> Because women tend to earn less than men and are likelier to hold multiple jobs, the figure suggests hiring is clustered in low-paying, contingent roles, meaning it’s not “necessarily a positive story for women overall,” Indeed Hiring Lab said.
Odds are that this is much more a reflection of a very poor job market, rather than a good outcome for women (or discriminatory hiring practices).
> 60% of college/university graduates are women, but it’s not “necessarily a positive story for women overall,” since it also means women are disproportionately burdened with student-loan debt.
My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
What are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Honest answer, building and maintaining a large complex project over many years. We have plenty of examples of one-shots like the 1000x slower gcc, but those don't see updates after they achieved their advertisement goal.
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's something fundamental. Agentic AI hasn't been around for many years, and many of its most enthusiastic adopters have, shall we say, attention issues, so I don't think it's odd that we don't have long term maintained wholly AI-coded projects yet.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.
Point is if humans need to struggle with something to build neural pathways, character etc. then getting better at playing an instrument is as good at that as anything, even if it has very little economic utility (I thought that part was obvious). Programming might soon have equally little utility.
I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review.
I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually improved quite dramatically.
I notice style inconsistencies and semantic errors far more quickly and consistently when reviewing both human- and LLM-generated code, as compared to a year ago. Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis and all that…
There are deterministically computable metrics for cognitive complexity and readability[0].
They’re not perfect by any means — and I suspect they’re already included in the RL process for coding evals, and have been for some time. I do think we’ll see ongoing improvement in this area though.
Filecoin was really weird on top of the standard caveats. I couldn't even figure out how to directly use and earn it. And all the straightforward options to touch filecoin were brokers offering free storage based on incentive programs.
Storj is a much more straightforward implementation. So is Sia, I think.
It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license.
Rocket technology itself is so intensely regulated by US export control laws that it’s practically impossible to develop an orbital launch vehicle without being a US- or Europe-registered company.
It is a real shame. It also looks like a lot of engineering work is shifting away from NZ — Auckland seems to be focusing more on operations and space systems, and the launch stuff is moving to the US with Neutron.
That is false. They were a purely NZ operation launching sub-orbital rockets before they got into DARPA contracts. What you meant to say is "Before they ever launched Electron", and I'm pretty sure that is false too, they weren't "primarily" American, the majority of the workforce was in NZ until years after that.
I'm 99% sure that they went to the US venture to raise money to build Electron and that's when they made the US company that primary and the NZ company the subsidiary.
Yes you are correct. That's one meaning of primary. I just think it's misleading by the more colloquial meaning to say "primarily a US company" when AFAIK basically all the engineering happened in the NZ subsidiary of what was initially more-or-less a USA shell company. Engine manufacture was the first thing they moved to the USA that I know of, after one or two launches IIRC.
Aside, Peter Beck has said (probably at a talk I was at in 2014) that they initially designed and built Electron in NZ so that they would be importing restricted technology into the USA, to minimise ITAR problems, which only covers exports.
Plenty of ”American” financial entities are registered to a holding company abroad. Does that make the company not American because a holding company abroad exists?
Ambient computing goes back far further than that... and we are getting there. I have digital control over most of the lighting in my apartment as well as several other items through various iot adapters (button pushers, stepper motors attached to my blinds, power outlet relays). Audio reactive agents like alexa/bedpodsiri/whateverrunsheygoogle can put you in control of all of that. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a audio reactive agent that dumps input into their AI model or models of their choice if they want it.
With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there.
Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display.
I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.
I use an agent to generate a first-pass attempt, and then (deadlines willing), I manually read every line at least once so I understand what the code actually does.
Then I manually fix the inevitable slop that is mixed in with the good stuff, and only once the code is up to my personal standards do I send it.
This probably reduces my “AI performance boost” to 30-50% instead of the huge gains reported by others. But I retain the ability to reason about the codebase and use AI much more precisely when I’m trying to troubleshoot production outages or subtle bugs — something I notice the rest of my team struggles with, since adopting “agentic workflows” everywhere.
I think actively working to retain some cognitive flexibility and “muscle memory” around coding tasks is going to be rather advantageous in the long run.
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!