The wealthiest Americans aren't buying shit from China, I have no clue where you managed to get that point from but they're buying boutique shit from Europe or elsewhere.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
Like I said in my earlier post, the richest group of Americans is not the 1%. It's middle/upper middle/upper class suburbia.
This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.
You're right, I'm sorry, it's the 60-95%* that are the richest.
The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.
The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.
You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.
I have looked at the stats. In the US the 1% own 31% of the wealth up from 23% in 1990. The 50-90% own 30% of the wealth down from 36% in 1990. The fact that their spending drives the economy is just more ammunition for better wealth redistribution.
> We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
So you already failed the first part of doing your goddamn job as an engineer which is reviewing and owning code. Code review is a vital part of that, because code ownership is a responsibility shared by your entire team. We used to say that cowboy coders were a disaster for your team and now you're saying everyone on your team is effectively a cowboy coder.
If it turns out claude or whatever LLM you're using pulled in a bad package and now your companies data has been exfiltrated are you going to be the one willing to be fired for your blunder?
Jesus, this rant is so eerily similar to one I read 25 years ago when someone explained why they stopped using C and started using C++ that I wouldn't be surprised to find that you are the same one who was complaining back then.
How much extra do you get paid to drink the corporate koolaid? I ask this because some of the most miserable people I know were the kind of people that were all-in on serving the corporation at all costs only for it to burn through everything else in their life, especially when they get laid off.
Thanks, that's good info. I found this thread from an ex Opera employee and to your point, they could have kept on with Presto, but didn't [1]. What remains true is that bad management chased profits and found a better path to more revenue by caving to webkit and Chromium. So it wasn't strictly unsustainable so much as outcompeted by better economics that came from abandoning Presto. I consider the soul of Opera to be gone at this point and the amount of personal integrity and vision it takes to swim against the current of short term revenue is another manifestation of unfavourable browser economics for sustaining an independent engine.
Hiding your use of AI will only make things worse when people find out. Look at how badly the CEO of Saber Interactive is crashing out after they lied about firing a writer to replace them with AI.
But in the absence of a reliable signal (which I doubt this is anyway, so I'm speaking hypothetically), lots of people will get their work dismissed as AI-generated when it isn't.
People should not be dismissing other people's work at all, AI generated or not.
If you're looking for signals, it's because you want to do something based on the result. Maybe people should work on getting rid of that impulse instead.
> People should not be dismissing other people's work at all, AI generated or not.
It depends on what the nature of the work is. If it's a work where technical soundness is the most important thing, then I agree. The criteria should be whether or not the work is sound.
But not everything is like that. Take fine art, for instance, where being human-made is a core part of its value.
It's fine to appreciate human art for what it is. I can empathize with the idea that the art is an external expression of the author's mind. The output of the weights of the author's brain, if you will.
I absolutely draw the line at thoughtlessly dismissing AI art as "slop" though.
> I absolutely draw the line at thoughtlessly dismissing AI art as "slop" though.
Fair enough. I don't call it "slop" unless it is, and slop can certainly be made without involving computers. But genAI has without question made slop very easy to generate and so we're seeing quite a lot more of it these days.
I'm just saying why genAI art, sloppy or not, is of no interest to me and why I get angry when I've been deceived about it. Watermarking, if it were possible to reliably do (which I think it isn't), would solve that particular issue by making deception impossible. Without a reliable signal, a lot of stuff made after a certain date will inevitably and necessarily be suspect. Not saying that's right or wrong, just that it is. Maybe think of it as the audience being self-protective.
A reliable signal might even make acceptance of machine-generated art easier, by eliminating or reducing the chances that people will feel tricked.
If you're a gamer: Have you seen the amount of AI slop on Steam? Or the amount of poorly created translations banged out with AI? Or the amount of shitty decomps appearing daily developed with Claude? People are looking for signals because AI usage is a strong signal of poor quality trash. You are not going to overcome that barrier by complaining it's being made obvious of it or complaining that people are being 'prejudiced', the only way you will overcome it is by proving you have something of actual worth. And if you can't prove that, then maybe you need to reevaluate what you are creating.
> Yes, I understand you want to dismiss works based purely on provenance without actually evaluating it on its merits.
I have gone over almost 20,000 games on Steam because I focus on indie game curation. If you have actually paid attention around you to the kinds of things people are throwing out there then you would understand. I have seen games that literally do not function with a bunch of generated assets [1], games whose sole providence is combining generated hollow art with a generated hollow story [2]. You are dealing with thousands of people who are doing exactly the same thing as you, with the same quality and the same reasoning. Your work can and will get filtered out along with the rest of them because you are using the same signal in the same way.
> Games are literally one of the absolute best uses for this tech. Someone is going to figure out a way to leverage this stuff as a first class function of the gameplay. Player directed assets or procedural world creation, dynamic quests like never before seen. They're going to hit the nail on the head and produce a banger with this tech and the landscape is never going to be the same again.
I see the AI boosters say this over and over again. People do not want it. Games have tried the whole dynamic NPC stuff along with generated quests and it's immersion breaking and more importantly, not fun.
People definitely want it. I can say I want to see it happen. Also people don't know to want what they don't know exists.
There just hasn't been the Edison light-bulb/Watt's steam engine/Apple iPhone moment yet. I'm not even sure generative AI is capable of it yet but I see the potential there. While not all dynamic games are "not fun" (lotta people really like Rimworld) that kind of content tends to feel flat, like the never-ending quests in Skyrim. But I think it's easy to squint and see how those shallow Skyrim quests could become far more interesting with a system that was capable of basically writing a story as you play.
IMHO It's only a matter of time before someone gets it right.
i think good dynamic quests will eventually be a thing but not coming from gen AI or old school complicated rule books. if you generate the whole thing with a LLM you get a lot of results that make no sense. if you go with a deterministic rule based generator or a constraint solver you get low diversity because the rules are fixed.
my solution is a hybrid approach using a machine learning model trained to estimate player ratings for a quest script. you have a simple RNG that generates a ton of different script, the model picks out the ones that are likely to be fun and you give one of them to the player.
the meta might be using all the methods (maybe not LLMs) together to get a result thats fun, logically consistent and even fits into a larger narrative. like tracking NPC relationships to assign a target for combat missions, coming up with extra plot twists along the way then using ML to rate all the generated options.
The US has long gone in the direction of abject mistrust in government agencies, which means large projects are just not feasible. Companies can't pick up the slack either; if they can't build out a new shopping mall without falling over themselves and cutting extreme corners then we shouldn't expect them to handle nuclear power either.
This is false and easily provable by simply looking at the location on the map [1]. It's very clear that it's being built near housing and schooling. Especially a big deal as there's been more recent cases of exceedingly loud data centers carrying noise quite a distance.
The only houses I see are across a busy highway (101). The location is in an industrial park with nothing behind it. You’re not wrong, for large values of “near”, but not making a great case.
It's close enough when you consider that the noise from a poorly built data center (ie: most of the ones being stood up rapidly in the current AI craze) can carry noise upwards of a mile plus depending on a bunch of different factors. So a lot of homes in that area would potentially be within the blast radius of data center noise, especially at night.
If noise is the concern then regulate noise. Don’t restrict data centers.
If someone’s house has a dog that barks continuously, you aren’t going to say building houses here are restricted. Instead you restrict barking dogs, which is what cities do.
And how is that more or less likely then companies ignoring city zoning laws, or making cities grant zoning exceptions through kickbacks and corruption?
Much more likely! Zoning exceptions can be opposed and construction is very visible, as with this trend we're starting to see. Whereas once a structure is built the owner will stymie attempts at investigation by denying access, and generally has more resources than a municipality to waste endless time in court. If they're politically connected at the state/national level, they can even nullify existing pollution laws or override local ordinances.
It looks to me like it’s several hundreds of meters away from housing, with a 6-lane divided and controlled-access highway between the housing and the site.
You’re right that it does appear to be near a school (I don’t think anything that contradicts anything else I said). I think the health effects of siting a school right on a major highway are much more serious than being near a data center.
> UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.
If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.
Pension systems don't have a huge effect on the incentive to work. They have some effect but not enough to collapse the system. But we could possibly see a collapse in the future in a country like Italy.
By the way, I support some level of rich-to-poor redistribution, not sure what's the optimal level but to get a reasonable range of where the optimum could be, look at the top 20 countries.
There's a difference between a plan someone worked and paid into and one where you never have to work and get to free ride on someone who does
But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers
I think if the ethos of hackernews has become supporting the MIC because they create nerd shit or to be contrarian then this site has long since lost the way.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
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