AI is already having negative impacts on working families. It's sucking up a huge portion of the money in the economy, and the money is being spent on things that produce very few jobs (data centers). The stated goal of these companies is to reduce jobs, increase surveillance, and to make the war machine more deadly. Some state there's a good chance what they're actively working toward will destroy humanity. Some believe one company will create an ASI, starting the technological singularity, which will concentrate immense power into that single company that beats everyone else to it. Arguably, an AI crash is preferable to an AI "success."

They're going to try to frame it as a national defense issue; like automotive companies are. My guess is they'd bail out SpaceX/xAI in exchange for personal enrichment if needed.

Same, I don't find "vibe-coding" very useful. It just produces slop. With enough back and forth with an LLM I can usually get something that "works," but works poorly. I don't have the motivation to read the slop it produces, so I don't know if it's doing things correctly or not (when I do investigate, it often is not). I often feel like the time I spent prompting the LLM in English would've been better spent "prompting" the compiler or interpreter in a language designed for software development.

These people need to justify their immense privilege, so they attribute nearly everything they did to their success instead of mostly luck.

I think this is somewhat bad advice. Young people are better off focusing on their education and skill development (if they are currently pursuing an education). Working at McDonald's and Dairy Queen will teach you nothing you can't quickly "learn" later, and it can often hurt your education (e.g. if you work late).

I don't think it's uncommon for management prey on the more vulnerable young workers either. I worked multiple fast food jobs. At one, the manager was caught giving drugs to and statutory raping multiple underage employees (he was the owner's son and in his 30s); and at another, a manager threatened to fire an underage employee unless he had sex with her (she was in her 40s). The only reason you should work any job is if you need the money and you haven't been able to get a better one yet.

As a heuristic, I look at the commit dates to see if it's still being maintained. And lately I look at the commits themselves for evidence of AI use. Then I'll maybe do a web search for discussions to see what other people/the community has to say about it.

Gnuhealth looks like it may be dead (or at least the repo I found hasn't had a commit in many years). (Nvm, they moved to codeberg which is a positive signal, IMO).

Mostly anti since renewables are cheaper. I would be OK with nuclear used for filling the dips in renewable output. The SMRs proposed by all these startups seem like a very bad idea to me, but IDK. If fusion ever brings all that they promise, I could be pro.

I think it's illegal to use Reticulum over amatuer radio because it's encrypted?

LoRa is very low bandwidth, only suitable for short text messages. Radio frequencies are heavily regulated, easy to triangulate, and can be shutdown. People could build a higher speed, planned WiFi mesh; hops just have to be closer. Neighborhoods could build cat6 and fiber into meshes if they wanted to as well.

I think nearly all western nations have similar problems, so it's not solely a US thing? I see people talking about affordability in Toronto, London, and New Zealand at least. I recently saw a video of a Chinese software engineer living in a makeshift shack on the roof of a building and still needing to do food delivery on a hacked ebike to make ends meet, so it may not be only a western thing either.

I would guess it's a multitude of issues causing it. Wealth disparity and the ballooned financial sector is probably the largest contributor. Resources (lumber, fossil fuels, etc) getting more expensive to extract and transport probably plays some role. Stricter building and sanitation codes, zoning, and communities fighting low income housing being built probably does too.

Red-pilled too.

Yeah, that's my experience. I think there's a kind of anxiety that if they don't spend it now, some unexpected expense may come along where they'll have to spend it on that. When unexpected expenses are required, they have to borrow/hustle/pawn/pick up another shift/etc. A lot of people couldn't even balance a budget if they tried (i.e. they don't have enough income to cover both expected and "unexpected" expenses).

It's because games are cheap compared to many alternatives that people would use to entertain themselves. They are one of the cheapest forms of entertainment when you consider how much time people spend interacting with them. An Uber and a night at a bar, or a dinner for two at a steakhouse could cost more.

I'm not very consumerist, but grew up poor by US standards (and am honestly on my way back). A lot of people seem to want at least some nice things. Sneakers, nice clothes, nails, hair; whatever they're into. I think it helps distract them, or gives them something to look forward to. Part of it may also be that society seems to conflate a persons worth with their income and possessions, and that has been internalized.

Related Youtube video I saw the other day: “AI bubble will pop………....any day now.”

I don't know if lowering rates would help anything at this time. I think it'd mostly just go into the AI bubble who's goal is to reduce jobs.

I've only been to Chic-Fil-A a few times. When I went, they always said something like "have a blessed day," giving me cult vibes.

Companies boasting about committing felonies and trying to charge companies to run the uncontrollable super-hacking machines on their systems has got to be one of the stupidest marketing attempts ever.

"Can't turn your brain off," and not reading the docs seems contradictory to me. I.e. if you don't even know the contract of the specific methods the code is calling, you don't really know if it's correct or not.

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

message = client.messages.create(
    model='claude-fable-5',
    max_tokens=128000,
    messages=[
        {'role': 'user', 'content': 'say "Hello World"'}
    ],
)

print(message.content[0].text)

I avoided all the effort of going to read the docs and relearn something I very rarely need.

This is the same thing as blindly copy-pasting StackOverflow snippets; which people used to think was a bad thing.

Half the living standards. Will be uncomfortable, and likely violent.