There probably should be a maximum legal age for the president and congresspeople (e.g. 65 aka "retirement age"). The guy is 78. It's common and expected for brain health to deteriorate, it's not a huge surprise, but the guy has too much ego/narcissism to ever admit that this is happening, and the people in his administration won't want to admit that they put a toxic narcissist with dementia into power and defended him way past the point where it was reasonable to do so.
There's many simple, small changes the US could put in place to make its political system less corrupt.
In theory, the electorate determines the maximum age for a politician by who they vote for…
There were several young Presidential candidates running in both parties over the last few cycles, but voters chose the oldest from each side. Which tells me that voters don’t really care about age as much as they do other things.
Which, when I view it from that lens, kind of makes your argument seem like: “people are voting for politicians based on things I think they shouldn’t, so I want to make a law saying they can’t”
> Which, when I view it from that lens, kind of makes your argument seem like: “people are voting for politicians based on things I think they shouldn’t, so I want to make a law saying they can’t”
Trump's situation has nothing to do with his age or mental acuity. We've had moron presidents before. Biden was supposedly a vegetable at the same time "he" was guiding us to a soft landing from COVID that made most other developed nations extremely envious.
It has everything to do with his public support for heinous and moronic and outright unconstitutional acts, and the way that support is pushed from the Legislative arm of the government. Without the majorities Republicans hold in Congress, Trump could have been rightfully removed months ago.
The President is not as powerful as Trump thinks he is. Congressional Republicans are using him as a lightning rod to keep pressure off their backs. They are mildly beholden to him in certain specifics, in that if Trump tells his base to primary you they often will, but they are not preventing Trump from doing stupid shit that even his base doesn't totally support that will objectively hurt everyone like this Iran war.
Reforming the Presidency cannot change anything because the paper already says he can't do these things. It doesn't matter as long as other people just pretend they don't hold the power they do.
Trump has been a moron, a simpleton, a grifter his entire life. None of this comes from mental deterioration. He's just a fucking moron who only knows retribution and grifting and refusing to pay contracts. A 35 year old Trump would be doing nothing different.
Years back, there were people on this site with investments in Tesla that would mass down vote any comments negative comments about Tesla or Musk. There are people on this site currently working on DRM and online ads and regularly defend efforts to defeat ad block efforts. There are immigrants that advocate for pulling up the ladder behind them and advocate for very racist policies.
Don't take the down votes personally, just know there's really scummy people out there
> There are immigrants that advocate for pulling up the ladder behind them and advocate for very racist policies.
If you listen to the immigrants supporting "pulling up the ladder", you wouldn't be making such bad faith attacks. Typically the arguments come from legal immigrants that took no benefits, attacking policies of mass immigration or illegal immigrants and giving social benefits to immigrants. This isn't pulling up the ladder, this is a fiscally conservative view that someone who pays taxes can hold and is a reasonable policy to have.
I didn't downvote you, but I don't agree that he's unpredictable.
At least to me, he is very predictable. He has an MO, and he never deviates very far from it. And he publishes his stream of consciousness on social media, which exposes a lot about what he's thinking at any given moment.
I agree with you, but most average people in the US were blindsided by his obsession with Panama, Canada, and Greenland. Remember, most average people in the US aren't thinking about other countries. Maybe Mexico. I know many older people who love Trump but don't know anything about Iran. It's very confusing, and seemingly counter to his America First and 'I only end wars' comments.
I think the split is between those who recognize it as true, and those who recognize it as true, but are mad you called it out. Because "politics on hn" or "dear leader during war time".
Also, he's 79, and turning 80 this year. I'd be good with a limit of 75, which would mean no one in office at 80+.
No. People turned to Trump because the other side is equally ludicrous, refusing to address things as simple as urban crime and propagating meaningless feel-good solutions.
While I agree with you about the pattern of impotent feel-good solutions, let us be clear that urban crime is a municipality, or possibly state-level problem. People turned to Grump because they wanted simple answers to complex problems (validating their own egos), and they doubled down (refusing listen to their fellow citizens) out of pure mass-media-induced spite.
Mass media reflects top down sentiment. The red media machine frames this as "liberal" to market themselves as some alternative when the reality is that they are openly in the pocket of big business rather than even having to make a show of caring about individuals.
They both present overly simplistic answers. The blue simplistic answers generally fall short and fizzle, as they're framed in disempowering ways and neutered by corporate lobbying. The red simplistic answers cause active harm by rejecting reality and the idea of second order effects. Grump's policies are basically what the grassroots red tribe has been lusting after for decades, and the results have been disaster after disaster - regardless what one thinks effective policy should look like.
(the only two political philosophies I've been able to find that match Grumpism are anarcho-capitalism and religious fundamentalism. I used to have more of an ancap perspective, but I moved past that thanks to Yarvin's writings)
What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand
100 x 5s is nearly 10 minutes. If it takes 10 minutes to write a PR there may be a "skill issue". The bottom end of this 1-2 minutes makes more sense.
How much productivity do we really need? Even at senior dev payscale 2 minutes is like a dollar. The tokens and calls involved in having a 5s commit could close in on 10¢, depending on your contract, the model etc. and that's today's costs. Do remember that my salary is on top of the rates for the LLM, so if the 5s response takes 5s for me to prompt, that's 15s (10 for me 5 for the LLM) that the boss is paying for.
This starts to feel like a billionaire eating ramen noodles just so he can reach his second billion dollars.
Where I work our contract limits API calls, so doing this could result in not being able to use the model when I need it later for something more sophisticated (planning, debugging etc.) than using tooling I'm paid to already know.
Probably constrained by training resources. It's much easier to experiment with a smaller architecture. You may need many training runs to figure out hyperparameters for example. If each run needs multiple GPUs for a week the cost adds up quickly. I think it makes a lot of sense to start small.
I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.
My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.
In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.
> imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
> the political will to stop AI development
The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the potential harms are less tangible.
> Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
I don't need to imagine this student, I'm friends with some who are going through this right now. They graduated almost a year ago and haven't found work yet. One of them jokes about suicide often and I don't know how to help him
The social contract between labour and capital has been frayed for a long time, but it is near breaking now. It's going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets better. If it ever does get better
That's the direction the field is already going with "agents". People want autonomous AI agents that are capable of acting independently and that have more and more capabilities. For example, something like Claude code, but that acts as a sidekick that is constantly running, and able to act without being prompted. That's what people are imagining when they talk about teams of agents. You act as a manager, but your coding agents are off working on various features and only check in periodically.
First, believe it or not, 3 years is not that long. It's also not a given that LeCun was given the resources he needed to work on this tech at Meta. Zuck wanted another llama.
Second, AMI Labs just secured a billion in funding, and while that's a lot of money, it's literally just a fraction of the yearly salary they are paying to Wang. Big tech companies are literally throwing tens of billions to keep doing the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Why not try something else once in a while?
There's many simple, small changes the US could put in place to make its political system less corrupt.
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