I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.
AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.
Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
"But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance."
Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
Could that change, though? It's 20% slower now, but could it be 10% faster than the human in the future? 20% faster? Or even 50% or 80% faster? I really don't know, but it's plausible.
Even today, consider that the GP's quote is trading human time/energy for external time/energy (even if the latter is greater). Manually doing a complex refactoring can be a tedious, annoying, draining, error-prone process. I don't enjoy it, and after doing it, I'll be annoyed and prickly and not feeling a bit intellectually dulled. If it takes me "only" 2 hours to do it myself, but takes the LLM 2 hours and 24 minutes, I might logically make that trade if it meant I could keep myself sharp and un-annoyed, and also perhaps get in some light reading while the LLM is doing its thing.
(In fact I am literally doing that exact thing right now, having an LLM do a refactoring while I write this comment. Maybe dicking around on HN isn't the best use of my time, but it's better than tediously shuffling existing code around, even if I can do that faster than the LLM.)
> And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)
> and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.
There are plenty of other countries, with different cultures, and different expectations for how things should work. France for instance, is known for having unions that strike, frequently. Socialism isn't a evil concept in some countries. When America has been co-opted by various factions, why would it be up to the "Yanks" to show the rest of the world the way?
The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years. Over the last 100 years, France went from one of the richest countries in the world to somewhere with a median (not mean) GDP that is considerably lower than Mississippi's. Probably not the example you think it is.
That being said, if nobody has a job, nobody can afford the stuff being sold then everything collapses. Acting like that isn't true isn't rational either.
> The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years.
Their finances aren't in great shape, but if you think the ECB will let that happen, I have a bridge to sell you. (And the need for a bailout is far from a foregone conclusion.)
> a median (not mean) GDP
That's not a measure anyone uses for anything, so not sure how that's relevant.
But sure, let's go with the idea that Mississippi is "better off" on this metric. GDP per capita (which is a mean, not a median) is not a good proxy for standard of living. A French person working 35 hours per week living modestly might be much happier with less money than someone from Mississippi working 3 jobs, 6 or 7 days a week, for a total of 60 hours, who doesn't really have the time for "living" at all, modestly or otherwise.
(I'm being generous to you when I say "might be" there. What I really mean is "almost certainly is".)
> The male Trump voters actually rated having children as number one among 12 or 13 different options. Nobody else had it up that high. Not any of the women, no matter how they voted. And not male Harris voters, either.
> The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain.
> When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did.
> [...] Surely SpaceX has created all that shareholder value more because Musk does what he wants than in spite of Musk doing what he wants; it is hard to accidentally create $1.75 trillion of value. SpaceX’s shareholders signed up for this deal — letting Musk cook — and have been rewarded;
The complaint here isn't from SpaceX investors. It's from retail investors that are being forced to buy SpaceX stock on an accelerated timeline as part of the ETFs they likely purchased so that they would not be overly exposed to volatile single stock picks. The article isn't explicit on this point, instead vaguely gesturing to the series of mega IPOs coming and pointing out that retail clients need to plan for this.
There is a game being played here where the various indexes (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.) are trying to sweeten the deal to attract big entries like SpaceX (and later OpenAI, Anthropic). The sugar they are giving is an accelerated timeline and inflated spot in the index (3x float rule). That sugar is paid for by retail investors, who may get squeezed when their index funds pay a high price for a small float of public shares, all on predictable days.
Before you say that retail investors should simply buy SpaceX themselves prior to the 15-day index inclusion, realize that retail investors also don't have access to shares at the IPO offer price. That benefit is reserved for large investors, private equity, etc. While it is possible that some retail investors will take this gamble and win, many will be taking a large risk.
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