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Commercial law nuts and bolts is very algorithmic often.

Criminal law is often fundamentally subjective, incorporating questions of intent and remorse.


As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.

More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor situation in an AI-based economy. FWIW, humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.

Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.

It's a problem, it's just not the root problem.

The root problem is nepo babies.

Whether it's capitalism or communism or whatever China has currently - it's all people doing everything to give their own children every unfair advantage and lie about it.

Why did people flee to America from Europe? Because Europe was nepo baby land.

Now America is nepo baby land and very soon China will be nepo baby land.

It's all rather simple. Western 'culture' is convincing everyone the nepo babies running things are actually uber experts because they attended university. Lol.


Yeah, unfortunately Marx was right about people not realizing the problem, too. The proletariat drowns in false consciousness :(

In reality, the US is finally waking up to the fact that the "golden age" of capitalism in the US was built upon the lite socialism of the New Deal, and that all the bs economic opinions the average american has subscribed to over the past few decades was completely just propaganda and anyone with half a brain cell could see from miles away that since reagonomics we've had nothing but a system that leads to gross accumulation to the top and to the top alone and this is a sure fire way (variable maximization) in any complex system to produce instability and eventual collapse.


There's a false dichotomy in that conclusion.

> humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

We're conditioned to do so, in large part because this kind of work ethic makes exploitation easier. Doesn't mean that's our natural state, or a desirable one for that matter.

"AI-based economy" is too broad a brush to be painting with. From the Marxist perspective, the question you should be asking is: who owns the robots? and who owns the wealth that they generate?


AI the hype beast product and the club for workers is a plague that I frankly hate.

AI the manual algorithm to generate code and analyze images is quite an interesting underlying tech.


The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it to look into the American Army.

> Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.

taken from -

-- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf


The American army, the origin of the term "fragging." (to wit, making sure your commanding officer has a close, and final, encounter with a piece of ordnance, such as a frag grenade)

if we are to learn anything from the US military, it is twofold

1. You can absolutely create a self-reproducing tradition of absolute conformity while retaining ample capacity for local decisionmaking, if you have enough money and time. (In the case of the US army, approximately 150 years, and more money than any other organization in the history of man)

2. Segregating the staff into "officers" and "enlisted" is still gonna get a lot of "officers" killed dead, and even more "objectives" un-taken, because it spreads their incentives too far apart.


Jules is nifty. Weirdly heavy on the browser CPU.


There was an attitude at a University about 20 years ago when I was an undergrad, around, hmm, stochastic learning algorithms. And the attitude was, "we don't care why or how it works - we want to make the outcome happen".

I found it intellectually reprehensible then, and now.


> "we don't care why or how it works - we want to make the outcome happen".

That's the primary difference between science and engineering.

In science, understating how it works is critical, and doing something with that understanding is optional. In engineering getting the desired outcome is critical, and understanding why it works is optional.


The number of junior roles I have seen my companies open in the past 8 years - and I've been at a few different shops - is less than he fingers I have. And this is _before_ the AI-copolypse.

Management has generally become persuaded that juniors are not worth hiring. My current shop is a bit more thoughtful on this which is good. But. The desire for senior+ is out of line. Particularly when companies want to pay junior rates. =}

---

Dear author,

I don't know any period in the past 20 years where entry level jobs were properly allocated outside of FAANG. I have always advised talking to Microsoft, as my perspective is that they have the best entry level pipeline.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can afford to stay in it" is an old stock traders proverb. And I believe it applies the AI fad. I do not believe that the dreams of actually replacing humans will work out generally. But it will be a painful experience for the employees and the prospective employees.


2015/16 was totallt doable to get a junior job nowadays companies are just barely hiring and most open positions wait for a unicorn with low rxpectations to snatch.


I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.


You need to think hard and understand that it is irreversible before you publish your content under certain licenses.

My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.


There are some discussion if the whole concept of "license" fits under Japanese law. I think it's understood as "a contract to allow the usage of otherwise restricted work by copyright etc under conditions"

But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.


Yeah - I know in US law some terms are simply unenforceable and void. Much of the FOSS movement is designed around US contract law. There are issues with some US licenses being enforceable under other legal regimes - I was chatting a decade or so ago with a Russian who understood the...GPL(? I don't remember exactly) to be invalid in Russia and so it had to be bundled in some fashion to be usable.

Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.


Nikon is building in authenticity tooling at the camera & sensor level with its latest cameras. Z6iii I believe was the first.


The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.

The FDA, FTC, EPA, etc should be involved here.


It’s true. It’s also great that we have companies that want to do better. All it takes is a board & executive who don’t care for public good, but only for short term profit, and the entire mission of the company goes up in flames. And since profit is essentially the only thing that executives & boards are allowed to care about, it’s essentially inevitable unless the company founders stay laser focused on their mission, never take on arbitrary investors, and even consider PBCs.

VC-backed companies in the tech space have an especially horrid track record on this stuff. I was reading about how cool Blueprint seems as a company, but couldn’t help thinking “at least until they get bought out or fucked by investors”

Which is exactly why the government should be involved. Companies simply do not have incentives to protect humans in almost any way without the government stepping in. It’ll always be cheaper to fuck humans over, and always more expensive to do right by them.


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