One can read very quickly, but writing takes a long time.
And speech is rather annoying because I read faster than people speak. But the worst thing is when people start writing on the blackboard during a lecture because then you have to watch them write slowly.
All patients recovered, the final patient left hospital after 3 months. Not ideal. The company went bankrupt and the outcome was better regulation in the UK and Germany; great wiki article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theralizumab including the relevant:
Critics of animal testing have cited the case to argue that experiments on nonhuman animals, even in species closely related to humans, are not necessarily predictive of human responses, and cannot justify the harm inflicted on animals or the resultant risks to humans
That was an antibody against human CD28, and I'd heard speculation at the time that the monkey trials failed to predict the human response due to differences between monkey and human CD28. That was apparently not correct, since "the sponsor had not only determined the relevant extracellular sequence (which is 100% identical to the human one) but also the binding affinities of the mAb, which were identical for human and monkey". That author goes on to propose a different explanation, though I don't know if any explanation is generally accepted.
It's funny to recall this in the context of Terence Tao's question of whether you'd take an AI-designed drug with no mechanistic insight. The sponsors of this trial had reason to believe they had strong mechanistic insight, but they were wrong. A pharmacologist from the nineteenth century would have probably run the trial more safely (lower starting dose, one participant at a time) without that false confidence.
We got to 80 without inventing money. Living that long back then was hard work every day.
Then the industrial revolution happened, and we got state pensions at one end of life and extended childhood a few years past adolescence on the other. We currently pay for this… by taxes funding both education and a pension.
Absent the radical transformations of an AI driven economy, we live 200 years in exactly the same way.
With those transformations, all bets are off unless they violate the laws of physics.
But the majority of people in the world are still working just as hard now as before the industrial revolution? Most of the labor rights activists of the 19th and 20th century spent their time advocating for working hours closer to their pre-industrial grandparents. Industrialization increased working hours with the promise that eventually everyone will have to work less hours once the equipment was built. And yet many generations later countries are talking about increasing retirement age, reducing worker rights, and wage theft is more prevalent than all other forms of theft combined.
What is AI going to do that industrialization and automation hasn't already made the same promises for?
Before the industrial revolution, you started working as soon as you could assist with anything (cooking meant firewood, washing clothes was by hand, etc.); you stopped working when you were too feeble, and only if you were lucky (or from another perspective, very unlucky) a lord's almshouse might look after you.
Life back then was a never-ending quest to make more calories, and you had to consume about 90% of what you made just to not starve (the other 10% went to the lords, the army, and very young children; though I'm oversimplifying here because farm animals also eat and you had to feed them). As total production was lower (and because "preservative" meant cats, alcohol, salt, and grain silos on mushroom-shaped pillars so rats couldn't get in, not industrial refrigeration and sodium benzoate etc.), this meant very different work schedule compare to today; but people were working at the limits of what biology would support, even if hours were fewer (no affordable artificial light to work at night) and "holy days" more plentiful… but on that front, most pop reporting on that seems to forget that today we have two-day weekends, while medieval European communities often only rested on Sunday (and even Sunday-is-rest-day was relaxed somewhat to avoid crop spoilage).
The modern equivalent would be if everyone's job was to hit the gym for 10 hours a day in summer and 4 a day in winter, and still sometimes had mandatory overtime. Some people do labour-intensive work today, but pre-industrial this would be 90%+ of the population and not by choice.
What we actually have in developed nations today, is no significant labour before 18 or over 68, only about 70% the people of working age* are in work at any given time, and the "work" is far less intensive. Less than half of us are employed today to support the whole population. I say "are employed" rather than "work" because childcare and domestic work is still work, but this too is much easier than pre-industrial life.
A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you. 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
Industrialization increased working hours, not decreased them.
> A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you.
Way to misread what I wrote.
A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.
Their work cycle was arranged differently than ours, with harvest season being longer days because letting crops spoil in the fields meant starvation come winter, and winter hours being mostly limited by sunlight and moonlight because artificial illumination was far too expensive.
> 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts 200-100 years ago are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.
If we suddenly get an anti-aging treatment that has us all live 200 years*, all the governments can trivially handle this just by adjusting pension ages.
* somehow without any of the other things implied by the tech that can make such treatments; add those things in and you have to ask "why only 200?" and "what else can this tech do?" and this is all about AI having been a big contributor to some bio research, so there's a lot of "what else" already and we don't even have the anti-aging treatment yet.
Yeah harvest season has longer hours, I grew up on a farm. But you aren't putting in anything like that amount of work most of the year. You don't work the same fields all year long. You got plenty of other things to do but not a full modern work schedule.
Heating can be done in a few weeks even with handsaws and an axe. A chainsaw makes it faster.
If 12th century peasants had to work anything like a modern work schedule, how would people a 1000 years or more before then survive at all with less technology, tools, and knowledge? How would clothing exist at all without a loom? How did ancient people have any time for discovery and innovation at all if their lives were nearly so grueling.
Those workers rights activists didn't get all that they asked for. And why has it not gotten even better with another 100 years of productivity increases after that?
To me your explainations seem like repeates of what robber barons claimed. The luddites didn't form because people thought industrialisation was allowing them to work less than those before them.
This is a horribly wrong understanding of history. If you think life today is in any way comparable to the Industrial Revolution, you need to pick up a history book because your history classes failed you.
If you think malnourished subsidence farmers could work non-stop before industrialization then you need to think about that a bit more and aread a bit more early and pre-industrial works.
This is great, and nicely written up in the context of agentic repos etc, but presumably no-one reads the official docs, right: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore where the multiple ways of ignoring files are clearly stated?
Until Claude suggested .git/info/exclude, it never crossed my mind to question how ignoring worked. A search would have answered it in seconds, but you have to think to ask first. I didn't, and I suspect most people don't either. Especially with git, which nearly everyone learns by doing; very few of us ever sit down and learn it properly.
That's why I wrote it up: so a few more people can learn this the way we learn everything else in git, by accident.
Now that you mention it, I should add a link to those docs in the article. Thanks!
This is true, using AI to help discover better ways of working with stuff is pretty epic, reading docs are about as exciting as writing docs, esp when you are trying to get something done.
Do the reading b/c there's a machine that has done all the reading so it's hard to add value if you maintain the anti-intellectualism of 2010s software dev.
So many people treat git commands like magic words, and then are terrified when they mess up their repo (example in this xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1597/)
> Some 57% of US doctors received more than $12bn in payments related to medical drugs or devices from manufacturers between 2013 and 2022, an analysis has found.1 “Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such payments remain pervasive,” says the letter in JAMA.
Making lots of money protects the children of the shareholders from being poor. Perhaps even their childrens children. Or their childrens childrens children. /s
No, it wasn't. This often made claim is based on a passage of Phaedrus where Socrates is quoting an Egyptian legend, and the negative judgement of the invention of writing is done by a pharaoh inside that legend being told inside the dialogue.
Besides, the dialogue is not about writing itself, but about writing down political speeches and the consequences and impact of political speeches being read rather than heard.
Also, the dialogue dates from about three thousand years after writing was invented.
Some direct quotes from the dialogue:
SOCRATES: So, it is obvious to everyone that speech writing is not shameful, not in itself anyway (258d)
SOCRATES: We are left with the question of the appropriateness and inappropriateness of writing, and how it may be executed in a worthy or an inappropriate manner. Do you agree? (274b)
And this, a very relevant insight for an age when some are convinced that text analysis should suffice for intelligent work:
SOCRATES: Then a person who thinks he has left a skill in writing behind him, and anyone who, for his part, inherits this on the assumption that something clear and certain will emerge from writing, would be full of enormous silliness, and indeed ignorant of the prophetic words of Ammon in believing that written words are anything more than a reminder to a person who already knows whatever it is that the written words may refer to.
Ironically, the sharpest criticism Socrates made of writing in the often misread Phaedrus was of misreading texts.
We have significantly degraded in our ability to memorize e.g. epic poems or preserve oral traditions since the advent of writing.
I know that sounds trite in retrospect, given the benefits, and that's half the point. But there are real tradeoffs too! For example, culture has a LOT more generation-to-generation turnover as a result of literacy being common, making it unstable.
I think (?) my point was that Socrates equated Memory with Wisdom, and the invention of writing would impact Memory and thus Wisdom. I believe he was just plain wrong. Equating (manual) coding/code-review with Wisdom makes the same category error.
Writing had been invented three thousand years before Socrates
The passage criticizing the "invention of writing" is a quote from a legend where a Pharaoh passes negative judgement to a god, by the way, who had invented writing in the story.
Ironically, the dialogue in question, Phaedrus, is about the dangers of misreading text. It discusses writing political speeches not writing per se.
Was Socrates even wrong, though? There have certainly been millions of words written that were lacking in wisdom and have convinced people of falsehoods to their detriment! When’s the last time you saw a debate be reasonable? devoid of cheap jokes or hot takes? actually change someone’s mind? or the whole audience’s mind?
In the world where we didn’t outsource Western manufacturing to China, our homes would not be overflowing with disposable junk; in the world where the Luddites won, our wardrobes would not be stuffed full of disposable clothes; perhaps in the world where Socrates won our minds would not be jammed full of nonsense.
It's not really a case of 'winning' though is it? There is no agreed criteria by which to judge which is going to pass muster for a majority of people (both in Socrates time and ours).
I mean, you can s/“won”/“had their ideas reach a supermajority in the population such that their future (and our present) resembled the future they wanted instead of the future they worried the target of their ire would (and did) bring about”, or equivalent, at your leisure - I think my point stands either way.
One affects memorization and is a trade-off for writing, a process that arguably allows someone to work through their own knowledge of a subject and find or realize gaps in understanding.
Having something else do all of that for you is completely different and essentially tossing any gain outside of the creation of some gray slurry of an output in the trash.
studies published between 2022 and 2025 that examined the use of GenAI in relation to students
If GenAI = LLMs then ChatGPT made public release in October 2022 which gives precisely zero time to generate data on impact in students. Also
173 records (studies) were included in the review
Really? 173 peer reviewed studies based on this niche in less than 3 years. I shudder to think the quality of those constituent studies. Not questioning the results just the means of getting them.
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