> Why cash cut deaths? For many living across rural sub-Saharan Africa, getting to a health facility, and paying for care there, can be difficult, especially when pregnant. Extra cash seems to make those decisions easier, as long as health care facilities weren't too far away.
Contrary to some extremist people believe, when people receives cash they will use it to improve their family well being.
To cut basic income on the poorest of society just creates more poverty, suffering and death.
AI does not need another trillion dollars, but the poor will make this world a better place if they get that money to raise their children.
UBI covers more underfunded nondiscretionary personal spending that tends to have a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of almost exactly 1 when used wisely. This means it funds necessary shit that might not have been funded and led to deleterious effects like malnutrition, stunted growth, and preventable disabilities.
Means testing and treating recipients like criminals places burdensome barriers in front of support (e.g., costs in time, money, energy, and emotional well-being) and often costs more to administer than the cost of the assistance itself when taken too far beyond deterring/eliminating obvious fraud.
I worked for others in a corporate environment and it was often a joy, but the problem is you don't always get that lucky and even if you do, the environment can change around you from year to year and a perfect job can turn into hell. And corporate engineering jobs have become so filled with stupid bullshit that the career I had and thrived in may not even be possible anymore.
I'm not set up to work for myself, my ideal is for others to worry about the business, and give me projects I can work on with freedom.
Agree. In 25ish years I've been part of 3 mergers, 1 divestiture, 1 IPO, and N CEO/senior leadership changes. Each of them has changed my job in some way, usually for the worse. I've been told to relocate or quit, I've had customer-facing travel policy change (told to be on the road 100%), I've been put on-call (even when traveling 100%), and I've had internal culture change the point of hating life. There were some positive ones too, but those stand out because generally it caused me to leave (or get laid-off).
I’ve worked at a few startups and one big company in Silicon Valley. Over the last 7 years I’ve had periods where I’m really excited to get to work in the morning when I’m going to sleep. I’ve had stretches of time where I realize how lucky I am and that others would be incredibly jealous if they understood how good I had it.
I also had periods of time where a job was making me miserable. Ruining my time outside of work. Making me question everything.
Some white-collar professionals enjoy continuing their work past retirement age. It can be stimulating, high-leverage, and I have often seen them contributing at key moments without spending much time at the office. The accumulated wisdom and political capital of many decades at the wheel makes a difference. I've also seen blue-collar workers keep at it past retirement age because of their finances or some other compulsion despite arthritis, weakness, bad sight etc and rue every moment. Let's make sure we understand that not every craft is heaven and not every corporation is a hellscape.
I definitely would have kept my software engineering career longer if I could have found a decent job like I used to have. But what it means to be and what's expected of a professional software engineer today is so different from how I spent my career and how I like/need to work. So I've retired rather than continue fighting it.
> Labor is a major cost, and cutting it is one way to bolster profit margins.
This also shows that big corporations do not expect growth. Investing for growth is the best strategy unless the company is sure that there is no more growth. Then cutting expenses makes sense, short term at least.
> In an environment where employment growth is already low, any increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shedding jobs.
Stagflation is a very likely outcome of current policy. Job loss, increase in prices, shrinking economy, etc.
> While there is evidence that AI is cutting into demand for certain jobs, such as software development
* citation needed.
> “Labor hoarding was especially pronounced in higher-wage jobs, where employees are harder to find and therefore more costly to lose,”
This is one problem with having increasing monopolies in the sector. When most developers will be hired by the same dozen companies there is no job market, but just a cartel in line with the 2010 no-poaching agreements.
- These agreements, which can take various forms, aim to reduce competition in labour markets. They also carry the risk of suppressing wages and limiting job opportunities for employees. While such agreements may be pursuant to ancillary legitimate restrictions, they are often viewed as horizontal cartel agreements necessitating a per se approach (https://www.legal500.com/developments/thought-leadership/no-...)
So, nothing new. Big tech screwing software developers like they always do.
A country that has been destabilized by foreign invasions again and again. The last one from the USA.
It is not about culture, it is about been ruled by outside powers that do not allow for internal development. Except for a few tax havens, former colonized countries struggle with violence, inequality, and corruption. That was the system that was setup for them and it will take decades to fix if they are left alone, it will never be fixed if other countries intervene to keep the status quo to profit from it.
Why blame outside powers again? There are very large differences where you have very limited differences in outside power rule, a big example being India vs Pakistan. And this is very far from the only example.
There have always been and always will be outside powers. Hell, the very first stories we have, from the Epic of Gilgamesj, the oldest stories in the Bible and Greek Legends are all about outside powers intervening, and here we are, over 4000 years later, and there's (checks wikipedia) 32 current wars (and none are "the west" doing that at the moment, China is currently the worst offender, there's of course Russia and Ukraine/Europe) where outside powers are trying to dominate someone else. At some point you have to accept outside powers trying to fuck things up as a basic part of life. So other countries will keep intervening, probably for another 4000+ years.
What do you mean by "war", exactly? The US bombing Somalia, Colombia and Venezuela clearly does not count, and neither does the SOF:s in Syria and Iraq, or the proxy wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon. I suppose the trade wars don't count either.
I think trying to accurately express natural language statements as values and logical steps as operators is going to be very difficult. You also need to take into account ambiguity and subtext and things like that.
I actually believe it is technically possible, but is going to be very hard.
What formal language can express this statement? What will the text be parsed into? Which transformations can you use to produce other truthful (and interesting) statements from it? Is this flexible enough to capture everything that can be expressed in English?
The closest that comes to mind is Prolog, but it doesn’t really come close.
> There's no such thing as "moral" in nature, that's purely human-made concept.
Morality is 100% an evolutionary trait that rises from a clear advantage for animals that posses it. It comes from natural processes.
The far-right is trying to convince the world that "morality" does not exist, that only egoism and selfishness are valid. And that is why we have to fight them. Morality is a key part of nature and humanity.
> You can be anywhere (on a boat, train, lying on the couch, in a stadium watching 18 innings of baseball) and using Claude Code on the web on any mobile phone (in a browser.) As it builds stuff, it's instantly deploying a review app for each update and so you can see the changes and then give it another request. Also makes it easy to just drop that review app into a groupchat to get feedback from other people who are also not at their computers.
Remote work has been a thing for more than a decade now. I always have the feeling that most of the people commenting on the web are new to the industry.
More than 10 years ago we had the same setup. We will say "deploy app_name" in the chat and it will just do that. With a VPN we worked like if we were in the office from anywhere in the world (but most people, to be realistic, just worked from home).
To need a web-based IDE seems a step backwards. You are already connected to the internet, any IDE will have access to all the needed services thru an internet connection.
Our world is becoming more and more fragile as corporations look to concentrate all services in just one place. I do not see a good ending to all this.
That's a fair point. I do think what's most interesting this time is the potential for new use-cases (users) vs the replacement of existing ones. I agree that there are better ways for serious developers to work than to be using Claude Code on the web. On the other hand, you can now set up someone in the marketing or product management departments with the tools in an afternoon and then they can create widgets, perform custom analysis on data, experiment with prototype ideas, etc. and they don't even need a laptop. All you need is a mobile phone with a browser. It could be neat for students as well. "Build me an app to help me study for X". Time will tell exactly how people use it.
> (I can imagine LLM operators jumping on the opportunity to sell some of these new barriers, to profit from selling both the problematic product and a product to work around those problems.)
That is their business model. Use AI to create posts in LinkedIn, mails in a corporate environment, etc. And then use AI to summarize all that text.
AI creates a problem and then offers a solution.
My current approach is to look at new sources lie The Guardian, Le Monde, AP news, etc. I know that they put the work, sadly places like Reddit and such are just becoming forums that discuss garbage news with bot comments. (I could use AI to identify non-bot comments and news sources, but it does not really work even if it says that it does, and I should not have to do that in the first place either).
Contrary to some extremist people believe, when people receives cash they will use it to improve their family well being.
To cut basic income on the poorest of society just creates more poverty, suffering and death.
AI does not need another trillion dollars, but the poor will make this world a better place if they get that money to raise their children.