In fairness, history didn't stop in 1879, a lot has changed, and many things have improved
But the thesis that productivity improvements don't necessarily improve the welfare at the bottom of society, as economic rent rises correspondingly, seems sound
"discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor"
- the introduction to Progress and Poverty (1879)
@dejectedvole I know that a yes-no question is supposed to end in ε; my complaint is how I'm deeply trained to expect that rising intonation at the end implies a question and that might take some time to unlearn...
The concept of semantically meaningful tones feels so alien to me. Why did you decide to take up the main pragmatic-emotive channel for this. Like you might just as well decide to move your eyebrows too, it would be just as ridiculous
(I'm going to learn it anyway)
@GutokuEijin I think if we removed the kanji now, it would get simpler for native speakers to learn how to read and write, but I 100% agree that kanji have been very helpful for me in reading comprehension. Also, the language itself has evolved around the presence of kanji!
People desperately want LLMs to be like a more familiar technology, whether automatic transmission or a compiler, for a comforting analogy as to what expect of them.
Those are actually not alike, and as long as you try to make them so, you're going to be miscalibrated on either
I disagree.
The promise that you no longer have to learn things, that you can just be a manager while "agents" do the work for you, is a siren song. Succumb to it at your own peril.
I disagree. I think the point of AI, in the short term of months, is to move up the abstraction ladder. Very few people still know how to drive a manual car
What is your plan to learn how to be a good manager? to learn how to operate at said higher level of abstraction well? to discern between good work and bad work, between truth and nonsense? That you were just divinely bestowed with this ability at birth?
So far most of the harm of AI is from people using it to become worse. To skip learning/thinking/working and become human routers of worthless verbiage. It's pathetic and contemptible.
In the past few months I've realised I'm not good enough for vibecoding actually. I had thought I can manage it, but not really no and ended up suffering for my past hubris
now I insist that the stuff I take long-term responsibility for is human-written, or as-if-human written