My point was that there is a bottom some-percent of homeless people that can’t immediately be helped.

But yeah I think I made my point clear in the second paragraph that we need the resources to provide housing and basic necessities for the majority of homeless people who are able to receive it, though I probably should’ve clarified that those benefits should be tiered and someone who just goes through a terrible point in life and is otherwise in a reasonably healthy place should have easy access to something decent.

That means that even though government insurance in the US only covers a relatively small percent of the population, we pay more than other countries that cover the whole population.

And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.

And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.

To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless

Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.

Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.

AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?

Even an average human writer can communicate details much more succinctly and directly than an LLM

You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos.

Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.

Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape

The files you serve to the browser are static, not the contents of the page itself

Updating the dom can happen with only individual assets, so it’s a static site

Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have?

Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?

It probably don’t cause long term damage unless that breath happened to be more important than normal, like while driving right as a child runs into the road.

Would you act differently knowing that you had one of these occasional acid breaths? Even if it only happened once per day on average (0.001%)

I think it’s those who still care about quality (which seems to be decreasing in the industry overall) trying to keep the whole thing running, in a sea of people who think going really really fast and not understanding their code is fine because LLMs can make sense of it and clean it up later.

Just look at the condition of open source contributions recently

(1) it’s not that I can’t understand their output, it’s just written in a way that is very homogenous and same-y, with very boring cliches and phrases that don’t quite match their context

(2) a pretty strong sign of intelligence is being able to explain complex things in simple terms

But you can do an analysis of a bottle of Coke to figure out exactly what’s in it.

You can even make your own and sell it, if you call it a different name.

> If it isn't fair use, then we may need to sue all teachers for spitting out knowledge they ultimately acquired from someone's work.

Is such a lazy argument and always was. A human doing something is necessarily different than a machine doing it. We can be ok with a human doing a thing and simultaneously not ok with a machine doing it.

Thanks for sharing, it’s nice to be reminded of potential other motivations of people who outwardly seem to just want to accumulate money.

That’s the steel man argument.

FWIW I mostly don’t believe that LLMs are the answer, I don’t think they’re going to reach a high enough level of capability to do this, and I think the current AI companies are problematic in a lot of ways.

I also think LLM use is bad for us and probably harms our thinking abilities. And using it takes away a lot of what it means to be human.

Personally I like both physical and mental difficulty. I like gardening even if I could just buy mass produced flowers. I like riding a bike even though cars are “easier”. I like playing ukulele with my family even though I can barely make a chord, much better than listening to some other real musician, or Suno ai generated songs. I like eating my wife’s sourdough bagels even if they take several hours more than just buying some.

And I think having those regular challenges and achievements make life worth living! And I worry that the AI future that some envision will make much of what we get value from feel meaningless in the same way that writing code by hand is starting to.

Maybe we’ll still be fine in the same way I find meaning in all of those things that I listed above. But damn what a gamble