• 1 Post
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Testing for genetic defects is very different from the Gattaca-premise of most everything about a person being genetically deterministic, with society ordered around that notion. My point was that such a setting is likely inherently impossible, since “heritability” doesn’t work like that; the most techbros can do is LARP at it, which, granted, can be very dangerous on its own – the fact that race is a social construct doesn’t preclude racism and so on. But there’s no need to get frightened by science fiction when science facts tell a different story.




  • Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

    If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

    Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

    What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

    What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”




  • the only future in that direction is one where they’re doing a much more painful version of the same job (programming against cookie cutter LLM code) for much, much less pay.

    To the extent that LLMs actually make programming more “productive”, isn’t the situation analogous to the way the power loom was bad for skilled handweavers whilst making textiles more affordable for everyone else?

    I should perhaps say that I’m saying this as someone who is just starting out as a web developer (really chose the right time for that, hah). I try to avoid LLMs and even strictly unnecessary libraries for now because I like learning about how everything works under the hood and want to get an intimate grasp of what I’m doing, but I can also see that ultimately that’s not what people pay you for that and that once you’ve built up sufficient skill to quickly parse LLM output, the demands of the market may make using them unavoidable.

    To be honest, I feel as conflicted & anxious about it all as others already mentioned. Maybe I am just too green to fully understand the value that I would eventually bring, but can I really, in good conscience, say that a customer should pay me more when someone else can provide a similar product that’s “good enough” at a much lower price?

    Sorry for being another bummer. :(