> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).

I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world? Because in this one, if you don't have labor worth buying or anyone to buy it, you don't eat.

>I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world?

You're likely to hear this sentiment from rich and privileged SV entrepreneurs and people who were handed six-figure salaries right out of school, and who have never had a realistic view of how most people live. People who only continue to work to satisfy their intellect and lifestyle.

You don't hear this sentiment from normal people.

> Wired up Claude for response generation — The retrieved documents get passed as context to Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) along with a strict system prompt: answer only from the knowledge base, keep responses short and conversational, and if you don’t know — say so and offer to take a message. No hallucinations allowed.

Claude will hallucinate anyway, sometimes.

I don't think there's any way around this other than a cli or MCP that says "press the 'play prerecorded .WAV file button that says the brake repair service info and prices.'"

I recently re read Walkaway and it made me yearn for an offline-first internet, where every computer is a node, and nodes are constantly refreshing each other's cache when they get the chance (the network works), but otherwise are basically mirroring much of the internet.

oh, thanks! you just sparked me to reread this, such a good book.

Not necessarily, basically the majority of our technology is the result of a very, very brief period of innovation.

So long as we don't forget that it's important to wash our hands and clean out wounds with soap, we're already centuries out of the middle ages.

The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community.

Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.

The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.

> Business problems are essentially neverending

That feels overly optimistic. LLMs seems on track to automate out basically any "email job" or "spreadsheet job," in which case we'll be looking at higher unemployment numbers than the great depression for at least some period of time. Combine with increased automation...

There are a LOT of people in the world and already a not insignificant portion can't find work despite wanting to. Seems the most likely thing is that the value of most labor is reduced to pennies.

Do you really think the billionaires are willing to have consumers so impoverished that they can’t continue to spend large sums of discretionary income buying the things that make the billionaires themselves richer?

They may not be, but even so they might find themselves in a prisoner's dilemma. I wouldn't rely in this logic for peace of mind.

Well what would each billionaire do? Give out money so that the poor can give some of it back?

You cannot just point at a system, say it’d be unsustainable and then assume nobody will let that happen.

Monarchies, lords, etc. have had much more reason to support their own countryfolk, yet many throughout history have not - has society changed enough that the billionaires have changed on this?

What evidence is there otherwise? That seems to be exactly what they want.

The impoverished are cheaper to enslave.

The billionaires are already billionaires. People like Sam Altman are not building a doomsday bunker because they believe in the longevity of established society. They are doing it because they've already won and are taking their ball.

I've read a theory that as the ultra rich divide their wealth among their descendants, eventually they capture so much of it among their families that trying to extract more from the working class is hardly worth the effort. The only option then, for the descendants of the ultra wealthy, is to start turning on each other. The theory states that the last time this happened was WWI.

Megacap investors already cargo cult business practices that reduce their own return and harm employees. This is why they all over-hired at the start of covid only to begin layoffs a couple of years later.

In summary: billionaires aren't as competent as you'd hope.

“The billionaires” are a boogeyman and not a cabal with all that much power in the west.

> Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.

The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding.

Making a bunch of money to turn around and spend on mosquito nets might seem to be making the world better, but on the other hand it also normalizes and enshrines the systems of oppression and injustice that created a world where someone can make 300,000$ a year typing "that didn't work, try again" into claude while someone else watches another family member die of malaria because they couldn't afford meds.

Nobody is asking about ethics or a fulfilling life. We are talking about maximum _impact_.

Impact only has meaning per a chosen framework to measure within. For example, if I apply my ethical system to measure the impact of an EA, they have essentially no impact, since all they do is perpetuate a system that is the root of the problems they're trying to solve.

To be frank that anti-system logic sounds a lot like. "Why are you taking a shower when there are people dying of thirst in a desert logic? Plumbing is an inherently unjust system for giving more water to those who already have enough!".

Yes there are flaws in the system, but smugly opting out of it and declaring yourself morally superior isn't helpful. Instead you need to actually do the work of understanding the system, its virtues and flaws before you can propose changes that would actually improve things.

Plumbing doesn't harm the people in the desert. Plumbing isn't an inherent bad.

The system of imperialism that enables some to starve while others eat is inherently bad and is propped up and legitimized when you act within its framework.

Adding plumbing to your house isn't saying "it's normal that people are dying of thirst." Structuring your impact around donations is, meanwhile, saying "though this system results in people starving while others throw away half their food, we can only solve these problems by working really hard within the rules this system defines, and then lending aid within the rules this system defines." After all, there's only one way to make money enough to be "impactful..."

This is a slightly tangential example, I don't want to be mistaken that I'm saying they're equivalent: Buying and freeing slaves is not a good form of activism when trying to overthrow slavery. It's doing the exact opposite: upholding the institution of slavery with every purchase. Legitimizing it and even in fact funding it. You tell yourself you're at least slightly reducing harm but in reality you're motivating slave catchers to go find more people to slave - and meanwhile btw you're doing nothing to address the fact that slave catchers in your own country are just grabbing the slaves you freed.

The only truly ethical choice for activism against slavery is to break chains and use violence against anyone that prevents you from breaking chains.

Again, not exactly equivalent, just an example of how "helping" can actually prop up the thing you think you're trying to take down.

> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year

I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.

We’d probably get better outcomes too.

For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

> Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!

I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?

The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.

Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.

I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.

It seems the job selects for those types. I suppose people interested in law enforcement / justice that aren't that way either end up as lawyers or working for the FBI or something.

If you don't have any kind of marketable skills yet want to make a decent living with plenty of benefits, becoming a LEO is the easiest choice for most people.

Or if you don't have any marketable skills yet have a spouse that has a job with health benefits, you can become a real estate agent.

Those two career paths seem to be the most chosen for almost all of the 'not so bright' folks I grew up with.

It's a use it or lose it skill. When you carry a badge and gun around and can bark orders at people all day and they have to comply or face the infinite violence you can summon with your radio your skin will grow thin over time.

Power corrupts, or some half baked version of that.

Other way around, right? Those types select that job. You're weak but you want to appear powerful, so...