It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation.

>After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing?

This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber.

I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools".

Tested against their examples:

>I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor]

As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship.

> any more than using a hammer to drive nails does.

If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements.

> What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it.

This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer.

The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made.

I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.

- term limits for congress

- voter day national holiday

- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election

- repeal citizens united (maybe covered by op)

- and change all fines/tickets to paid in human hours of community service rather than money

It also makes for much more fungible developers. Instead of having a few key engineers that know the system inside and out, that knowledge is encoded in markdown throughout the project, allowing new devs to ramp up by asking questions against the codebase and tracing the history of reasonings that led to the shape/implementation that exists today. It's like having near exhaustive design docs & documentation with change tracking included.

While it seems likely that developers will become more fungible (replaceable) going forward, I think being able to operate at this layer of abstraction & still having the capacity to drop down to the nitty gritty implementation details will make strong devs more valuable, rather than less.

Part of the issue is that you're presupposing a uniform definition of success. Different cultures have different priorities, and not everyone wants to spend 80 hrs a week in the office to climb the ladder and become a millionaire. Some cultures prioritize family/social relationships, sports, or a connection with nature. Unsurprisingly, these different cultures can often be racially affinitized. Sure, most people wouldn't mind being rich, but many do mind the hustle often accompanying that form of success.

I think part of what you describe around momentum holds merit, but I don't think affirmative action goes about the remedy in a constructive manner. It's fighting racism with more (albeit different) racism. You turn it into a zero sum game where your political posturing can be more valuable than your work contributions. That incentive structure is degenerative for all parties.

> If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this.

Genuinely curious, would you support an initiative to shuffle all babies between families at birth? Your argument seems to be "who you're raised by gives an unfair advantage in life, and we should correct for this societally". It seems to me that a random shuffle would equally distribute any inherent bias relative to generational momentum.

The best advice I can muster is "be the change you wish to see in the world". Giving up hope is just passing the buck. You'll never have the whole world on your side, but you also don't need it to be.

I'd say that bias is only an issue if it's unable to respond to additional nuance in the input text. For example, if I ask for a "male nurse" it should be able to generate the less likely combination. Same with other races, hair colors, etc... Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.

Flipped around the other way, if a man says "trust me, i'm on the pill", now a woman has to trust this man even though they're the one's at risk of getting pregnant. What's worse is that the woman can't easily verify if they did in fact take a pill. At least with a condom you can be check that it's being used properly..

This asymmetric risk profile makes me think think that male birth control pills won't work outside of trusting long-term relationships, and then there's better options than a chemical pill for those situations already.

I don't know about that. More like it muddies the waters and leads to miscommunication and polarization

- Freedom of information So that leaves can error correct when corruption is detected

- Freedom to re-associate So that leaves can re-organize when the existing power structure becomes destructive to the leave's objectives. This may be a contextual or cultural shift rather than a direct form of corruption. (Eg: climate change may change many individual's priorities going forward). Imo pursuing this heuristic should preclude most forms of identity politics; I'd rather the leaves associate on philosophical priorities rather than on innate physical characteristics

- No special rules for leaves vs nodes higher in the hierarchy Or perhaps only more restrictive rules for nodes higher in the hierarchy

Your examples seem to have went back to a peer-to-peer model of decentralization; which I was agreed is inherently inefficient and untenable at scale. You need some hierarchical distribution of power, it's just that it needs to stay beholden to the leaves in the hierarchy. The person who decides what's on the ballot is the individual(s) elected/appointed to have that job. That person(s) is likely beholden to some pre-agreed upon rules for how to phrase questions, and any individual in the society can cry afoul if they abuse their position or if we need to update the rules with new considerations. All other leaves can choose to listen if they want, and choose to respond if they want, at whatever level of the hierarchy they believe is best suited to respond to the corruption. The hierarchy is not rigid, it's dynamic, evolves, and must be allowed to error correct as each individual sees fit. The only way that's possible is if it's driven bottom up rather than top down.

The objective should be to distribute and localize power as much as possible, because the more power is centralized, the more prone to corruption, less efficient, and less responsive to nuance it becomes. The exact laws and regulations that achieve that objective? Society is still working that out, but I'd argue separate judicial, legislative, and executive branches was a good move in the right direction. I'd also argue trial by a jury of your peers was also a solid move in the grand scheme of things.

I'd argue that same objective holds true for technological networks as well.

I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's legal system.

Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo, your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a new representative at will.

In my opinion, crypto is largely a ponzi scheme, so rest assured I'm not saying this out of love for bitcoin. But I also don't believe there's some master-mind illuminati behind the scenes orchestrating this intentionally. This is a 100% open and transparent protocol that people are supporting out of fear of existing societal power structure. If you have a good reason to suspect someone of manipulating crypto for some greater purpose, present your evidence and let us evaluate it. But vague paranoia about some puppet master's scheme sounds a bit like crying wolf to me.

We as a society just haven't gotten good at pricing in externalities (eg: carbon emissions) to consumer goods yet. If crypto miners were providing enough societal value to afford the excessive consumption of energy, then I think everyone would be praising crypto as the next industrial revolution -- improving quality of life for everyone! But instead, I think most people recognize it as siphoning value from many for the benefit of a fortunate few.

If anything, it seems like the reversal of entropy would be a better description of life. To make paper and oxygen from fire would have higher consciousness than a fire itself