in a company/etc.
In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a very good signal.
I might be a good thing. Colleges have become complacent and too expensive. Costs of an education have been increasing while employment opportunities decreasing for some degree categories. People have been sounding alarms for a while and colleges have not been listening. The student loan market is booming.
Now if students can shortcut the education process, they can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education looks like in the new era.
It's aroind 5 years out but schools are gonna have a rude awakening as the population decrease finally catches up to them. The standards won't raise because many will simply shut down over lack of students.
The Harvards will be fine, though. But I guess that will raise the standards naturally.
I was somewhat downvoted for saying something similar recently here [1].
Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the current environment. We should push younger people to face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great side effect the young people won’t have to start out their careers saddled with huge debt.
I kind of understand this argument, but I kind of don't. Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.
There's a lot of crops that are grown in CA that are not native to the area, and require a lot of water to be viable in that area. Trying to grow a crop native to monsoon areas in a dry area is just unsane.
And growing a human in that area? Would it not also be a drag on the area? At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).
> At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.
The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.
There is a reason 80%(?) of the world almond crop is grown in California. It has a great climate for almonds, a lot of land, and water to support the trees. We need to trade something for our IPhones besides the promise of future dollars (debt).
> Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).
Tax water for agricultural usage enough to fund desalination plants for their water use. The market participants should then adapt by switching to less water-intensive crops, or paying the tax and getting the desalination plants.
From the survival of civilization scale, most of "almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes" are probably luxury items that we can ill afford.
Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?
Strange because you are naming staples that are concentrated sources of nutrition and energy that can indeed ensure survival, and components of “trail mix” for this very reason.
Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.
Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.
We can afford them, it costs maybe 5% more to grow them other places. We just don't anymore because that is 5% someone can skim off the top because they don't have to pay for environmental destruction and other downstream effects.
