Some of us are on visa and have our online presence routinely scanned these days. Asymmetric vuln. If that's not you, why are you upset when it is acknowledged?
Quick reminder to my fellows that if you discuss this story here, it will end up immutable and available to law enforcement and, e.g., H1B eligibility deciders.
because, intentionally or otherwise, your joke is 'too on the nose', as comedians put it, and 'will the oceans boil first' is, unfortunately, not an unreasonable question to ask, as during any positive feedback loop there is the chance for it to go into runaway. The second planet in our solar system likely experienced just such a cascading change, for example. Earth hasn't gone there before, or we wouldn't be talking (that so-called 'weak anthropic effect' Stephen Hawking was on about in _A Brief History of Time_,) but there is no a priori reason to think it _couldn't_, given a sufficient carbon pulse.
That said, we're more likely looking at more of a prehistoric scenario, near as I can suss, which would be more like, 'most high-metabolism creatures can't hack it, but at least you get some really cool massive dragonflies!'. This is emphatically a place we've been before, and, given all the prehistoric carbon now in every breath, a place we will likely be seeing again, and soon.
I'm very sorry about your planet and you have my condolences.
Ah, yes, an urbanist telling me to sell the thing that allows me to live far enough away from the metropole such that I can afford a home, which, in turn, is now the only alternative available to a pension, and those, famously, no longer exist for nearly all workers. Factor that in, and selling your car gets you short-term gains in exchange for several decades of poverty at the other end.
Friends, we are going to need to do better than, "have enough money not to put your head in the money-stealing bear trap." We all know it's expensive to be poor. That's what just poverty is; noticing this does not mean you get to stop paying for it.
And I say this as an urbanist, with progressive politics, in a city well-serviced by public transit.
Honestly there are worse things to write about. I too am a hard nerd who migrated from backend to frontend and dabbled in design. The discovery of typography, design rules, graphing principles, etc. felt to me like a revelation far outstripping the initial project(s) that inspired them. I read _The Elements of Typographic Style_ (Bringhurst) and Tufte and I read Nielsen's blog every day (back when it was at useit.com).
I wish in retrospect I'd written an article like this one; the wonder is genuine, and the satisfaction from the discovery of heretofore-invisible but trivially demonstrable rules is significant.
Finally, would point out that the author of this piece currently does not have any cards for sale, because they are sold out. :) So not only would it be ethically _ok_ to write an interesting piece that as a side-effect did some art self-promotion (if that were for example the reason the cards sold out,) but we know that, now and going forward, this article _cannot serve as a sales funnel_ because there is nothing being sold!
So, no, this article is fine and the cards are very interesting. I wish I'd been able to order a set, frankly
As someone who has been describing things as 'load-bearing' as something like a signature phrase for about twenty years, I'm beyond miffed that Claude has ruined my whole gimmick.
A new catchphrase every twenty years is hardly sustainable at my age :)
So you're saying companies correctly estimated the need to cut staff to remain competitive and did so -- or at least, some state of affairs empirically indistinguishable from this. Not much of an argument, sorry to say
So did typesetting. But now nobody wants me to ink pages with my bins of moveable type, so I have to go be smart somewhere else, in another field, where everyone is leagues ahead of me in all the ways that count.
Signed,
a fictitious 18th century typesetter, perhaps the best and smartest there ever was
Depends on the bigco IMO. I'm not sure what kind of layoff numbers for Year Three of genAI would grab your attention, but I assure you, hundreds of thousands have mine.
Fuck. If the tea is true, this is such a gross way of handling it. I get that they're in an existential battle rn, but they have just Streisand-Effected their own technological pusillanimity.
"Normal" here requires a time bound. I would say it's pretty abnormal if the window is "the last thirty years", and pretty normal if it's "the last thirty days."
Ads first, then surveillance, as always. Also, recall that there is no confidentiality privilege when talking to an AI; any proprietary cloud-hosted model gathers text to be read out in court. You can now have your convo about your ex wife read out by your ex wife, in front of a judge.
Finally, recall that the unique conditions that kept the USA from developing a culture of political disappearances and kangaroo courts seem to have ended. The state will love knowing who is thinking about abortion, for example, or attending a protest.
Just like it already does, but with so much more detail!
The barrier to getting a traditional therapist is enormous - for some problems you're looking at years, maybe decades of treatment, at anywhere from $150-250 a pop.
In the USA techworld, your insurance will likely not cover this unless you are fortunate enough to still be on a gold plated FAANG plan. (For now.) If you're elsewhere, or working elsehow, then it is often even less likely.
A second barrier, is the difficulty in finding patient-therapist fit; IMO it's worse than trying to find a kidney donor, unless your problems are very mundane (litmus: does a Hallmark card cover this?)
So, access to real therapy is already hard to secure. Talk bots offer a convenient and affordable alternative. Most people will thus be fobbed off on bots that are also snitches, sycophants, and occasionally incite violence and self-harm, but that's what we have personal responsibility for, hmm? It's terribly convenient for mis-ascribing blame.
Finally, there is every reason to expect that for many people there is no "transference" or deep therapeutic emotional connection with LLM therapy, and, if there is one, it's an attack surface now.
In other words, the new "therapy" will be risky, ineffective, manipulative and sycophantic, so it will, in the best case scenario, do nothing, and in the worst, quite a bit of harm.
You have a great narrative there, with villians and deception, and sensible heroes who dismiss the nonsense with fresh air and clear heads.
But do look at the actual data. The AMOC slowing is ahead of schedule. Carbon use is down, but atmospheric carbon is accelerating (!) , strongly suggesting that there are now active feedback loops.
"Ha! It is Tuesday and I am not yet dead! Those silly doctors!" Feels good to shout, but won't see you through Sunday.
Trust me, the climate is in as rough a shape as those so-called extremists would have you believe. You can quite literally read it off the veniers, or at least we could until we hired a strong man to smash them.
Nuclear is another matter -- I reckon the European anti-nuclear movement set climate change ahead by at least several years, but these days the cost/benefit leans solar, as political unrest pairs poorly with nuclear hazards, as Ukraine has learned in the past five years.
Nevertheless, the UK's administrative class' fetish for "sensible" solutions works great except during a generational upheaval, when they can't (to borrow a metaphor from aviation) see the horizon and must trust their instruments and the data they deliver.
It's the same here in Canada, I am sorry to report. A Commonwealth cultural tic we would all best be mindful of, lest we wear sensible shoes that take us all the way to calumny.
"Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.
I've been thinking lately that what underpinned the FOSS golden age was not actually decentralized VCS and high-quality forges, nor even ZIRP, but rather peacetime.
After a period of branches and patchsets, full national hard forks are going to become de rigeur, and linux-derived OSes across the world are going to bloom necessarily, as we no longer have the kind of ambient trust required to collaborate across borders.
Look forward to Euro-linux, Sino-BSD, and I guess probably some sort of GCC-area build as well.
Patches will be accepted across national boundaries with only the highest scrutiny, which itself will likely be provided by nationalized AI platforms.