This is very cool. I concur on the conclusion that we'll soon see a lot more use of AI coding tools in gov as people discover what can be done with all these existing data sets. Would love to see more resources put into creating and publishing them. I'm sure there's plenty of ways for govs to make their money back on the data these days with some creative licensing.
Tangential, but I'm also a little obsessed with taking municipal data and turning it into something else. Lately I've been building an online open world game built on Philadelphia's terrain. It similarly uses a Philly LIDAR scan, the land use maps, the street data, building lots, and a few other sources to make the game map.
There's a signup but it doesn't validate or anything I just haven't gotten around to making a demo mode. Any fake email will do: https://cityrider.jpsmaps.com/. The general idea is to pick up trash around Philly to power/build other fun things like your jet pack and ramps. Buy properties and customize the facades. Run from Gritty. It's been a blast, and while not conservation, I believe what is effectively a littering PSA to be a worthy output of my time ha.
You can also click on many trees to see what they are, as most are from the Philly Tree Inventory (though more are added to fill out forest areas for style reasons).
to me it is just market pressure to exploit the high stress on laborers atm. the level of uncertainty today is only a problem if you don't have a ton of existing capital, which everyone in charge does. so they are insulated and can treat people poorly without repercussions. in a market that prefers short term profits, they will then do this in order to make more money right now.
companies must do this, 'cause if they don't then their competition will (i.e. the pressure)
of course, we can collectively decide to equally value labor and profit, as a symbiotic relationship that incentivizes long term prosperity. but where's the memes in that
We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days
I thought about that, but anecdotally i know many renters addicted to Robinhood. i think housing prices and therefore the cash necessary to get a loan have shifted this divide a bit
I agree, I think this is a longer way to say what I was feeling. It's a rigamarole by people with too much money. If they had less money, they wouldn't be able to do it. So at the end of the day the root cause to me is the inequality. it allows special treatment and the ability to manipulate our daily life (through social apps, news, etc) in a way that they are completely insulated from, feeling no pain whatsoever. Huge policy failure to let so few people have so much influence
We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547
The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.
IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
I suspect this ends up being pretty important for the next advancements in AI, specifically LLM-based AI. To me, the transformer architecture is a sort of compression algorithm that is being exploited for emergent behavior at the margins. But I think this is more like stream of consciousness than premeditated thought. Eventually I think we figure out a way to "think" in latent space and have our existing AI models be just the mouthpiece.
In my experience as a human, the more you know about a subject, or even the more you have simply seen content about it, the easier it is to ramble on about it convincingly. It's like a mirroring skill, and it does not actually mean you understand what you're saying.
LLMs seem to do the same thing, I think. At scale this is widely useful, though, I am not discounting it. Just think it's an order of magnitude below what's possible and all this talk of existing stream-of-consciousness-like LLMs creating AGI seems like a miss
IMO the best innovations tend to happen when someone has their hands bound and has no other choices but to figure out a new way or die. Now seems like an incredible time for new models and startup paradigms.
To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.
But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.
My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.
Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.
Then you might be missing it as it’s a huge huge issue for below the line workers (actors are part of the package we’re shipping out to other countries)
my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.
To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.
The "tariff" we're talking about here would be for where the labor comes from. If a EU film company is choosing to film in the US instead of at home for cost reasons, then sure they can put a tariff on that somehow to keep it local. I don't think that's happening in any meaningful way, but it is in the reverse to the detriment of thousands and thousands of local jobs in LA, ATL, NY, etc.
you can see everyone willfully ignoring this here, which makes me nervous about actually solving this problem long term. I used to dream of screenwriting and that dream is almost certainly dead but I'd like to see others have a chance. It looks bleak now
i don't ask ppl who they voted for because i've learned it's not a good signal on whether they are nice or a good person. life is complicated. i didn't vote for trump though, so at least this village idiot has a clean conscience and just isn't interested in reliving 2017
Especially about planes, billiards, or baseball!!