I happen to live in one of the few districts in CA that has a republican representative. I was looking forward to voting him out but then CA got gerrymandered and now we'll likely have a Democrat representative next term.
I didn't like our republican representative but it seems kinda shitty that the folks who did like him and voted for him suddenly didn't get a say in who their representative ought to be. I mean, sure they probably voted No on 50 but most of the yes votes came from outside of our district.
Edit: I strongly hate gerrymandering but I also acknowledge the need for the democrats to play dirty because the Republicans are, and "being the better person" doesn't seem to be a viable political strategy anymore.
I think the company I work for has a pretty pragmatic approach for AI utilization. Don't use it to replace jobs, use it to make jobs more efficient (we call it an "enhancer"). IE we won't lay people off, at least not because of AI, we just may not hire as quickly as we did before LLMs, but still attaining similar scale. This goes for all departments, not just tech. We have very strict standards on what code gets accepted (no slop). Whether it's AI generated or not is irrelevant; even senior engineers can be guilty of slop after a long day. But we do have regular meetings to discuss our AI usage and to converge upon common patterns and rules to level everyone up.
That being said, I think we as a society are quickly reaching the point where there just doesn't exist enough jobs to keep everyone gainfully employed. There may be new jobs opening up but not ones that people in the middle or ends of their careers can quickly pick up on. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily, just that when combined with the shitty safety net that the US has, it's a recipe for disaster. If even folks who are working full-time still need assistance for groceries, then we've already failed, and that's not even AIs fault.
I left IT for the time being, but I ask copilot.microsoft.com a question once in a while to see if we've got to AGI yet.
Today's question (I admit not so creative) was what's the market cap of TSLA.
Its answer was "Tesla Inc. (TSLA) currently has a market capitalization of approximately $429.52 billion USD. This figure is based on the latest trading price of $429.52 per share"
It allegedly used a web search to find this out, and it included a screenshot showing the market cap as $1.4B.
On the other hand, chatgpt.com prudently tells me to go look it up myself, because it doesn't have live data.
I never use LLMs to get current data. Sometimes for fun I'll ask it for product recommendations and it'll routinely make up products that don't exist and confidently even generate links for such products.
But for code generation, Claude is awesome. ChatGPT is OK too but I've had much better results with Claude. Weird things happen if a new version it a library came out with breaking changes though. You'll have to write rules or ensure that the new apis are in context.
But that's kinda my point. It's not good enough to replace a human, but it is good enough to make a human more efficient.
My dad's first name is my last name so my last name @gmail is taken by him :)
But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name).
Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4.
I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
One place I worked, we had one guy with the same personal and family names of the (then) Director General of the BBC… working on a project with another guy who also shared both.
I am not the horror film director I share a name with.
I tried to start doing this. The first site I tried to sign up to said it was an invalid email address.
I would say they could fuck all the way off, but there are legitimate reasons to not let people sign up with an alias (like one person signing up for multiple free trials)
When I'm signing up for one service, I don't want to have to sign up for another service, no matter how easy it is. It's not a question of difficulty, it's a question of convenience.
That's why services like Firefox Relay exists. Just generates a new email address for you whose inbox gets relayed to your regular email, no fuss needed. I don't personally pay for it but I do use the heck out of the free email addresses they provided.
He was. he didn't just parachute in Meta to start working on PyTorch. he worked in many areas of the product and a member of the senior technical staff, was knowledgable about many aspects of the company.
We as a society. If everyone just thought about their own pod because they can't be bothered about govt corruption then that's how dictatorship wins. MLK had a family too. We can't all be MLK but it doesn't mean we need to be okay with shitty things happening just because they're not as shitty as other things we let happen.
In my circles of news and friends, plenty of people are actively hating against politicians and policies that make our lives worse, or who spout dangerous rhetoric (and do nothing else but that).
Usually it's just Trump, but my local congressman gets a lot of hate too.
Sometimes it is just "orange man bad" but cmon building an opulent ballroom and remodeling a bathroom in marble and having a grand old Halloween party while millions of Americans have no idea how they're gonna have their next meal is some Marie Antoinette shit. Sure that's not really a "policy" per se but it sure makes it look like he doesn't give a shit about policies that actually help the American people.
It's an analogy. They are not comparing the worth of a human being to a car. They're saying that someone else's high risk should not increase your premium.
I stongly disagree with the premise that someone else's high risk should not increase your premium. How do you control your insurer? How do you know who's in their pool?
Why should your premium be tied to someone else's risk? There will always be some level of connection, the insurer has to stay in business, but that's very different.
Without preexisting conditions your premiums go up only because they can't charge the higher risk individual for that risk. That is no longer insurance at least at the individual level - you're effectively being asked to vouch for, and pay for, someone you never met.
> you're effectively being asked to vouch for, and pay for, someone you never met.
That is the basic premise of insurance. Collectivized risk. That you disagree with a specific detail in the implementation and that part, and that part only is vouching for someone else is undermining your point, not reinforcing it.
Everyone in the developed world has injected government heavily into healthcare, because its the lynchpin of a healthy and efficient workforce. That's the real solution.
No, it isn't. You'd have to define "developed world" here to make your argument more clear, but more importantly you'd have to define insurance in general if the government is stepping in to control those markets.
If we just want healthcare to be covered for the entire population that's fine, but don't call it insurance.
I didn't like our republican representative but it seems kinda shitty that the folks who did like him and voted for him suddenly didn't get a say in who their representative ought to be. I mean, sure they probably voted No on 50 but most of the yes votes came from outside of our district.
Edit: I strongly hate gerrymandering but I also acknowledge the need for the democrats to play dirty because the Republicans are, and "being the better person" doesn't seem to be a viable political strategy anymore.
reply