I feel like the real reason behind this fatigue, which is an issue most people skirt around a lot, is that AI takes the joy out of intellectual tasks. Modern global capitalism only emphasizes efficiency, so everyone asks: does it make programmers more efficient? Does it make this or that company more efficient?
But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it.
Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others.
A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.
You're giving examples of difficult and boring jobs while there will surely still be fun jobs to be done like plumbing, dangerous construction work or prostitution
Von Neumann pretty much was a god, and even as early as 1945, he was explicitly assuming that neural models were how things in the computing business would eventually shake out.
The rest of us are just a little slow to catch up, is all.
Even if he did predict what would happen, it doesn't mean it's a good thing. von Neumann was a great prodigy but he was also a freak in a way, being able to enjoy the peak of very advanced technical things, which is not necessarily a good thing for the rest of us.
Every game becomes boring once figured out. I personally like to explore "meta" on my own. Once I know it I leave game to others as it's usually boring to me.
I think meta is basically experimentally determined constrains that limit reasoning tree and make problems computable/easy. LLMs/AI needs to start figuring something like this out on their own to make progress. RL kinda does it but maybe there's a better way.
To add to this. Scientific progress seems to slow when some of these constraints are incorrectly defined leading or blocking valid search trees, which suggest that humanity determines then but also wrong sometimes. Thus we need to really on formal proofs that are 100% reliable as well and revisit these constraints from time to time.
Unfortunately, a lot of this effort seems stalled by some of the Linux kernel developers' hostility towards Rust, which also prompted Hector Martin (marcan42) to leave the project.
Now at the current rate, Apple is still moving backwards faster than the FOSS community is moving forward. I actually miss macOS 10.5 on PowerPC.
So far nearly all of the kernel/driver code in the modern (~1990+?) history of osdev has been written in C/C++. However it appears that Rust can make you incredibly productive, at the very least in experimental/explorative development based solely on reverse engineering.
I really don't understand how countries like the USA can be even considered a democracy, when the only choice is swinging between two parties that only really make headway on a small handful of issues. The same goes for a lot of countries with a similar system. Over time, parts of the system get locked into a certain path through manipulation and then people vote between a small subset of two issues.
It's much more like an oligarchy with a sprinkle of democracy thrown in, rather than true representative leadership.
I wholeheartedly agree. To make matters worse, the “culture wars” have led to a situation where many voters for one party would never consider voting for members of the opposite party due to where the fall on cultural matters such as abortion, LGBT+ issues, race relations, etc. Someone’s position on abortion is far more predictive of political party than one’s positions regarding how the national debt should be dealt with. It’s easier for people to compromise on non-cultural matters.
Unfortunately, one effect of this is that people are “locked into” one party. The party then could take its voters for granted. “What are you going to do, vote Democratic/Republican?” is the attitude, which breeds apathy, which creates conditions that are ripe for bad actors to exploit.
I wish there were more choices, where conservatives have options beyond MAGA and where liberals and progressives have choices. I also wish there were a wider spectrum beyond liberal/conservative. Unfortunately the current system is such that the two main parties are entrenched, with third parties being massively disadvantaged.
I wish I had solutions. All I know is 2026 is coming fast, and we better be prepared.
The USA is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic. The architects of the system were highly suspicious of Athenian democracy and the tyranny of the majority.
Third parties don't really work in this system. If a third party gains transaction on an issue, one of the two main parties will largely adopt those policies. Otherwise, the 3rd party just splits the vote and the party least like the third party wins.
Everything is always changing too. Both parties have changed quite a lot in even the last 10 years.
Even further back look at an election map of JFK and Nixon in 1960. The states have practically all flipped. California and the west coast voted all Republican. The southern states voted all Democrat.
> The USA is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic.
I'm not sure why this basic issue is constantly attacked with the nonsensical claim that a republic is not a democracy. There are two forms of democracy - direct (never tried in the West) and representative (aka republic). In short, for all intends and purposes, the US and all other western democracies are both democracies and republics. And that's that.
The confusion goes back all the way to Hamilton who might have been too busy effing around to understand the difference.
Constitutional republic is a form of democracy. The parent post is largely unchanged if you find and replace "democracy" with "constitutional republic".
They were suspicious of the tyranny of the majority because they were rich slave owning aristocrats i.e. they were the tyrants and wanted to remain so.
The system does generally push towards a duopoly. Still there's more influence of voters inside the parties at the local levels than it seems at first. Many important issues are handled at the state level. There's more variation of the parties beliefs as well at that level. A Wyoming Republican can have fairly different views and priorities from a South Carolina Republican. Side note, personally I believe that the growth of the scope of the federal government reduces representation significantly.
A big difference with China or Russia's one party systems is that the presidential candidates are chosen in primaries, which can have a large effect. Both Obama and Trump were relative outsiders who were able to win their parties primaries without being heads of their parties.
To me the USA's executive branch system allows more choice in representative leadership than parliamentary systems where the parties choose the prime minister.
There are different kinds of parliamentary systems. In some, the prime minister is a big important leader, almost like a president in a presidential system. In others, they are just another interchangeable cog in the machine.
Here in Finland, it's rare that a prime minister manages to serve the full four-year term. Usually there are enough controversies and scandals that they eventually have to resign. But the government coalition just keeps going on, implementing the same policies as before, as the leader is ultimately not that important.
The article doesn't make it clear whether it was AirBNB itself that increased prices, or whether it was hosts. And moreover, it also doesn't even give one example of a before and after price. I'd like to see at least one example.
Host here. Almost nobody sets prices manually. You either use Airbnb's pricing algorithm, or one from a third party. Either way it's set automatically based on local occupancy rates/hotel prices/etc.
Which is an argument that this is not truly gouging - there's just a demand surge and a supply crunch and the market responds the same way as if it was a business conference in town.
Another thing worth pointing out is that the market of available Airbnbs clears out from the cheaper units first. So it may look like prices are shooting up, but really it's just that all the normal priced ones are gone.
> Which is an argument that this is not truly gouging - there's just a demand surge and a supply crunch and the market responds the same way as if it was a business conference in town.
So then real price gouging is... what, when you charge more than everyone else (and drive all your customers away to competitors)?
> then real price gouging is... what, when you charge more than everyone else
Honestly, a myth. It’s aesthetically pleasing (outside perishable personal essentials, like staples in a crisis). But if you have less housing than the population, the problem is the lack of housing. Getting uppity about pricing while builders wait months to get permits issued is performative at best.
Gouging: When I have a significant control of the supply, and set prices up in a way that significant parts of the supply get wasted because my profits are maximized anyway.
So one can argue that some cartel-like algorithms are price gouging, but it's unlikely to be what a provider of a lone AirBnb unit will do, as for them, going empty is worth zero.
Yeah, funny how property markets always seem to have that same response.
I bet most of those same people would lose their minds if their favourite restaurant tried to double prices overnight. "Yeah we sold a lot of burgers yesterday..."
popularity is irrelevant - the context is day-to-day. Prices change slowly over time of course, but that's different.
If there was less egg available for a given day, McDonald's [^1] don't charge more for a McMuffin, they sell fewer McMuffins
I'd argue AirBnb's approach here is more like Uber's surge rates. Which are clearly more extreme than anything taxi cabs did (bar the occasional bad actor)
[^1]: mcdonalds is stretching the "restaurant" analogy here, but they have a higher consistent turnover so seem like a closer comparison
I wonder how much "value" would actually be lost from the market if prices were simply fixed a month or two ahead of time to exclude those price shocks.
Is the price reflective of the market though? I just negotiated an airbnb outside of airbnb at 40% of the platform quoted price and it was not a deal either but the market price. Airbnb massively inflates prices for everyone to create an expectation of how much things cost.
> Almost nobody sets prices manually. You either use Airbnb's pricing algorithm, or one from a third party. Either way it's set automatically based on local occupancy rates/hotel prices/etc.
This seems pretty undesirable. Very easy for Airbnb/third party to increase prices even without demand just to increase their prices.
We recently saw a similar price fixing lawsuit for renters. Landlords, co-ordinating together, ended up increasing prices of Condos across major American cities (via means of a third party). The consumer ends up paying unnecessarily high prices in an inelastic market.
What definition of gouging are you using that conflicts with “there's just a demand surge and a supply crunch”?
“the market responds the same way as if it was a business conference in town.” Normal people definitely complain about that and use the word gouging when they do so.
Huh. I know a number of AirBNB hosts (the new kind that treat it like a business, not the old kind) and they all absolutely do model the market out months in advance and 100% manually set the prices.
This reminds me of the time my middle-school history teacher decided to bring in one of the student’s financial advisor parents to defend price-gouging on gas during Hurricane Katrina evacuation and subsequent exodus.
It was an unconvincing argument then, and is an unconvincing argument now.
That’s awfully hard to do well though, especially setting up a system quickly.
Sure, you can limit amount per customer per store. But then someone comes in with their husband and double dips, and then go back through in 10 minutes hitting different checkouts, or just go through self checkout, and then go to different stores…
All the toilet paper is still gone, encouraging fear in other people to do the same as the couple above.
The alternative would have been “you idiots are buying all the toilet paper? Fine. It’s 5x more expensive now.”
People then see that toilet paper is still in stores and prices can come down gradually but rapidly, and if people start being nervous again prices can quickly raise to stamp that out.
> But then someone comes in with their husband and double dips, and then go back through in 10 minutes hitting different checkouts, or just go through self checkout, and then go to different stores…
During a panic toilet paper shooping spree that would allow like 100 other customers to also get toilet paper.
if airbnb raised the prices and the market isn't there, rental income will go down and vacancy rates will go up and airbnb will lower prices again.
if airbnb raised the prices and the market stayed strong, they'd raise the prices more.
the higher the prices go, the more people with extra space to rent out will take notice and clean up their garage, or go stay at grandma's or whatever, creating more housing out of thin air (actually, on the margin) helping alleviate the housing shortage.
the same pattern would happen if hosts raise the prices themselves. also, if all the cheap places get rented, the market will appear to have higher prices even if nothing has changed.
let markets figure out prices, period. that's what markets do, it's one of mankind's stellar achievments. It's why the west is successful and communism fails.
if airbnb has monopoly power and is manipulating prices, fix that problem any day of the week, don't use a massive fire that destroys housing as evidence of anything, it means nothing, that's normal market correction.
(while I think this isn't the affordability driver) this point about prices isn't really true - compare the graphs of two markets: one with a horizontal demand curve (perfect competition) and one with a downward-sloping demand curve (monopoly) - the first will have no deadweight loss, the second will have substantial deadweight loss.
Markets tend to the second and need state intervention in order to prevent the proliferation of monopolies. Functionally this is intervention every time price coordination happens, which... is pretty clearly what AirBNB is doing!
This is all economy 101, rational preference BS. The reality is that suppliers very often collude to increase prices universally (particularly for things like housing, where there is almsot a natural monopoly - you can't bring in more land to the same city), and buyers have no way of knowing or acting on this. Airbnb is perfect for organizing such collusion, acting as a virtual cartel.
econ 101 actually explains collusion as you are describing, but you need evidence to show perfect collusion of all participants to make the point you are trying to make. the average person in LA probably knows friends who rent out spaces and would tell you that their friends are not part of a cartel
but the real estate shortage and natural monopoly you allege (it's not true as I already pointed out) would explain the post fire short term situation, so you don't need to grasp for conspiracy theories.
as i said already, airbnb's potential to manipulate RE prices is a problem to be concerned about in normal times. When a fire burns down much of the city, prices go up because there is an actual shortage, not price manipulation.
There's still a sort of web of trust. All you have to do is find people who you really trust and hate AI. For instance, people who know me know that there's no way in hell that I'd ever use any sort of generative AI, for anything.
Let's expound some more on this. There's a parallel between people feeling forced to use online dating (mostly owned by one corporate entity) despite hating it, and being forced to use LinkedIn when you're in a state of paycheck-unattached or even just paycheck-curious.
I've disabled dubbing on my channel completely. I think the world was a better place when people made an effort to learn languages, and making material in any language available in any other removes some of the magic from the world.
A lot of the reason why I even ask other people is not to get a simple technical answer but to connect, understand another person's unexepected thoughts, and maybe forge a collaboration –– in addition to getting an answer of course. Real people come up with so many side paths and thoughts, whereas AI feels lifeless and drab.
To me, someone pasting in an AI answer says: I don't care about any of that. Yeah, not a person I want to interact with.
I think the issue is that about half the conversations in my life really shouldn't happen. They should have Googled it or asked an AI about it, as that is how I would solve the same problem.
It wouldn't surprise me if "let me Google that for you" is an unstated part of many conversations.
The big issue here is that a lot of company IP is proprietary. You can't Google 90% of it. And internal documentation has never been particularlly good, in my experience. It's a great leverage point to prevent people from saying "just google it" if I'm dealing with abrasive people, at least.
It is, which I'd argue has a time and a place.
Maybe it's more specific to how I cut my teeth in the industry but as programmer whenever I had to ask a question of e.g the ops team, I'd make sure it was clear I'd made an effort to figure out my problem. Here's how I understand the issue, here's what I tried yadda yadda.
Now I'm the 40-year-old ops guy fielding those questions. I'll write up an LLM question emphasizing what they should be focused on, I'll verify the response is in sync with my thoughts, and shoot it to them.
It seems less passive aggressive than LMGTFY and sometimes I learn something from the response.
Instead of spending this time, it is faster, simpler, and more effective to phrase these questions in the form "have you checked the docs and what did they say?"
I remember reading about someone using AI to turn a simple summary like "task XYZ completed with updates ABC" into a few paragraphs of email. The recipient then fed the reply into their AI to summarize it back into the original points. Truly, a compression/expansion machine.
Think what you want, but I really do feel that once computers completely conquer something with ruthless efficiency, it becomes less interesting. I felt the same way after watching computers beat humans in chess definitively, and I think a lot of people feel the same way.
It's no doubt a rather impressive achievement for AI, but I wonder if what we're doing really makes sense? Yes, I know coding is for its utility, but along the way, we shouldn't forget that part of the reason we have a healthy society is because we have a large array of stuff we can do where we can engage in intellectual tasks in domains that still have some mystery.
I guess most people here will disagree, but I find the recent emphasis on AI coding and AI-this-and-that to take some of the magic out of what was once a purely human domain. Maybe no one will notice or care much, especially because we're still in the age of novelty....but since computers took over chess, I've become less interested in human-vs-human chess because they have access to computers to study.
To me, it really does seem that beyond a certain level, the mechanical and methodical approach takes the spirit out of things.
But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it.
Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others.
A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.