Depending on what exactly this analysis means by Human Choices I either think it captured me well or got me completely wrong:
Human choices can make limited changes, but dominant forces constrain the outcome.
I actually believe Human Choice is the dominant force here. But I expect aggregate human choice to limit the changes a single individual can have on the global outcome.
I've given up on not buying "smart $thing". It seems nearly impossible in many cases. However I absolutely refuse to connect them to my wifi which mostly makes them "dumb" for me.
I have been searching for a good term or name for what we are actually buying. A "probabilistic search for a reasoning chain through a semantic space" is about as close as I've gotten and I have a feeling it's not exactly accurate either.
Personal responsibility leads to corporate responsibility which is the solve for structural problems. You can never impose a new structure to fix it unless you embrace some form of corporate responsibility which requires personal responsibility.
I don't really feel like permissions is the hard bit here. The hard bit is that for an agent to do any kind of useful work it needs access to a lot of stuff. Further, the stuff it needs access to probably has vulnerabilities the agent can do. We have not exactly designed our environments for a use case like this. I've gone through the sandboxing exercise for an agent and by the time I had given it enough permissions to do anything useful my sandbox looked like swiss cheese.
I keep seeing the same contradiction: people consider certain activities like "write code that me or my customers run" or "read my email", to be table stakes abilities for an agent. At the same time, they expect some kind of sandbox that prevents even a malicious agent from doing damage. You already gave it the most broad and powerful possible capabilities at the beginning though, there's not even a barn left to close the door on.
There are really just two ways to avoid the inflationary spiral. You can either increase income (i.e. grow gdp) or you can decrease spending (i.e. cut entitlements).
This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.
That sucks and I'm sure it feels hopeless. But there are ways forward you can investigate. Look for a local community you can plug into. Ease into them and after some time you will be able to make the kind of connections you need.
My personal preference is a local church but there are other options out there. Club's around a shared interest you have. Community center events in your area. It's won't be quick and it won't be easy but you can reverse this.
The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.
The important part is the quality of the code, how well-considered its design is, how well it gels with existing code, how readable it is to other humans, how well documented it is, how well its author understands it (and thus, can make surgical changes if needed), and how well it was tested.
A PR that implements a sought out feature or bug fix can be practically worthless if it doesn’t check some percentage of those boxes. The line differs per project naturally, but almost nobody wants a PR that is missing all of them.
That might be true of the raw, unknowable "true" value of the thing, but that's not the same as what people are willing to pay for a thing.
When one evaluates a purchase, implicit in that evaluation is the option to do the work one's self. If the price you are offering a thing is more than the cost of doing it myself, then I will not buy from you.
LLM coding proponents keep saying that it reduces the cost of development to near-zero. We keep hearing about all the "things we wouldn't have done before because it was just too expensive to get people to do it."
If this is true, any day now, the customers and clients and consumers are going to catch wise and start doing it for themselves. I mean, it's been almost a year since LLMs supposedly "10x'd" everyone's productivity. I'm still waiting to see where all this singularity is, so I doubt it actually is true. But it doesn't mean you're going to achieve ungodly margins on your software sales, especially when we're talking about open source software. Value absolutely does have a component that is the cost of the inputs.
This is impossible until a critical mass of voters across every state starts putting competence and integrity ahead of their pet issue and populism. If you actually want to start making headway in this direction you have to stop voting for candidates in either of the main parties. The parties are probably not salvageable. Find a third party candidate with these qualities and vote for them and convince as many people as you can to vote for them.
If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.
Realistically, the option that will actually work for you is to fight within Democrat primaries. The absolute best case is you get a Mamdani. (Note this means accepting a bit of populism, because ultimately it's a popularity contest). Third parties are going nowhere due to the coordination problem.
(NB: this is meaningfully different in the UK which has really multi-party elections despite Westminster elections being FPTP)
Choose the worst Democratic politician currently in office and please explain what they’ve done or said that is in any way comparable to what the Republican Party is doing.
This is completely missing the point. Structurally I don't believe either party is set up to allow truly quality candidates to succeed. They optimize for all the wrong things in their candidates. Candidates who are quality that get through tend to be exceptions. Picking the worst of either side is just furthering the "We can't vote for good candidates because they might lose to whoever we believe is the worst candidate on the other side" narrative. The only way out is to stop buying into that narrative in a large enough number.
I think that’s some pretty thin gruel. The Democratic Party is hardly perfect. But that’s true of every political party on the planet. There are some grifters, some incompetent, and some corrupt Democrats. But by and large, Democratic politicians do seem to genuinely try to do their jobs. They seem to be at least somewhat receptive, as well. And crucially, they hold their own to account. Get caught with gold bars in your suitcase? Bye. Have women with credible accusations of sexual misconduct against you? Sayonara. There also are many very competent democratic politicians doing solid jobs across the country: Senator Van Hollen, Senator Ossoff, AOC, James McGovern, Baltimore’s mayor Brandon Scott, etc. I see no reason to pretend they’re unworkable. And to suggest “eh, both sides suck” has always felt incredibly lazy and nihilistic to me.
Care about third party options? There are current Democrats advocating for ranked choice voting. The RNC rejects ranked choice. And there are many GOP states that have outright banned ranked choice voting. There’s a party that’s clearly better for your interests.
You're missing the point. The harris administration wouldn't have had even 1% of the damage we are seeing. No 50% tariffs on Canada. No Iran war. No family members get bank charters and $600 million DoD contracts. I could go on and on. Biden was never remotely close to what his worst critics predicted nor was Obama. This admin has been far worse than even the most hyperbolic criticism predicted. American leadership and place in the world is permanently weaker now. It won't ever be the same and we will be poorer over the next few generations more isolated and sink into a position of parity if we are lucky.
The Biden administration left an economy that was the envy of the world. Leadership that was trusted and a series of impressive bipartisan legislation from the CHIPs act to the infrastructure bill that set us on a good trajectory for the coming changes. Obama did the same, if we had continued the emphasis on building a solar industry our AI build out would be better positioned now we are behind China by a massive degree.
But hunter Biden sold a few painting? And democrats take corporate contributions so it's all equally bad? That doesn't match the data, results or predictions people make before administrations take over.
Three Republicans started three wars in the middle east and caused three spikes in oil prices.
Three democrats started 0 wars and over saw reduced deficits, landmark legislation like Obamacare, build back better, CHIPs, etc. And would have had even more accomplished if the Trans pacific partnership trade area had been continued the Iran nuclear agreement remained in effect, the solar investments been expanded the EVV subsidies expanded.
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