> At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses

It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement. The consequences can be quantified, even though the subjective experience itself can't.

If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied, and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?

This is really all I'm trying to get at. Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.

"establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior."

And other sources have something similar. I'm interpreting your comment as saying "(psychological) harm is subjective, and because it can not be measured empirically, it's not possible to have expertise on this topic."

Fortunately, there are real world consequences that can be measured. If I take an action that makes many people say "ow!" and we acknowledge that expression as an indicator of pain, even though I can't measure the exact level of pain each person is experiencing, I can measure how many people are saying "ow!" I can measure the relationship between the intensity of my action, and the number of people that respond negatively. There's plenty of room for empiricism here, and a whole field of mathematics (statistics) that supports handling "normative" experiences. They even have a distribution for it!

The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms. A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.

Humans have a great capacity for problem solving and creativity which, at its heights, completely dwarfs other creatures on this planet. What else would we reference for general intelligence if not ourselves?

My skepticism towards AGI is primarily supported by my interactions with current systems that are contenders for having this property.

Here's a recent conversation with chatgpt.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69930acc-3680-8008-a6f3-ba36624cb2...

This system doesn't seem general to me it seems like a specialized tool that has really good logic mimicry abilities. I asked it if the silence response was hard coded, it said no then went on to explain how the silence was hard coded via a separate layer from the LLM portion which would just respond indefinitely.

It's output is extremely impressive, but general intelligence it is not.

On your final point about functional replacement not requiring biological mimicry. We don't know whether biological mimicry is required or not. We can only test things until we find out or gain some greater understanding of reality that allows us to prove how intelligence emerges.

Usually there was a cadence to things that allowed for a decent amount of downtime while the machine was running, but I once got to a job where the machine milled the parts so quickly, that I spent more time loading and unloading parts than anything else. Once I started the first part, I didn't actually rest until all of them were done. I ended up straining my back from the repetitive motion. I was shocked because I was in good shape and I wasn't really moving a significant amount.

If I talk about excessive concern for productivity (or profit) being a problem, certain people will roll their eyes. It's hard to separate a message from the various agendas we perceive around us. Regardless of personal feelings, there will always be a negative fallout for people when there's a sudden inversion in workflow like the one described in this article or the one I experienced during my internship.

I'm admittedly in no position to argue deeply about biology, or even physics for that matter, because I studied mechanical engineering. I dealt with physics in an applied manner.

With that said, this story comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri

It seems to disagree with your idea that fat is not fuel. And the first law of Thermo seemed to be applying to this man. He had little to no energy input (via food) and a baseline energy expenditure from just existing, so his system burned stored energy via body fat.

So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.

Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.

If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.

With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.

I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.

I haven't used agents much for coding, but I noticed that when I do have something created with the slightest complexity, it's never perfect and I have to go back and change it. This is mostly fine, but when large chunks of code are created, I don't have much context for editing things manually.

It's like waking up in a new house that you've never seen before. Sure I recognize the type of rooms, the furniture, the outlets, appliances, plumbing, and so on when I see them; but my sense of orientation is strained.

This is my main issue at the moment.

None of the things you listed are signs of merit, they are signs of pedigree. If people recommended them here, they did so in error.

There's certainly a difference between universities, but the most important differentiators are connections (has she exhausted these) and prestige. If those aren't working for her, the only thing left is personal projects. That is the true indicator of merit in the software space.

As for specific advice, your daughter is in a similar situation to me. I graduated thinking I had did all of the right things, and that my degree (mechanical engineering) was some sort of magic ticket. I was unemployed and then underemployed for a year or two. I eventually went to a job fair and got a job as a data analyst then, finally, moved into data engineering.

Reality has shown her that there isn't always a direct path to a goal. Are there other skills she has that she could use to get meaningful or interesting work?

Tell her to explore alternate jobs outside of her field or preferred industry, build up a portfolio of projects on the side to keep her skills sharp, and keep applying to her preferred role, but now at a much slower and deliberate pace.

Those of you who would ask someone for financial information after they say this, would you also say "it's hot out side" if they described something as cool during the summer?

Ultimately, given the complexity of security, expecting there to be some cultural shift on privacy is silly unless it's made trivially easy. We can't get people to eat right, exercise, or control their screen time and social media use and all of those have more immediate and tangible consequences.

I appreciate the message, but I don't think the call to action is practical.

"Every relationship with {men|women} I've been in has been bad, so romance is obviously worthless."

"My neighbors dog always barks at me, I didn't get why anyone likes dogs."

"I've had a bad experience with ${race} so I really wish we could get rid of them."

"I caught the flu, and it didn't kill me. I don't get why people are always worried about it."

"I've never worn a seatbelt, and I'm still alive. They're a waste of time."

"School was a bad experience for me personally, so best to get rid of it"

Are you serious right now?

Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.

I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.

All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.

Reich can't prove the internal working of the president's mind, so statements of intent are speculative to a degree, but if you interacted with a person in such a way that you projected feelings of animosity and hatred towards him, I wouldn't need your explicit admission to determine that you hate him or that you are consistently behaving in ways that appear hateful.

The president's actions have certainly shown a disdain for the education system. Vance has explicitly expressed taking issue with universities and wanting to implement government control. Trump has mandated that universities allow review for their curriculum if they want to receive funding.

This article isn't alarmist, because the actions that anyone would need to be alarmed about have already happened. The only question at this point is whether or not you like the results.

For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.

Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.

- Things that prevent you from starting the job. Org silos, security, and permissions

- Things that prevent you from doing the job. This is primarily data cleaning.

- Things that make the job more difficult. This involves poor tooling, and you'll struggle to break the stranglehold that SQL and python-pandas have in this area. I'll also add plotting libraries to this. Many of them suck in a seemingly unavoidable way.

On the second and third points llms will most likely own these soon enough, though maybe there's room to build something small and local that's more efficient if the scope of the agent is reduced?

The first point is organizational generally, and it's very difficult to solve outside of integrating your system into an environment which is the strategy pursued by companies like snowflake and databricks.