I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.

I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.

Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).

> and render some folks unemployable

If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35277655

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Inflation causes asset prices to rise.

> If inflation was running hot persistently at like 6% then long term interest rates would be higher

This is not true.

> housing prices would fall in nominal terms compared to wages

I suggest you reconsider your assertion that 6% inflation would result in lower housing prices.

> The low-inflation, low-interest rate environment has produced high asset valuations due to the cheapness of borrowing money.

The high asset valuations as a result of low interest rates is textbook monetary inflation.

> There is an important distinction on the spectrum between consumable things bought with wages and investments bought with borrowed money, and the rise in prices in those categories are different.

The prices in both those categories are affected by dilution of value as a consequence of monetary expansion and that increase in prices has a name, 'inflation'.

> If you want to play the semantic game that all rises in any prices are inflation there is a real distinction that you're missing -- in which case we should talk about asset inflation vs. price inflation vs. wage inflation as being different inflations and stop talking about it like its the same thing (which economists would tell you it isn't by arguing that you're talking about assets and not inflation, but now we've just gone in a circle talking past each other because of definitions).

The point of semantics is to enable us to communicate by having mutually understood meanings for the words we use. If you want to talk about price increases that are not a result of monetary factors, then you can just talk about the price of things going up without misappropriating the word 'inflation' and making it seem like you don't understand what the word even means.

Indeed, seems they are not "happy" to buy Apple.

> There is an alternative

I mentioned this twice, it is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well. Do you have anything to add to the discussion?

They aren't all "happy" about it, but as I mentioned in the post you replied to, there is not a decent alternative.

> Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.

Certainly not but one would have to be interested in the fact of the matter to realize it.

Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.

The experience of being human is what allows me to infer meaning from the words, phrases, sentences, etc. that a human generates. This is what allows me to make the leap from text to understanding (or lack, or incomplete understanding, or confusion, or deception) with human-generated responses. This is what I have in that case of humans, which allows me to interpret their statements one way; and what I lack with machines, which means I have no basis for inferring understanding the same way I do with a human. If I was not human, I would not be able to infer meaning from the noises a human makes, except by observing correlations between those noises and their behavior. This is well understood in cognitive science and animal behavior.

> To understand something means that one can create novel answers to questions about something. Those answers however must make sense with the rules that govern the "something" at hand. This answer must also not be "memorized" in some sort of giant query-response lookup table.

chatGPT is functionally equivalent to a lookup table with randomization.

> For example if I ask chatGPT to emulate a bash terminal and create a new directory it can do so indicating it understands how a filesystem works. That is understanding.

It replies with a text output that is a probabilistic representation of the text that one might find on the internet in response to such a query. The emulation occurs in your mind when you read the response and assign meaning to the words and phrases it contains.

> However understanding things is an aspect of being human and chatGPT captures a part of that aspect.

You have not shown that chatGPT is anything different than a fancy lookup table with some randomization.