Anyone who doesn’t complain about code not compiling on the first try likely writes dead simple programs and could be replaced by an LLM. Writing simple programs is easy, writing complex programs is hard.

Marinading is for meats that are too tough to cook with minimal preparation. If your hunk of meat needs to be marinated before you eat it, it’s not a steak.

It bans some versions of this, but it can’t ban all of it. The obvious way is fully banned and hard to get away with: pay someone to delete unflattering things about you on Wikipedia. But, you can do a much more costly, slower, but much more likely to be acceptable version: you can buy a newspaper and arrange for that newspaper to write flattering articles about you. Since those articles qualify as a primary source, you can then have someone update Wikipedia to include things from that article using the article as a primary source. That doesn’t delete the unflattering things, but it pushes them down the page and surrounds them by flattering things. If you’re a billionaire, you’ll find a way to get the articles edited in a way that is permitted by the Wikipedia rules.

there’s always at least one guy who’d hyperfocus on monitoring something like this

That’s the thing, there’s only about 3000 billionaires worldwide, but 8 billion other people. Let’s say out of those 8 billion, there are maybe 20 who really, really hate Bill Gates. All it takes to undermine all Bill Gates’ attempts to launder his reputation is for a few of those 20 to keep an eye on his Wikipedia page in their spare time, and challenge any changes that try to whitewash his reputation.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work well, but at least this causes a trickle down effect. Gates spends millions with PR firms to keep his reputation clean, including vandalizing Wikipedia. Those PR firm employees are unethical assholes, but they’re not billionaires. Gates (indirectly) pays their wages. These PR firm assholes then spend Gates’ money to buy BMWs and prostate massagers. That ends up trickling down to car mechanics and massager manufacturers.

So, every time you edit Wikipedia with unflattering but true information about billionaires and middle eastern oil states, you’re causing some wealth to leak out of the billionaires’ pockets as they fight to contain that information. And you can do this damage while just sitting on a toilet.

I don’t think anybody, other than maybe high-school kids, thought Wikipedia was some perfect site with no flaws. Even with these flaws, it’s really an amazing achievement and deserves massive amounts of praise.

Just compare it to what came before: Encyclopaedia Britannica and the like. Wikipedia is estimated to be about 95x bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica. So, it goes more in depth on almost everything, and has orders of magnitude more articles than Britannica had. And, do you think Britannica didn’t face pressure to not publish controversial or unflattering information on rich people? It was probably much, much easier for the rich to get things their way when it was a single, for-profit publisher, rather than a worldwide group of volunteers. And then there’s the issue with being factual or having a neutral point of view. That’s always going to be a challenge, but it’s much more likely there will be systemic bias for an American-owned for-profit company than it is for a volunteer-based non-profit with editors worldwide.

Also, the way Wikipedia works, it’s much harder for these PR firms to completely hide things they don’t like. Nearly all of Wikipedia’s edit history is easily visible just by clicking a link on the page you’re reading. If someone removed something unflattering, you can often find it just by going through the edits. It would be nice if the rich couldn’t adjust the main pages, but at least it’s extremely hard for them to make unflattering information completely disappear just due to how the editing process for Wikis works.

Finally, paid PR professionals can’t just edit whatever they like. Wikipedia editors are notoriously proud of what they do, and annoyed at seeing their site vandalized. Often edits will be rolled back, or pages will be locked. Eventually a billionaire might get what they want, but to get a fact changed on Wikipedia they’ll probably need to pay a reputable news site to make a counter claim, then have one of their paid PR flacks to use that news article as a primary source to allow it to be used on Wikipedia. That’s an expensive and fragile process. Do it too often and you damage the reputation of the news site so it can no longer be used for that kind of thing. And, all it takes to undo that is a good journalist doing their job and reporting the truth and a volunteer Wikipedia editor updating the page.

So, don’t lose hope, just think that billionaires are spending millions to try to launder their reputations, and often those attempts are being undone by some girl in sweatpants casually updating Wikipedia on her phone while she binges Critical Role.

its

Sure, some people were initially against electricity. But, it’s not like they had to beg people to use it. There was enough demand that the main issue was deciding between AC and DC, not whether to do it at all.

In the winter when the sun might set at 4:30 pm, it’s pretty ridiculous to try to stop eating before sundown.

The way that sort of invention often works is:

1. Inventor thinks they have a world changing idea
2. Inventor spends their own time and money to build a prototype
3. Inventor shows the product off to the world.

If it truly is a world changing invention, step 4 is “world is amazed, inventor can’t keep up with demand”. There are also frequent cases where the world goes “meh, not for me”. Now occasionally those are when an invention is ahead of its time, and years or decades later the inventor is vindicated. The other case is when the invention really isn’t good, and there simply isn’t and will never be demand for it.

Somehow, the AI bubble is built with people ignoring the feedback from people that keep saying “meh, not for me”, and the various “inventors” burning more and more of their money trying to change people’s minds. Has that ever worked?

Has there ever been a true world-changing invention where the “inventors” had to beg the public to use it?

Capitalism says that the market won’t reward people making those things, and the companies might fail as a result.

But, we’re no longer in a capitalist world. We’re in a corporatist world where it’s closer to technolfeudalism where it doesn’t really matter how bad your idea is, because you aren’t out to make a profit, instead you’re out to extract rent.

This is the thing I hope people learn about LLMs, it’s all hallucinations.

When an LLM has excellent data from multiple sources to answer your question, it is likely to give a correct answer. But, that answer is still a hallucination. It’s dreaming up a sequence of words that is likely to follow the previous words. It’s more likely go give an “incorrect” hallucination when the data is contradictory or vague. But, the process is identical. It’s just trying to dream up a likely series of words.

I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets

That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.

If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.

Let’s just say AI truly is a world-changing thing.

Has there ever been another world-changing thing where the sellers of that thing had to beg people to use it?

The applications of radio were immediately obvious, everybody wanted access to radios. Smart phones and iPods were just so obviously good that people bought them as soon as they could afford them. Nobody built hundreds of km of railroads then begged people to use them. It was hard to build the railways fast enough to keep up with demand.

Sure, there have been technologies where the benefit wasn’t immediately obvious. Lasers, for example, were a cool thing that you could do with physics for a while. But, nobody was out there banging on doors, begging people to find a use for lasers. They just sat around while people fiddled with them, until eventually a use was found for them.

The interesting thing about this is that people are now stuck with whatever PC they had when the prices suddenly shot up. In the past there was always a hardware adoption curve, where some people had the newest stuff, other people waited for it to get cheaper before they bought it.

In the past, if a game company was developing a game that was scheduled to be released in 2 years, they could look at what hardware people were using now, and estimate what people would be using in 2 years. Graphics and gameplay that was possible on game studio machines running the latest hardware would be too much for home PCs when development at the studio started. But, by the time the game was ready, home machines would have caught up and people could experience these amazing graphics at home. Now, I assume game studios are going to have to re-think things and assume that most people at home will still be playing on the old gaming PC they built before the AI price apocalypse.

Technofeudalism

When those immigrants were coming to the US, they were not considered “white”. Sometimes the discrimination was because of skin colour, sometimes it was religion. But, they weren’t considered to have the morals and work ethic of the English-descended protestants that dominated the USA.

They still have to file income taxes. But, most places have higher taxes than the USA. Most places also have reciprocal tax agreements with the US. There’s also a deduction of something like $100k, so the first $100k (or local equivalent) you earn in another country isn’t taxed. As a result, unless you’re making high six figures, you don’t actually owe any American taxes.

OTOH, just filing US taxes is a real pain in the ass. In the US it’s made very slightly easier by your employer, bank, etc. all supplying you with the tax forms you need. If you’re overseas, you need to figure out the info you’d need to supply on that form yourself.

Exactly, and it’s a cycle. They buy things on credit, carry a balance on their credit cards, owe a lot of money, and the stress gets to them. Eventually they buy things as a way to feel better and relieve the stress.

Trying to “not look poor” or “keep up with the Joneses” can lead to real misery. But, if instead you make a budget and save just a little bit every month it can be liberating.

Fundamentally, the problem is unequal wealth distribution. But, we should also try to help people live within their means while we attempt to fix that societal issue.

The reason they don’t admit that they got a head start is that they actually don’t believe it.

The daughter of a family friend of mine grew up middle class. Her mom was a social worker, her did had an office job. She managed to marry a man who’s the son that’s inheriting his dad’s oil business, worth tens of millions. She is now a housewife / stay at home mom. She now has a city home, a cottage (which is fully a house, just in a more rural location) and a summer home. One of her daughters competes in sailing races (and anybody who knows sailing knows just how expensive that hobby can be), the other is into horse riding.

I’ve asked her what it’s like for her kids to grow up rich, and she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t think she’s rich. She says that there are houses around where she lives that are even bigger than hers, and that her husband works hard. I’m sure that’s true, but she’s still in the top 0.1%. And this is someone who grew up middle class, and should remember what it was like.

I guarantee that most of the kids that come from rich families have no idea what it’s like not to be rich. As a result, they don’t ever consider that it might not be normal to be able to have your dad’s lawyer look over the contracts for your new company free of charge. They never think of how easy they had it to find investors for their company, and how forgiving those investors were. It never occurred to them that during those lean months at the beginning when their company hadn’t yet started generating real revenue, that it was unusual to be able to live in their parents’ spare apartment in the city, and to have dad pay off their credit card.