The level of bullshit the tech industry puts up with without unionizing continues to baffle me.
We are two decades past illegal no-poaching schemes. We've live with very obviously maliciously compliant H1-B abuse. We're getting to the point where programmers expecting high compensation to be asked to be professional prompt engineers, when they know the output is likely unsafe for production.
Yet nobody unionizes. Yea, unions have problems, but they don't have to. You don't have to vote for assholes that use protectionist tactics. You can just ask for a 40 hour work week to mean 40 hours, and vacation to mean vacation.
I mean, to be fair, the restriction on freedom is the real punishment. I don't think anyone could honestly say that house arrest isn't genuinely undesirable, especially for rich and powerful people.
What's the point of having all that money and power if you can't actually do the things you want?
There's another layer. For rich and powerful people, being confined to one place is very dangerous. Every one of their enemies know where to send an assassin. Every lender know where to correct payment. Every burglar knows where the money is.
> My main thing is - why would I buy their stock at the rumored valuation? Regardless of anything else that valuation is basically saying all their growth has been captured, unless they literally take over the world.
I didn't buy Amazon in the early '00s for this reason, and I won't buy Anthropic for this reason. Maybe I lose out, but I like to invest in stocks that look like good investments.
Regardless of how you felt about Amazon as an investment when they went public my point is - they actually the potential to grow as much as they did. I don't believe Anthropic has the potential to grow even a fraction as much.
My point is only that with Amazon stock, even well after the dotcom crash, the valuation only made sense if they were going to become the biggest, most important company in the world.
At the time, I didn't know whether or not they would become the biggest, most important company in the world. They did in the end, but if you live your life betting on every company whose valuation depends on them becoming the biggest, most important company in the world, you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm old enough to remember when IPO's existed to generate equity financing for growing companies. Now they exist to facilitate exit liquidity for mature companies, but a two decades of near-zero interest rates and enough inflation and wealth consolidation to make the "qualified investor" requirements trivial will do that. We're living in the days of the pink sheets again, where you really have to invest in small companies with very little reporting on them, but you already have to be wealthy to have access to those investments.
I actually wrote a thesis on this in graduate school, and completely disagree with the author.
The problem with this argument isn't that natural language programming leads to vague/ambiguous code that would lead to errors. The problem is that the machine does not inform you of the ambiguity. Rational humans do just fine when they interact because they can identify these problems. Programming would work just find if context were identify and clarified while the code was being written.
If I were to tell a program to "buy political ads in Portland," yea, the point is that the program would need to know which Portland I mean. Otherwise it might accidentally think I mean Portland, OR, instead of Portland, ME:
Humans can do the same thing if they're not being careful. The point is, the vast, vast, vast majority of time, someone would just say "wait, you mean Portland, Maine, right?" and you'd say "yes" and that would be that.
> I really don't see how a flash-bang grenade is justified against a person sitting in front of a computer, doing non-violent crimes.
People who pretend that nonviolent crimes are some kind of special thing always confuse and annoy me. Coups can be nonviolent, should we avoid flashbangs against a group trying to undermine a democracy? The seriousness of the crime is what should matter, not whether a threat of bodily harm was involved. Are you destroying someone’s life is what matters.
We are talking about an organization ruining people’s livelihoods. Dozens and dozens of lives wrecked. Millions stolen.
Yes, less-lethal force is very obviously justified.
Yea, I started out thinking "well you just use the thing to find citations." Then I realized all this article is just: "I lied on the internet and people believed me, isn't that crazy!?!"
This type of behavior is why gatekeeping institutions exist. We all pay a non-trivial cost because someone thinks that other people taking their lies seriously is somehow remarkable. It's not.
Research is hard work. Publishing fake research is just intentionally throwing wrenching into the machine of academia. All you've done is reinforce the need for gatekeepers (which never went away), show that some no-name journal isn't rigorous (they often aren't), and you've wasted a bunch of people's time demonstrating why institutions exist, when we know why they exist.
I mean, there is a big grey area between immigrants here who are:
undocumented and here temporarily (most people oppose this),
undocumented and here permanently (the left is split on this, the right is mostly against it),
documented and here temporarily (most people are fine with this, especially tourists),
documented and here temporarily with an option to become permanently (many oppose this because it's impacting employment, especially with H-1B abuse),
documented and here permanently with no intention of becoming citizens (many people on the right don't like this for assimilation reasons),
documented and here permanently an a path to citizenship (most people support this except the extreme right),
former immigrants who are now citizens (nearly everyone supports these people).
The problem is that all of this is put under a single umbrella called "immigration," but it includes so many sub-issue like rule of law and assimilation preferences that you can't have a serious debate on it.
The other thing making it difficult to have a serious debate about is that one portion of the population keeps getting asked to moderate their positions on immigration (in all its facets) while there is little to no similar pressure on the opposing group. To put it another way: why should I move towards the center (from my "left" position) when I see the right continue to push immigration policy to the extremes?
We are two decades past illegal no-poaching schemes. We've live with very obviously maliciously compliant H1-B abuse. We're getting to the point where programmers expecting high compensation to be asked to be professional prompt engineers, when they know the output is likely unsafe for production.
Yet nobody unionizes. Yea, unions have problems, but they don't have to. You don't have to vote for assholes that use protectionist tactics. You can just ask for a 40 hour work week to mean 40 hours, and vacation to mean vacation.
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