You hung up a “services offered” flyer on every town square around the world and want to control what people do with the information after you’ve shouted it into the void? Don’t post if you don’t want every tom, dick, or jAIne reading your stuff.
There are two internets: the one on your phone (ruined by outrage and mobile slop) and the one on your computer (ruined by marketing slop). They’re both dangerous and disappointing for different reasons - but mostly because independent voices got drowned out.
Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield.
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
What do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.
Sheriffs are elected (except in New York City, Rhode Island and Hawaii) and responsible for a county whereas a police chief manages law enforcement in a city or town and is appointed by its local government.
> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
Elon Musk fully tweaked out and I believe banned his twitter account. There’s some people who think he bought out twitter purely for this power, to unilaterally ban people who annoy him. He also offered some money for the kid to take it down, which he refused. It was really not enough money if I remember correctly, maybe 10,000 dollars. Me personally, if I was squeezed to give up my conviction, I’d at least want to maximize my profit.
I agree with you about juniors and remote work - but like everything else: just figure it out.
Your customers aren't sitting next to you several times a week, yet they have no problem paying you and expecting you to get your job done. Sure, you might need to meet in person a couple of times a year but if you're smart enough to use a computer you can figure out how to work with someone in a different location. The issue is probably not the distance.
Yes, much like the “we’re all family but we’re reducing headcount by…”
Treat people like professionals: admit that you did a bad job but that you’d rather protect yourself and not give up any of your salary/benefits and instead you are going to layoff your “family”.
It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain.
American electricity costs a very low. What they've gone up is nothing its a drop in the bucket compared to the damage from the tariffs and middle east war. Populists settle on this issue because its malicious. They are Accelerationists
I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project.
I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?
3D printing is a good comparison - it allows almost anyone to make things, but in the end very few do.
Another example is when the WWW first became available, and suddenly everyone COULD be a publisher (browsers even included built-in HTML editors), and for a while MySpace pages proliferated until the excitement died down and people went back to being media consumers.
I expect we'll see the same thing with consumer use of generative AI. Suddendly everyone is generating 3-D worlds/games with Fable because they can, but I expect that just as with the web the novelty will wear off and they'll leave it up to the pros.
Professional use of GenAI, and coding in particular, is certainly here to stay, but it seems we're still in the early experimental/hype phase. At least tokenmaxxing has passed, and it seems most companies are now paying attention to, and limiting, how much they are spending, but it doesn't seem we've yet progressed to the stage where companies are paying attention to what they are actually getting out of it - is the money spent showing up on the bottom line in the form of increased revenues.
A comparison I find useful here is Excel (and spreadsheets in general). Those enabled huge numbers of non-programmers to build software-like things, while the demand for expert developers grew enormously at the same time.
It’s terrible and depressing work to take vibe coded garbage and make it a real product. There will be demand, but good engineers won’t want to touch it. And people paying will think they did the hard work so why pay a good rate?
These are all very neat things and I’m very pleased to see the hacker spirit move into AI, but I gotta admit - some of this just comes across as “what did you print with your printer?”
Another recent thread mentioned that AI has helped devs build better “shop jigs.” This seems to be where the rubber is meeting the road for AI-powered development. So maybe more people will be developing custom tooling for their own little problems but you still need reliable, deterministic, interchangeable tools to realize the value of all these shop jigs.
Unfortunately many states (north eastern states that spread salt on their roads I’m looking at you) have rolled back their safety inspections - but this is the perfect application of a reasonable state-sanctioned activity. Tax tires, inspect vehicles, write fixit tickets, and let insurance handle the rest of the edge cases where deadbeats caused harm with their slick-tired jalopies.
I mean…I guess. But this is ridiculous - how many layers does our technology need to bash through to update two records on remote systems? I get that value is being added at some point - but just charge some micropayment for transactions. This is just too much.
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