seanmcdirmid

6 ms·

1.
by seanmcdirmid 3d ago
A UBI society doesn't mean jobs aren’t available. There most certainly will be jobs. But with UBI and universal healthcare, the jobs can pay whatever the market really demands. People always complain about the government subsidizing lo
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by seanmcdirmid 3d ago
Gates probably honestly believes in UBI; the guy is practical to a fault but evil misleading genius he is not. I actually don’t see any better options than UBI long term.
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by seanmcdirmid 3d ago
I’ve had to move away from thinking to meta-thinking. Most of my engineering effort is now focused on figuring out what information and process to feed a model, and then observing how it runs and tweaking the results until it’s not crap. Yo
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by seanmcdirmid 4d ago
I wasn’t talking about the kids’ safety, I was referring to Waymo’s liability.
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by seanmcdirmid 4d ago
Gemini 3.8 flash via Antigravity desktop has been my daily driver for the last few weeks. I also use DeepSeek V4 flash and a Qwen 3.6 MoE for local stuff.
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by seanmcdirmid 4d ago
Harnesses are a lot of prompting and sandboxing also. Then you need to add goldfish reminders when it makes mistakes depending on model quality. It isn’t a lot of code, it definitely isn’t a lot of code that you can’t build with an agent.
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by seanmcdirmid 4d ago
Only if they retain it, and I would bet they are purging it quickly as a matter of policy to avoid these kinds of situations.
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by seanmcdirmid 4d ago
Google would probably be held 100% liable if it happened from their car. . What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? That seems like a huge risk for them.
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by seanmcdirmid 5d ago
The kid that learns, by the end of their education, to use the more advanced tools is going to economically out competed as an adult by the kid that got stuck learning how to do things the old fashioned way. Amish communities exist snd are
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by seanmcdirmid 6d ago
Many overflow drains are not or are poorly connected. If you buy a new home, the inspector will usually skip to overflow test because it will likely fail.
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by seanmcdirmid 6d ago
My pushback is that AI can be used for writing, and the results will depend on the person using it. It’s like a type writer doesn’t make anyone a great writer either, but it improve their legibility at least.
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by seanmcdirmid 6d ago
Sorry, I meant that universes with exploits don’t exist because the exploits mean they don’t survive very long. Of course, I just have 1 piece data in my sample, so take it with a grain of salt.
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
Deepness in the Sky "programmer-archaeologist" will never come to pass because of LLMs :( The Forever War series changes the speed of light at the end to mess with the mortals, not to prevent any calamity however.
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
Nothing changes, bad writing is just more uniform.
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
I'm pretty sure organisms would exploit glitches in the universe if they could find them, to the point that they don't exist (well, universe survival bias at work).
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
I'm going to say its bad, but especially bad for low paid blue collar workers. When I worked at McDonalds as a kid, a lot of crew would get pregnant and work until 8 months, and be gone for a couple of months, I don't know how the
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
Nothing has really changed: bad writers using AI will still be bad writers. Good writers using AI, with some effort put into learning how to use it, can benefit a lot from it in terms of (at least) writing good content faster.
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by seanmcdirmid 7d ago
If done right you couldn’t tell either way, and you probably wouldn’t care. The point of writing is to get a message out to the reader as efficiently as possible, don’t waste their time. The writer ensures that, AI is just a tool at that po
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by seanmcdirmid 8d ago
There is a lot of curation and editing that go into AI generated content. Like if you just use an AI to write from a prompt, you’ll just get slop (vibe writing), but if you plan it, review the bullet points, delete and add points that make
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by seanmcdirmid 8d ago
A parallel question: do you think Python being so entrenched in LLMs model weights means that future new programming languages are just going to resemble Python? Corpus means models that write that language means more corpus of that languag
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by seanmcdirmid 9d ago
I hope you are right, but it definitely feels like everything is turning against workers. They might have jobs, but prices are such that they are still getting by or not at all.
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by seanmcdirmid 10d ago
We are seeing workers get laid off to free up more money for AI and only the AI techies are making more money? It could be temporary, but the way AI is currently owned and structured, the owners and investors are positioned to reap almost a
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by seanmcdirmid 10d ago
Why do humans need to work to exist? We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help u
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by seanmcdirmid 10d ago
Increased productivity is nothing to sneeze at even if you work the same amount of hours. The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
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by seanmcdirmid 10d ago
The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
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by seanmcdirmid 12d ago
If Chinese kids are taught how to use AI from an early age, while American kids have to wait until they are in university, which ones are going to be make economically competitive when they become adults? I think we already know the answer
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by seanmcdirmid 12d ago
> We use appropriation and tax dollars to expand the road network, but the railroads generally don't have access to either. The federal government leases tracks using Amtrack money (among other public agencies). They get low interes
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by seanmcdirmid 12d ago
Ground effect planes are already pretty limited to calm water situations. Like between Seattle and Victoria, or maybe Seattle and Vancouver. I would say the Alaskan marine highway would be a good fit, but that is mostly for freight and cars
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by seanmcdirmid 12d ago
I remember reading about making ground effects electric planes for this reason. You need a reserve, but if your plane could double as a boat and was flying over water, that would satisfy the requirement.
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by seanmcdirmid 12d ago
It has a good rail freight system but it’s running at capacity. Trucks are still needed for connections.

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