> We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

This, I believe, is because the problem is psychological more than political: social division and alienation.

Of course, an increase in economic prosperity will lessen populism.

But if people continue to be alienated then they will be drawn to populists offering collective causes against perceived wrongdoers.

The large majority of online activities increase social alienation and social division.

Local, apolitical activities that breed cohension rather than division will decrease the psychological benefits that populism offers the alienated. I see no other solution.

It helps the American people because they will need to rely on foreign countries for their cyber security?

Heck, those nuclear subs and aircraft carriers are only making the American people less likely the collaborate with the rest of the world on security too.

Bin the entire lot

Well, the renters will reward any government that pushes down house prices i.e. builds more houses. And I assume there are more renters than home owners.

Renters do not want justice or fairness. They want to one day become landlords and themselves suck the blood of the young and healthy.

"A slave dreams not of freedom, but of his own slaves."

^^^ this I don't think people consider the fact that a very good portion of these landowners were once renters that worked their way up and don't want to make it easier for the ones who have to do the same after themselves. It's easy to point fingers from the bottom until suddenly you're looking down from the top and the view ain't that bad

> It's easy to point fingers from the bottom until suddenly you're looking down from the top and the view ain't that bad

I wish we had specific words for this type of hypocrisy. Seeing people in wealthy USA complain about people relatively wealthier than them, rather than looking at their own wealth versus the poor in other countries. Obviously the poor in the USA aren't living the life of Reilly, but they're far beyond the wealth of the poor in India. How wealthy were the 99% Occupy Wall Street protesters?

You can't make people see what they don't want to.

> The 2011 Census tells us … around 64% of UK households owned their home

That’s not the same as the number of voters, obviously, but I’m not sure it’s a safe assumption, even before it gets into the actual voting dynamics from FPTP… there’s also presumably a lot of renters with their eyes on Mom and Dad’s home as an inheritance.

If they inherit the house they would be out of the mortgage casino and lower housing prices won't affect them so much.

Of course it won't be as valuable as an asset, but assuming they are primarily using it as a house rather then an asset then lower housing prices may not significantly affect their voting behaviour.

> but assuming they are primarily using it as a house

Unlikely unless they’re an only child

but which group is more active in voting and politics?

I would assume home owners are more likely to vote. But even with a lower voter turn out, there could still be more voting renters.

A sibling post has stats from 15 years ago but a lot has changed since then. My gut feeling is that more people are struggling to buy than to pay back mortgages but I have no stats to back that up.

> But even with a lower voter turn out, there could still be more voting renters.

Almost every country has more home owners than renters, so no. In USA its 65%.

Which group lives in cities where their vote counts far less than a vote in the countryside

It depends on the country or area unfortunately

People would be friendly and polite on the whole, a few standoffish and curious about your political leanings. Most places would just want the tourist cash in all honesty

That must be new.

I was an American in Austria during the first Gulf War, and people were pretty hostile to both me and my wife.

But then, Austria does tend to its own thing.

Huge economic issues threaten national security.

Economic and infrastructural sabotage isn't an unprecedented act in the last few years anyhow.

Isn't Arm now venturing into the product, rather than just specification, market and so this acquisition could help Arm?

Great, thanks. I would have valued your post more if you'd stated this. Unfortunately it just looked like you said "All these people are idiots and I'm right".

Those comments were written by two different accounts.

Do human servants make you lazier or more productive? (A sincere thought experiment)

And our memory has declined. He was right

Has it? Or do we instead have vast overfilled palaces of the sum of human knowledge, often stored in pointers and our limited working memory readily available for things recently accessed?

I'd argue that our ability to recall individual moments has gone down, but the sum of what we functionally know has gone up massively.

For sure. But through writing we've been able to learn more, and through AI we'll produce more.

With a diminished ability to store, recall and thus manipulate information, our learning is arguably more shallow.

With AI trained on increasingly generic input used by the casual, then the quality of our production will increase in quantity but decrease in quality.

I am not arguing to abandon the written word or LLMs.

But the disadvantages--which will be overlooked by the young and those happy to have a time-saving tool, namely the majority--will do harm, harm most will overlook favouring the output and ignoring the atrophying user.

That's not really the question though. The question is, would we be better off if we didn't have "[the] means of external marks"?

I'm sure somebody out there would argue that the answer is yes, but personally I have my doubts.

I think the question is that were Plato's fears unfounded. I don't think the question is "is writing bad", although it is framed as that to justify a carefree adoption of LLMs in daily life.

It’s all about how you use written content, even before AI you could just copy-paste code from StackOverflow without any understanding. But you could also use it as an opportunity to do your own research, make your own experiences and create your own memory (which sticks a lot better). And it’s not just about coding, you can’t really grasp a subject by just reading a text book and not doing exercises or further reading.

Plato’s (or rather the Egyptian king’s - IIRC) fears were not unfounded, since a lot of people do not operate this way (sadly I see this with some peers), however overall the effect could still be positive.

Writing distributes knowledge to a lot of people, without it you have to rely on a kind of personal relationship to learn from someone more knowledgeable (which can be better for the individual mentee though). So maybe it increases chances of learning (breadth of audience) at the cost of the depth of understanding?

What about when they say 'when I "stare at a mess of unfamiliar code" I will ask ChatGPT to explain it and it will fix the problem for me'?

If it works I'll say "I can automate you away". If it doesn't work I'll say "You checked in that code without understanding what it does?"

In which scenario does the cheater win?

> If it works I'll say "I can automate you away".

I don't think deciding not to use LLMs makes you any more immune from automation, because other devs will.

If anything, assuming it really does increase productivity, it'd seem to me that the devs using LLMs would be safer than devs in the same ___domain that refuse.

> If it doesn't work

The extent to which a human using an LLM still produces buggy code should already be taken into account by assignments.

I'll answer my own rhetorical question: the human wins when (s)he creates value; by asking the right questions (crafting prompts better than the next person) and by recognizing deficiencies in the computer's output.