U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Hell there could have been a third set of four numbers that were the nuclear launch codes. It’s not the fact that it was four numbers, it’s what you were trying to make happen when you typed them. Now of course whether they can prove what your intent was when you typed them is another matter, but generally a duress pin should be for when robbers are breaking into your house, and the government will be on your side, and not when the government will be against you.

When carpenters moved from mostly hand tools to mostly power tools, it didn't take away much of the need to understand the techniques of woodworking, it just made it all faster.

Reading a nonfiction book is very different than reading a book summary, even if (as is often the case), the ideas in the book could have been condensed way down. The point is that actually reading the whole book means you spend far more time engaging with the ideas, and so they become more deeply embedded in your neural network. In things like sports, this is just obvious, in that no one expects someone to become a good soccer player by just reading the rulebook, and obviously more practice is the main way you get better.

Starlink is clearly the best right now but there are competitors. In particular, these competitors may not have the capacity to service millions of households at $100/mo, but they definitely do for private planes at $10k/mo, especially when the service is only being used for maybe 40hr/mo.

I don't know where they're at in terms of civil engines, but each new generation of engines eeks out less and less additional performance. If China comes out with something like the CFM LEAP at a good price, I'd imagine they could sell that for many years to come.

This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.

If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.

My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.

Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.

I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.

It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.

It used to be that almost every river was unsafe to swim in.

It’s possible to fix environmental problems. It just requires the will.

Ultimately what it means to be a professional is that you are responsible for your work. That’s why you get a salary instead of being paid by the token.

Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.

What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.

Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.