I don’t understand the Scrum one. Scrum is also agile with short development cycles, and prioritizes communication with the product owners and stakeholders.

I’ve never heard of lean development, but not a fan of “lean manufacturing,” at least not the way it’s commonly implemented in the U.S. (using primarily temp workers so they can ramp up and down their workforce as needed; and it also exacerbates supply-chain problems).

you can buy a house even on a median salary or lower.

I think think this very regionally dependant. Median household income and house cost in Austin, for example, is ~$70k and ~$650k, respectively. I grew up in a very small rural town, very far from any cities, and even though houses were much cheaper, they were still unaffordable to most people unless they could land one of the few available union jobs (most jobs available were in manufacturing and paid near minimum wage).

Things may be getting better, slightly, for the median person, but inequality is soaring, and a more dangerous problem IMO. Money is power, so inequality is a direct threat to democracy. It’s also inequality, not poverty, that has the largest effect on crime rates, and social decohesion in general.

Smarttube works well on my android TV. Comes with adblock and sponsorblock enabled. I’d bet my TV is spying on me in some way, so yeah, PC and TV disconnected from the Internet would probably be better.

Server side rendering looks like it could be useful. I imagine SSR could be used for graceful degradation, so what would normally be a single page application could work without Javascript. Though, I’ve never tried SSR, and nobody seems to care about graceful degradation anymore.

Yeah, that’s my thinking as well. All these billionaires seem to be becoming doomsday preppers (Zuck, Altman, etc).

After reading about “effective accelerationism,” which many of these people seem to subscribe to, I think they’re worried “technocapitalism” and AI will cause a collapse of society. I.e. they’re purposely funding and promoting projects they think will cause a societal collapse. It’s a really wierd cult-like ideology and worldview. I think they’ve fallen for their own grifts.

But yeah, I’m personally more worried about the destruction of U.S. institutions (which Trump and Republicans publicly admit they plan to do), and the potential social unrest, federal-state conflict, and economic havoc it may cause.

They wouldn’t against Israel, for the same reasons they wouldn’t against the U.S. if the U.S. did the same. I’m pretty sure the U.S. is violating international law ATM in regards to the border they share with Mexico, and I expect no action will be taken against them.

Eh, I’m not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I’d probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don’t really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don’t plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I’d probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that’s my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.

Edit: I should say, I don’t think most people care so little about luxury and money as I do. My problem is not so much about people having wealth (though wealth is a limited resources, so that does mean others will not have it), but my problem is what people do to get such wealth. It usually involves deceiving your network of associates and exploiting your employees. I do not think most people would be ok with forcing their employees to shit in bags.

Yeah, I agree. Our economic system and some of our culture encourages and rewards antisocial behavior.

Nah, only about 5% of the population have antisocial personality disorders. That’s a lot of people, but not “most.”

Ah, a three star programmer.

Stuff that is used and immediately disposed of like trash bags, paper towels, and toilet paper. You need to be a little more careful with the cheapest trash bags and toilet paper, but it will still get the job done.

The difference between soda is very noticeable to me. Some store-brand sodas taste almost flat.

I can’t tell much a difference between wines of the same type. They taste slightly different, but I can’t say which taste “better.”

Cheap liquor seems “harsher” than more expensive liquor; even with vodka, which doesn’t really have a taste. The difference in taste of say, the regular Jim Beam and a barrel-proof bourbon is pretty noticeable.

I’ve noticed no difference in 100% fruit juice by brand. Well, except for orange juice.

Tea quality is very noticeable to me, but I’m a heavy tea drinker.

Even different water brands have different tastes. But, as long as it’s not my tap water (which is very hard and smells like a swimming pool), I don’t really care.

Google has a great advantage in the SEO cat-and-mouse game (being able to hire and pay many very smart people). I think part of the problem is that Google has an incentive to not penalize pages with excessive and intrusive AdSense ads.

Traded-in vehicles don’t go to waste. Vehicle life cycles are actually pretty efficient. If a car runs, and is street legal, it will likely be bought and used by someone. Once a vehicle does not run, it will go to a salvage yard and used for parts. After a while, whatever metals are left will be recycled.

Edit: Yes, I don’t think everyone should just ditch their ICE cars to “help the environment.” I don’t know if anyone is arguing for that. And, all new cars are bought by wealthier people because all new cars are way too expensive and have all kinds of “features” with dubious utility. I do think this is a problem. Until a couple years ago, I’ve never bought a new car. The only reason I bought a new car is because I couldn’t find a used car that was worth the price (used car market was pretty fucked up back then). Coincidentally, I ended buying an EV, lol (a Leaf).

Using the Serenity Prayer as inspiration (though I’m an atheist and not an addict), I try to accept what I cannot change, and change the things I can.

I also try to keep busy with hobbies such as gardening and woodworking.

I suppose I should probably try to get into some type of activism or community type stuff, but I’m not at all an outgoing type of person.

Nah, they’re an incremental improvement. EVs are more efficient at turning energy into locomotion. They get >100 mpge. The increase in tire wear isn’t nearly as significant the CO2 emissions. I’m pretty sure there are studies that show EVs are better for the environment as a whole than ICE vehicles (even accounting for things like lithium mining and fossil fuel powered grids).

Tesla is a horrible, anti-consumer company. A lot of companies make EVs now (but a lot of those companies are pretty horrible too, I guess).

I’ve heard it’s cheaper if you mix with baking soda or something and smoke it.

I’ve seen these arguments gaining prominence on the last few years. I don’t think they care about Mozarts or Einsteins though. If they did, they would use their money and push for policies that would improve the conditions people live in, so all the would-be Mozarts would have a chance to actually becoming one. I think they’re worried global capitalism will collapse if population growth slows too much; which is probably true.

I also wonder if these people are funding all the anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive campaigns around the world… After a quick Google search, I see it’s definitely been on Musk’s mind: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tucker-carlson-sex-procreation-collapse-civilisation-abortion-pill-2023-4

Hmm, I guess your right. I guess what I was vaguely thinking of was that we don’t have as much (conscious) control over ourselves as people seem to believe. E.g. we often react to things before we consciousnessly perceive them, if we ever do perceive them. Was probably thinking about expirements I’ve heard of involving Benjamin Libet’s work, and my own experiences of questioning why I’ve made some decisions, where at the time I made the decision, I rationalized the reason for doing so in one way, but in retrospect, the reason for making such decisions were probably different than what I was consciously aware of at the time. I think a lot of consciousness is just post-hoc rationalization, while the subconscious does a lot of the work. I guess this still means that consciousness is not an illusion, but that there are different “levels” of consciousness, and the highest level is mostly retrospective. I guess this all isn’t really relevant to AI though, lol.

I think the human brain works kind of the opposite of that. Babies are born with a shitload of neural connections, then the connections decrease over a person’s lifetime. ANNs typically do something similar to that while training (many connection weights will be pushed toward zero, having little or no effect).

But yeah, these LLMs are typically trained once, and frozen during use. “Online learning” is a type of training that continually learns, but current online methods typically lead to worse models (ANNs “forget” old things they’ve “learned” when learning new things).