sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Sure, but that was an economic divide, not a divide based on artistic qualities
It is based on artistic qualities because Beethoven got big appealing to the 1%. Taylor Swift got big appealing to the 99%. They are not the same and comparing them is a mistake.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
The music being a major point of pop music goes back centuries: For example Mozart and Beethoven were "pop" artist in their time.
The top answer suggests that a much larger fraction of the population has heard e.g. Michael Jackson than Beethoven or Mozart in their time. Beethoven and Mozart were "pop" for the upper crust of society. Has music popular with the 1% gotten worse? I don't know, but certainly mass media has transformed who you have to appeal to in order to have mass success.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?
Possible, hence why I called it replacement level slop.
I do find Spotify's algorithm shows me recent songs that I like with some regularity (and no, these aren't from the Spotify ghost artists/ais), so I'm not as negative as you about today's music.
Music is perhaps not the point of pop music, it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist. It's not clear to me if people will be willing to do this with an AI, but perhaps.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
I suspect that's just result in there being no more sales on such items, demand would probably smooth out substantially.
There's probably some variance in people's willingness to buy in bulk. Costco exists but that hasn't resulted in everyone matching Costco's prices. Maybe more websites will start offering bulk discounts (kind of like subscribe and save).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Or just do stuff on its own. If I could have Gemini monitor websites XYZ for sales on some consumable and order ten when there's a sale, that would be pretty convenient.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.
That or we'd get Singapore.
I mean, maybe we'd need to cane them on national TV rather than incarcerate them, but you get the point.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
I can't really put my finger on what's wrong with it but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.
I guess I agree that it's succeeded in producing replacement-level slop and to the extent that people thought this was impossible they should probably eat crow. But I see no indications of SOVL.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
The municipal government argues that the grocery store's below-market rent of 0.77 $/ft2 results in valuation of 2.3 M$ for the two properties at issue. The couple argues that the market rent for the grocery store was 8.5 $/ft2 and on that basis the proper valuation of the two properties is 4.8 M$
Huh? Why is the valuation only ~twice as much after the square foot price is 11x bigger?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
You got arrested for felony assault for calling a cop 'fuckface'?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Wiki says 12-18.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Is the implication that Hemingway is not easily digestible?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Bro, they've got wandshit #1 on the nyt bestseller list these days.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/quicksilver-callie-hart/1145866827?ean=9781538774205#
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?
Yes? You'll never catch me defending the tariff retardation.
If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to.
The world is positive sum. Abetting your enemies, however, is likely negative sum. At any rate, it's negative for you.
Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.
Yes, this is also retarded. Two retards don't make a right.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what?
In the pessimistic view you seem to hold, maybe the horse will sing. In the optimistic view, then nothing and China never catches up to the western SOTA.
Let's turn the question around. We let American companies sell chips to America's geopolitical rival for less than 4-6 years until, apparently, indigenous Chinese capabilities match American capabilities, at which point China tells Nvidia to GTFO. We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?
Your inclination towards China makes it hard to take seriously your opinion on how America should conduct itself with China.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.
You're merely restating your original argument rather than arguing against what I said. Yes, it is often possible to do without and to do with less, and we did without software engineers for a hundred thousand years, and we can do with less of them now. The question is whether it's better to do with less than to have more. It is, to say the least, rare that scarcity is more socially optimal than abundance.
Do you think that we would be better off with five software engineers total in the US? If not, then your implicit argument is that there is such a thing as "peak software engineer" and we're past it. So far, you haven't presented any evidence for this.
Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs.
The point is not about database engineers in particular. To be pedantic, I don't think I've met a "database engineer" in FAANG for at least a decade, so I don't know that they even hire database engineers.
I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles.
Great. But, they were already doing some job that was worth doing. If an H1B is parachuted in for that job rather than the database engineer job, does that make you feel better?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place.
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
This proves too much. There was a time when you could not hire a database engineer for any amount of money, because there was no such thing as a database. People found other solutions (clay tablets, books, etc). Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database?
What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers? Well, if you can't hire one, you give up and do something else. Maybe you decide to shovel shit in Louisiana instead. But there was a reason you wanted to do the first thing, and the fact that it's impossible has a real, albeit hard to measure, cost.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
If your coworkers are morons, that's kind of a skill issue.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
They're "fun" for the VP running the show. They're less fun for the guys working on something useless.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Sure. I've worked with coworkers on a 24x7 rotation and there the time difference is a must for maintaining sanity. But when I'm working on a project (rather than keeping a system running) I find it way better to be nearby.
they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it.
This works in the case that they have nothing going on, or are going to drop everything to pursue your project. More likely IME, they'll think about it for perhaps an hour and send you some feedback. That's the kind of thing that would have been way better as a meeting and that's most of my cross timezone experiences.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
So you think that, in a budget crunch scenario, the administrators are going to fire their fellow administrators (or, even more risible, their reports that give them clout in the organization) rather than doubling down on the existing sliding scale of tuition and soaking the families at the top even more?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Their books are open, right? What is there to disagree about here?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Remote collaboration still sucks, especially with big time zone mismatches. There's a world of difference between me walking over to my coworker's desk for a quick chat and we can pull up a whiteboard or look at a screen together and me trying to find time with a coworker with an 8 hour time difference (convenient overlapping hours are usually booked solid with meetings already) and try to make myself understood over zoom.
And if they're gone home for the day (which happens before I have lunch) I can't talk to them at all that day.
The architecture behind her is fucked up too.
Would have been too spicy to make her a white woman with soot on her face, I guess.
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