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smithoc

55 karmajoined 8 bulan yang lalu

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smithoc
·3 hari yang lalu·discuss
It's too bad that no immigrants work in construction to build more housing. If we could import lower cost laborers to build houses, that would greatly improve the housing affordability problem, but sadly, every time I go past a construction site, all I see are white guys whose great-great-great grandparents came over on the Mayflower.
smithoc
·3 hari yang lalu·discuss
> is there any country an immigrant can move to, and better their lives as well as the locals' life/economy?

The United States.

> It seems the world is turning hostile to immigration in general - or maybe it is just the impression I get from the media?

The world is turning hostile to immigration because the media (and social media sites) highlight and repeat the bad anecdotes, while barely mentioning the actual data showing positive outcomes.
smithoc
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
By that argument, why should any musician get anything? They're not paying royalties to the musicians who they listened to in the past and whose songs they trained on while they learned to play.

An LLM can be a tool to make music. So is a synthesizer. So is a drum machine. So is a drum set. So is a piano. So is a guitar.

Should everyone who used an 808 or autotune or amplifier distortion have their music be demonetized? Or is the line on acceptable new technology drawn at exactly the moment you became an adult?
smithoc
·22 hari yang lalu·discuss
This is the first time I have seen refusing to pay bribes framed as a moral failing and character flaw.

Perhaps it's not that he "didn't understand he was supposed to bribe" but rather that he thought that system was bad and antiquated and that he was taking a principled stand for the modern (of the time) technology industry to move away from those historical norms.

It didn't work, but he's not bad for trying.
smithoc
·24 hari yang lalu·discuss
Robots
smithoc
·25 hari yang lalu·discuss
You've picked a handful of consumer goods which have become cheaper due to technology and used them to construct a narrative entirely opposite of reality.

It would be more accurate to say the baby boomers could "work as a grunt and get what their children only dreampt of"

Single-income households, lifelong employment at the same company, people buying houses at 23 and having kids at 25, pensions, affordable health insurance, inexpensive college, people working their way up from the mail room to the C-suite. All taken for granted as typical, middle-America norms a few decades ago, but utterly unrecognizable to Millenials and Gen-Z.

Yes, people today have big TVs and air fryers. And they can use them to self-medicate briefly against the anxiety of rent that takes 40% of their post-tax income, student loans they'll be paying for the next decade and the knowledge that the whims of executives they've never met could make them lose their job tomorrow and be faced with a loss of healthcare and housing in short order.

Most people would happily downgrade their TV and drive a lower horsepower car in exchange for stable employment, no debts, no retirement worries and a spouse who doesn't have to work a corporate job.
smithoc
·29 hari yang lalu·discuss
The problem is on a thread where there is 1 AI post, people will identify 10 posts as being AI.

People latch onto the word "delve" or an em-dash or the idiom of "it's not X it's Y" as being proof that something was written by AI, without ever considering that AI is largely just writing in the style of how internet commenters write since that's a lot of the training data.

Now we've got students re-writing their homework to avoid looking like AI and commenters self-censoring against words and phrases that trigger AI suspicion.

I'm deeply skeptical that people can correctly identify human-written vs latest AI model written HN comments with sufficient accuracy.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
> No they don't know and if they did I would get fired obviously

And yet, above, you're still asking where the fraud is. You clearly know you're violating the terms of your employment agreement. That's the fraud. It's not complex.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
OP was presumably not asking literally because they thought this was the best way to find out, they were doing so rhetorically to point out that Andrew Tate is not a person of any real significance or mainstream notoriety, who has garnered a weird amount of attention from a tiny set of terminally online people.

Basically, talking about him should be beneath the New Yorker, and the choice to publish about him drags a weird little pocket of the deep internet into the mainstream, in a way that makes us all worse off.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
> Using AI, I've been able to land several interviews and work 3 jobs remotely currently without much effort

Working 3 jobs is almost certainly defrauding the employers, your employment agreement likely forbids this due to IP ownership issues and expectations that you're, ya know, working for them when they're paying you and not secretly collecting a paycheck while working for a different company during the time they're paying you to work for them?

Also, unclear if you're also fraudulently claiming experience you don't have by having AI write a resume tailored to the job posting rather than representing what you've actually done.

If your 3 jobs are actually part-time jobs, with clearly delineated and compartmentalized time and work tracking and the employers are aware and the contracts allow that, then fine. But your description definitely reads like someone bragging that they're hacking the system to get away with tricking multiple employers into thinking you're working full time for them.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
Does it matter if it was?

It's 2026. LLMs are integrated into text editors the same way as spell checkers and grammar checkers. Even if people write things themselves, they likely are using LLMs to review and edit.

This isn't a bot pretending to be a human, this is an official announcement from a company. It's going to be written by a committee and edited by legal and PR and marketing anyway. Who cares if one (or several) of those steps used an LLM.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
So you've used AI to do fraud and you're confused why people are opposed to this?

You're the reason companies are pushing return to office and putting candidates through gauntlets of interviews and homework - because otherwise they end up hiring someone who lied on their resume and is trying to collect 3 salaries until they get caught and fired.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
This anecdote may be true, but is certainly not representative of current life in America.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

Millions in prison, massively disproportionate to the rest of the world.

If jurors in Seattle have become skeptical of the claims that police and prosecutors make without evidence, the blame should fall squarely on decades of innocent people being sent to jail and minor infractions sending people to prison for years due to police lying, fabricating evidence, destroying evidence and prosecutors filing charges for far more severe crimes than what really occurred.

You're fortunate that your only experience of the failure of policing in America is in the most recent awakening against the unreliability of police and prosecutors. For many families, their lives have been destroyed after watching their loved ones be brutalized in prisons because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were victimized by the police and prosecutors.
smithoc
·bulan lalu·discuss
> would imagine that they’ve been compelled

Sadly, your imagination isn't cynical enough.

While the responsibility for the Texas grid failures, which led to multiple deaths and billions in damages, are diffuse across multiple people and organizations, if blame should be focused on one role it's the misleadingly named Railroad Commissioner who is primarily at fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_of_Texas).

Despite the deaths, shutdown economy, massive destruction of property and suffering that the grid failures caused, the position has continued to be held by Republicans and they have not fixed the underlying issue of gas power plants that have to shut down in the cold.

If Texas gets another large ice storm, the grid will fail again, people will die again, and then 51% of the state will go vote for another Republican who won't fix anything and campaigned about preventing Sharia law (this is a real thing they run on in the primaries).
smithoc
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
The HN title matches the submitted article title, however, it should really say "racial diversity".

If removing the legacy preference results in a working-class white kid from the Midwest getting admitted instead of a upper-class white kid from Connecticut, that's still an increase in diversity of socioeconomic class, regional background, ethnolinguistic subculture, and more.
smithoc
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
> Particularly given the alarming stories of people being prosecuted for having miscarriages

You need to delete your social media accounts and change where you're getting your news from. Nobody is "being prosecuted for having miscarriages". A few people have been investigated for drug abuse during pregnancy which led to the baby's death, which sensationalist news stories twisted into attention-grabbing headlines.

A doctor asking about cycle is just a core piece of diagnostic data like taking blood pressure and temperature, not some conspiracy to harm you.
smithoc
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I'm genuinely fascinated and confused by what's going on in this thread, as apparently British and American English speakers misunderstand each other.

If I understand correctly, we've got: libraryofbabel says "maybe a little too uncritical" ... but that was supposed to be British snark that actually meant "it's a big problem that it's not at all critical"

Then, moab says "Bro" as a pejorative, because he took the original "uncritical" comment as literal rather than sarcastic...

And then libraryofbabel objects to "bro" not because it was used as a pejorative (which maybe she doesn't understand that it is in this context?), but because she interprets it as gendered (which maybe it is in British usage?)

I think libraryofbabel and moab are actually in agreement about the book, and but have both misunderstood the other's sarcasm. Maybe we really do need the /s usage.
smithoc
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Important to note that "banned" here means "a school chose not to have this book in their library".

It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.

This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
smithoc
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
There's a political backlash because Fox News and some Russian propaganda social media accounts told people to get angry and they did.

We have mandates against leaded fuel and excessively tinted windows and for child seats. We have mandates for airbags and seatbelts and bumper heights and crumple zones and turn signals.

EVs are better than gas cars in every way - less noise, less pollution, less dependency buying oil from the Middle East. Our policies, regulations and incentive structures should mirror that.
smithoc
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
And schools get funding from lotteries and casinos, and healthcare gets funding from alcohol and cigarette sales.

A good thing funded by taxes on a bad thing is pretty common in America.