• 14 Posts
  • 327 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.

    Sure, over the course of like 200 years. Can you not see how that is fundamentally different?

    There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford

    “Afford” is doing a lot of work in your sentence. How do you think people are going to be able to afford more? Workers aren’t going to be making more money, and the workers who enter these professions are going to be making a lot less money.

    Labor force participation is a better metric here

    No, it really isn’t.
    Labour force participation rate is “how many working age people want a job” even if they’re unemployed.
    Unemployment rate tells you “how much of the labour force can get a job” which is what we actually care about. Can you get a job if you want one. More people need jobs (as you have shown) but fewer percentage of those people are able to get jobs (as I’ve shown).\


  • The automation that AI is promising (but not necessarily delivering) is fundamentally different than the automation that came before.

    Remember; the luddites were right but their industry was small enough that the displaced labour could be absorbed by other industries.

    Not only is AI affecting almost every artistic and white-collar industry, but the cap-ex barrier to entry is way lower than for any other automation effort in the past. No need to buy expensive machines, or create whole new production lines just to test it out. Computers used to take up an entire room to do the work of a handful of people. If you can increase productivity but there is no associated increase in demand, then what you get is layoffs.

    The amount of workers that this has the potential to displace far outstrips the industry/economy/society’s ability to replace with “new careers” (that we’ve yet to see materialize). And I challenge your assertion that automation has resulted in increased demand for human labour, do we significantly less unemployment on average? Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.

    What we have seen is a total gutting of employee bargaining power.




  • Pangolin is built on traefik, and does all the reverse proxying I need (X sub-domain goes to Y port on Z home server).

    I don’t really like the idea of n metroyska reverse proxis, both because conceptually it bothers me, but also because my needs seem simple and doesn’t seem like it deserves the extra complexity. The public resource reverse proxy works for everything I have.

    I’m looking for a way to configure pangolin, which already routes property, to skip auth when the auth can be provided by the pangolin client.














  • What is your argument that that phase of boyhood is nature rather than nurture?

    Kids that age are typically emulating their older peers, and things they’ve seen at school, in media, at home, in public, etc. if anything, I think that the behaviour difference we observe between adolescent boys and girls suggests that kids absorb gender roles very early. Even from before they can walk, the typical common toy selection differs greatly; girls get toys that teach them about working with people and caring, but get toys that teach them about manual labour(?!?!). Even if you don’t do that with your children, at school and daycare they’re surrounded by kids who are raised like that.

    When my son was a preschooler, he loved to wear dresses, but as he approached school age he would wear them less and less, and completely stopped since he started school. I don’t think he grew out of it and we didn’t tell him to stop, but he learned that lesson from his peers.

    All the abilities that set humans apart from other animals are social in nature, humans evolved to help each other (at least in small groups)



  • I did a better job explaining my position in another comment, the problem is one of culture. We live in a culture that pressures people to use AI in this bad way, and pressures the creators of AI to court bad people as customers, and throw away their ethics. If we weren’t in a rat race, I feel like a lot of the problems would go away.

    But we live in the culture that we live in, and at some point you simply cannot practically view the technology in isolation.


  • I think that the problem, in both cases, is culture.

    It’s not that either of those are bad, or bad for people; it’s bad for people of this culture or people of this society. It’s how the two intersect that is the problem.

    It could be a tool that lifts up the worker or creative, but instead it’s a tool to devalue the creative and extract power and wealth.
    It highlights that people with power get a different set of rules and laws than the rest of us, and they’re using that to further entrench and enrich themselves.