As a user, I feel like talking to them is pointless because nothing we agree to is actually agreed until a human agrees it. The chatbot promising me a refund doesn’t mean I’m going to get a refund. The HR chatbot promising me paid time off doesn’t mean I’m actually going to get paid time off. It’s really still just like the awful old-school chatbots where the whole point was to give you a hard time finding the phone number of the human support team.
I’m not going to install this because I’m not looking for a band, but it would be cool if you could keep in mind solo musicians often need to hire a band in order to play
This could be a good way for people to find that when they don’t have other musicians in their network who can fill that role for them.
I would argue that many of the big tech companies have also been subsidised rather than being efficient. It has just been private investors rather than governments (and it feels like we are starting to see the end of that).
It always feels like open source enthusiasts would never pay for something themselves, but expect that their boss will for some reason. What would your boss get by paying that he/she isn't already getting for free?
I think things like being able to contact anyone are important to people, but decentralisation doesn't necessarily provide that (e.g. if I sign up on a Mastodon instance will I be able to see the messages of everyone on every Mastodon instance, and will they be able to see mine? Will I even know if somebody I care about can see my messages or not?)
I think decentralisation is not a selling point to most people. It's an implementation detail that they're happy to go along with but it's a negative if it make the experience worse, makes everything more complicated, if they can't talk to the people they know IRL, etc.
LLMs always remind me of pigeons you see in the city that have spent their whole life eating out of bins and pecking dropped chunks of kebab. We trained it on a bunch of stuff, but we're not sure quite what. Looks like it works OK, so let's get it on a plate!
It’s probably the same deal as with LLMs generating code: it can crank out something that’s probably broken, and the person using the LLM needs to be able to know how to code to see where it’s broken. Companies might be able to reduce the headcount of programmers / copywriters / artists but certainly not replace them right now (or possibly ever).
I think the point is to avoid a situation like with Uber (where investors subsidised Uber rides to try to destroy most of the world's taxi industry, then replace with Uber and gather all the profits for themselves).
It's going to suck for the world in general if AI models destroy a lot of jobs but the productivity gains are all paid to overseas companies like OpenAI and Microsoft.
Searching a phone is not fundamentally different to searching a home or searching a diary. The key difference is that encryption makes it impossible for the police to force their way in (as they would with a physical lock). We can then choose to either make it illegal not to let the police in, or give basically anybody a ‘one weird trick’ to prevent their phone or computer being searched.
It's not entirely clear to me how this would work though. Right now we don't have AI-powered reporters scouring the streets for articles to write about - we have humans who write articles about things that humans would find interesting.
If people move to reading their news through AI aggregators rather than reading articles written by humans, why would humans keep writing articles? It takes time and it costs money.
It's the same with AI code-generation based largely on programming blog posts and stack overflow questions. A lot of the blog posts will stop being written if people move to using AI models instead of reading blogs.
From an employee perspective I don't think it's really worth being outside London right now. I want to live somewhere where there are more than a handful of places that I could work locally (and I don't count companies bashing out websites in PHP etc). I'm not really interested in working for startups, but if I were I would definitely not move across the country for a single employer. It's just not worth the risk. It's sad, because I grew up elsewhere in the country and it would be great for those areas to have the same opportunities as London, but it is what it is.
I used to work for another company where it's acceptable for people to move from management to IC roles (and I wish it were possible everywhere).
They're going to do it anyway, whether it's going back to being an IC at the same company or by leaving to do it elsewhere. If it's not possible to stay they're just going to go (and presumably these are the people considered good enough to promote into management).
Why don’t you study something in your spare time? There are plenty of grad students who moonlight as tutors that you could pay for a couple of hours a week to keep you on track.
I think for a large part of the population getting in a car with a stranger is fundamentally not a trustless activity, and no combination of tokens, hashes, customer reviews or market forces is going to make it so. Even more if the driver is anonymous apart from an address in a blockchain.
How would a blockchain ride-hailing system work for women - would it expect people to jump into any car with a driver who claims to own blockchain address X (with ratings from other addresses)?
The world looks quite different when a significant proportion of the population are significantly stronger than you - strong enough that you couldn't physically stop them doing horrible things to you.
Uber with random drivers is sketchy, but you know there's been at least minimal background checks, and knowing that Uber are tracking the ride gives a bit more safety.
I'd love it to be faster, but (when I bought in the UK) a lot of the things my solicitor checked were things that I'd definitely want to know before handing over money:
Whether the seller actually owns the property or lease, if there are other people who would have a valid claim on the land/building (or historical covenants that would prevent the construction of the building there etc). For leasehold, verify how long is remaining and so on.
Environmental information (whether the property is built on land that regularly floods, whether the site has a history of subsidence that could cause a significant risk to the building etc).
Also, if you're buying with a mortgage, the mortgage company are going to want to have a look at the property to know that they're going to get their money back if you default on the mortgage and they have to sell it themselves.
Some from an English background, some from a Scottish background. Parts of the north of Ireland were colonised by Britain in the early 1600s - have a look at the Wikipedia articles for ‘Plantation of Ulster’ and ‘Ulster Protestants’