currently most industrialised countries are in a demographic decline, sometimes patched by immigration that will burden their economies long term much more than they will help them
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
All developed countries are in demographic decline (ex immigration), and need automation/robotics. There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
> There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
Is this true? The US has been doing this for over 100 years and it's been fine, I think. I mean, our countries identity has basically become "we're all immigrants" but that's not a new phenomena.
I don't even know why I clicked on this thread. It's like reading a thread on economics or other topics where we tech folk think our success at pushing around bits makes us instant expert on anything we ponder.
Most of the responses here are either demonstrating a heavy bias, an utter lack of background knowledge or both.
Is that reliable? The IRGC basically runs the economy and takes a significant cut. The IGRC is also separate from the military. The nuclear program, quite obviously for military use, may also not be included. What about support for proxy groups? Hezbollah alone gets support above $1B per year.
I tried to check the amounts normalized for % of GDP.
Conservative estimates put them at half of the 2% GDP military spend. However, the IRGC's tentacles are also estimated to siphon off something like +50% of the GDP.[0]
Not all of that money's going to military hardware, but they have a substantial slush fund and use the Iranian resource base as a military piggy bank.
I find people tend to omit that on HN and folks dealing with different roles end up yelling at each other because those details are missing. Being an embedded sw engineer writing straight C/ASM is, for instance, quite different from being a frontend engineer. AI will perform quite differently in each case.
My experience is that it gets the syntax right but constantly hallucinates APIs and functions that don't exist but sound like they should. It also seems to be tricked by variable names that don't line up with their usage.
In my systems programming job ICs have mostly avoided it because we don't have time to learn a new thing with questionable benefits. A lot of my team are really, really good programmers and like that aspect of the job. They don't want to turn any part of it over to a machine. Now if a machine could save us from ever dealing with Jira...
That said, I have begun using AI for some things and it is starting to be useful. It's still 50/50 though, with many hallucinations that waste time but some cases where it caught very simple bugs(syntax or copy/paste errors). I think the experience of, say, systems programmers is very different vs python/web folks though. AI does a great job for my helper scripts in Python.
Management needs to take their own medicine though. They continue to refuse to leverage AI to do things it could actually be good at. I give a duplicate status to management 3x/week now. Why? AI could handle tracking and summarizing it just fine. It could also produce my monthly status for me.
Unusual Whales paraphrased a Sky News article (Fox-lite) which quoted sans context Lurion De Mello of Macquarie University (the Transforming Energy Markets Research Centre) who himself sourced infomation from LSEG
Lurion De Mello thinks (to the best of his human recall) that would be the first US shipment of processed fuel (bowser ready) in decades (although he factors in he might be wrong about that) but acknowledged that US shipments of crude (unrefined) are more common.
The west should have just used cluster munitions in ballistic missiles. Apparently you can target civilians with those and no one will accuse you of war crimes. Drones hitting residential buildings, airports and critical energy infrastructure? No problem. If you use an F-35 and smart munitions we expect perfect accuracy though.
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
The US is currently threatening to bomb power plants across Iran, which is a war crime. Yesterday the US spread land mines across a city that have already killed civilians. These are the actions of my government and it's my duty to stand up and be critical of war crimes being committed by my government. The idea that I am also obliged to criticize irans actions is bullshit. I hold my government to a higher standard, that's surprising to you?
It's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues. If not, well we've accelerated a lot of our worst problems(global warming, big tech, wealth inequality, surveillance state, post-truth culture, etc).
> If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues
If AGI is born from these efforts, it will likely be controlled by people who stand to lose the most from solving those issues. If an OpenAI-built AGI told Sam Altman that reducing wealth inequality requires taxing his own wealth, would he actually accept that? Would systems like that get even close to being in charge?
This sounds just like the idea that quantum computing will solve a lot of computational issues, which we know isn’t true. Why would AGI be any different?
> If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues
How, exactly, does more and better tech help with the fundamentally sociological issues of power distribution, wealth inequality, surveillance, etc? Are you operating on the assumption that a machine superintelligence will ignore the selfish orders of whoever makes it and immediately work to establish post-scarcity luxury space communism?
I don't expect AI to replace me anytime soon, but...
AI is already letting me care less about the languages I use and focus more on the algorithms. AI helps me write tests. AI suggests improvements and catches bugs before compiling. AI writes helper scripts/tools for me. All of these things are good enough for me to accept paying a few hundred dollars every month, although I don't have to because my employer already does do that for me.
6 months ago I was arguing that AI wasn't very good and code was more precise than english for specifying solutions. The first part is not true anymore for many things I care about. The second is still true but for many things I care about it doesn't matter.
I'm getting tired of articles that try to tell me what to think about AI. "AI is great and will replace all programmers!"... "AI sucks and will ruin your brain and codebase!"... both of these are tired and meaningless arguments.
As a middle aged guy who has used pot on and off for decades and no longer really enjoys the high, I'll say weed is good for two things:
Old man joint pains. Not headaches, broken bones, etc. But it nearly erases achy joint pain for me.
Being angry. I am much less angry in general when I'm smoking a bit every couple of days. That said, when I take a break I feel like my testosterone goes through the roof. I get more irritable and, TMI, I get a lot more spontaneous boners.
Weed is great for my anger and sleep. I’ve never found as good of a sleep medicine for someone who wakes up too early.
I also had debilitating anger in my teens and weed really helped calm that down. I’ve been off it for years at a time and I still can’t get past my anger without it.
I found it used to disrupt my ability to fall asleep, and I didn't dream, or at least didn't remember doing so. It also impacted my memory when awake, which makes sense if it was messing with my sleep cycles.
However, I was able to fix all of those problems by consistently ceasing use 4 hours prior to going to sleep.
Emphasizing this for anyone that reads it. Ceasing use 4 hours prior to going to sleep really helps - and yes, you can “use it for sleep” that many hours before and still be in a more sleep ready State than otherwise.
Anyone reading this far looking to optimize sleep, don't forget the basics of consistent schedules/meals and regular exercise. Personally, I can't exercise or eat too close to bed, as it keeps me awake. If you have the flexibility to wake without an alarm, that can be good as well to prevent sleep cycle intrusion. Stay away from blue wavelengths of light as bedtime approaches (use redshift/f.lux/etc on screens).
Agree. For different reasons, I cut THC a week ago after taking it before bed for years. This whole week my sleep was horrible. I’d fall asleep fine but wake up around 4 and not able to fall back asleep. Until someone recommended tart cherry juice. After two days of having it, I’m falling back asleep fine and having a great quality sleep. Try it out. YMMV.
It has at times worked well for sleep. One thing I've noticed though is that nothing works consistently for me. While weed and/or melatonin helps me get good sleep, both can leave me groggy/hungover during the day. What's weird is that I don't mean it varies night-to-night, but like for a period of, say, 9 months I'll sleep better on melatonin then it starts to leave me hungover so I'll switch it up and try weed and maybe it works fine for a few months then I get daytime sleepy/sluggish.
Recently I just quit everything yet again and now I sleep well for 6.5 hours, wake up refreshed, and have a lot more alertness and motivation during the day. My past experience says this will last for a while until I yet again find I need weed or melatonin to get more than 4 hours. I don't get it.. probably other factors in my life affecting my sleep.
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