Right, nobody needs cabinets or doors because... AI. /s
I'm a professional woodworker. One-off tables in a garage might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins, and cabinetry in homes is a great business. You're likely not exposed to cabinet or architectural woodwork shops that build high-end homes, or that just do renovation for that matter.
A better comparison to Ikea vs Handcraft would be shrinkwrap software vs custom software for companies. With AI, the custom software industry is getting disrupted (if the current trajectory of improvements continue).
In case of woodcraft, there is some tangible result that can be appreciated and displayed as art. In case of custom software, there is no such displayability.
There are still plenty of industries that won't trust AI generated anything unless it's gone over with a fine tooth comb, or maybe not even then. Devs will still have careers there. I'm talking about medical devices, safety critical systems, etc. In any case, I don't even believe AI gen code will get there anytime soon, but if I'm wrong that's okay too.
That’s the point. It used to be something almost everyone bought. Now it’s relegated to high-end luxury. The craft still exists, and you can still do well, but it’s much diminished.
It’s not that nobody needs cabinets or doors. It’s that automation, transportation, and economies of scale have made it much cheaper to produce those things with machines in a factory.
> One-off tables in a garage might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins, and cabinetry in homes is a great business.
I'd like to see numbers backing that up. My personal impression is that you have a small number of custom woodworkers hustling after an ever smaller number of rich clients. That seems like exactly the same problem.
I've got my doubts, because current AI tech doesn't quite live in the real world.
In the real world something like inventing a meat substitute is thorny problem that must be solved in meatspace, not in math. Anything from not squicking out the customers, to being practical and cheap to produce, to tasting good, to being safe to eat long term.
I mean, maybe some day we'll have a comprehensive model of humans to the point that we can objectively describe the taste of a steak and then calculate whether a given mix and processing of various ingredients will taste close enough, but we're nowhere near that yet.
Taste has nothing to do with it; 'tis is all based on economics and the actual way to stop meat consumption is to simply remove big-ag tax subsidies and other externalized costs of production which are not actually realized by the consumer. A burger would cost more than most can afford and the free market would take care of this problem without additional intervention. Unfortunately, we do not have a free market.
So there's no point in pushing for pasture raised, and it's either all or nothing ?
I think incremental progress is possible. I think rolling back and gag laws would make a positive difference in animal welfare because people would be able to film and show how bad conditions are inside.
I think that's worth pushing for. And it's more realistic than everyone stopping eating meat all at once.
The economics of what you describe are impossible. The entire concept of an idyllic pasture is actual industry propaganda which is not based in objective reality.
People will eventually stop eating meat because it is unsustainable, but unfortunately not without causing a great deal of suffering first, and your comment is an example of why this process is unnecessarily prolonged. It is clear you have not done much research on actual animal welfare based on your "pasture" argument alone. I am even willing to bet you think humans currently outnumber animals, when the reality is so much more troubling.
> I'm not sure what makes you assume that about me.
I'm not sure why you're not sure; the parent comment explained it already: your vision of an idealized pasture is incongruent with reality, namely because the number of animals and resources it would take to materialize and actually sustain such a system defies reason.
This was never a discussion about animal welfare, but about challenging industry-seeded assumptions which were not even being questioned. It is unfortunate this makes you feel threatened and requires a retreat from the conversation, but it is also typical.
Comfortable clothes aren't necessary. Food with flavor isn't necessary... We should all just eat ground up crickets in beige cubicles because of how many unnecessary things we could get rid of. /s
You don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
Would you say all people have the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness? If not, we need _some_ way of saying who is, so that they could be matched to higher complexity jobs. It's far for perfect but it works somewhat
So your theory is that a dominant military force is using a missile that costs at least 5 figures on random fisherman, with no intel or reason for targeting... Forgive me for thinking that it might be a bit more nuanced than that.
So pick Venezuela? Which at best is a transshipment point, why no strikes in the Darién, why not take out some railroad tracks since a lot of drugs go up from coca country by rail? Also drug smugglers aren't stupid, why would they send product out knowing the U.S. military is sitting out there with a toddler's finger on the trigger?
Know what Venezuela has a shit-ton of though? Oil. Guess who loves the oil, gas, and coal industries? If your answer involves someone orange you'd be right. Guess who got kicked out of Venezuela when Chavaz took over? If you said large multinational oil corporations you'd be correct.
On top of that donnie gets to look tough against a country that largely has no serious regional allies in fact I believe a lot of them are pissed, China has ties but they aren't going to ratchet up the trade fiasco over Maduro, russia is a bit busy punching itself in the balls and last I check Venezuelans aren't big fans of Maduro so donnie is basically riskless save domestically.
Also given the size of those boats I'd wager a solid amount on the total lost amount would be equivalent to taking out 8 McDonald's store shipments and claiming you've dealt a serious blow to McDonald's bottom line.
People need to retire the oil argument, it isn’t credible. We don’t live in the 1980s. The US has been the world’s leading oil producer for years now, is expected to maintain that position for the foreseeable future, and has several trillion barrels equivalent of hydrocarbon reserves.
Venezuela’s oil production is a single digit percentage of US oil production and the quality of their crude is famously poor. The US neither needs it nor wants it except to the extent they pay the US to refine it for them because they don’t have that ability.
Pinning this action on a desire for oil is a lazy argument far past its expiration date.
So your argument is my argument is old? Why were there oil corps there and why were they so pissed when they got kicked out?
Also did you think I was suggesting the U.S. govt wants it? Donnie's friends in the oil industry want it, single digit, double digit, doesn't matter to them greed knows no bounds with that crowd and this isn't Iraq in 2004 under Bush which I never believed had anything to do with oil.
My argument is that it seems like you haven’t updated your understanding of oil geopolitics for several decades.
The US has always had significant control over Venezuelan oil production because the US runs some of the only refineries that can process that type of low-quality crude. If the US banned Chevron from refining Venezuelan oil in the US, Venezuela has few other options. The US already captures much of the value of Venezuelan oil production because of the refinery monopsony. There is little margin in the rest of it. They’ve been profit-maxxing Venezuelan crude for decades.
Your argument could have been reasonable a few decades ago in a “big picture” geopolitical sense but we don’t live a few decades ago. OPEC no longer controls oil prices and the US is the uncontested oil producing superpower. No one saw that coming. Pretending all of this history never happened isn’t going to lead to rational conclusions.
The US used to expend a lot of power ensuring its oil supply. It hasn’t needed to do that for a while. Now it expends power to control oil supplies to other countries. None of this applies to Venezuela though because Venezuelan oil has a dependency on US refineries that other oil producing countries don’t have.
> My argument is that it seems like you haven’t updated your understanding of oil geopolitics for several decades.
Your argument, then, is the GP has a more recent and up to date grasp of geoplotics than the current POTUS?
The same POTUS with a 1930s grasp of tariffs?
What reason exists for the US to "bail out" Argentina? Was that as simple as extending time for those who contributed to the Presidential library fund to claw back their money from Argentina?
Modern geopolitics is all very well and good, but it falls well short of explaining some of blatently century old banana republic stuff going on in the current US administration.
To be more specific, it shot down a balloon from a hobby balloon club, which is built similar to a child’s balloon insofar as it has the same material.
On the heels of the Chinese balloon incursion it might be understandable why they would shoot down a high altitude balloon.
It's very much not nuanced. The purpose is intimidation and a show of political and military strength. Missile attacks on apparently helpless watercraft serve that purpose quite nicely.
Wasting massive amounts of money with no intel and (especially) no reason is the public policy of the current administration. So it’s not that hard to believe it also extends to the Department of Defense.
Cheddar is a small town and a gorge in Somerset, UK. I live close by.
Switzerland is an entire country with sodding great mountains and lakes, multiple towns, cities and a lot of worryingly loved leather clothing.
How on earth can you reduce a nation that supplies the rather lovely Swiss Guard to the Vatican and rather a lot more (that word is working quite hard at this point and perspiring very heavily) to the entire world to ... cheese.
I suggest you don't apply for any jobs in marketing. Your talents will be wasted, should any be found 8)
The context of the thread is "swiss" on a menu in the US, which makes it obvious that it's cheese, and not a guard at the Vatican, same as cheddar on a sandwich is obviously not referring to an English town. It may shock you to find out that things are named differently in different places. smh
Consciousness is observable in others! Our communication and empathy and indeed language depend on the awareness that others share our perceived reality but not our mind. As gp says, this is hard to describe or quantify, but that doesn't mean it's not a necessary trait for general intelligence.
But LLMs have been measured to have some theory of mind abilities at least as strong as humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z . At this point you either need to accept that either LLMs are already conscious, or that it's easy enough to fake being conscious that it's practically impossible to test for - philosophical zombies are possible. It doesn't seem to me that LLMs are conscious, so consciousness isn't really observable to others.
That's still using language. My dog has theory of mind in the real world where things actually exist.
Also, those results don't look as strong to me as you suggest. I do not accept that an LLM is conscious nor could I ever unless I can have a theory of mind for it... Which is impossible given that it's a stochastic parrot without awareness of the things my five senses and my soul feel in reality.
I'm not sure it's all that new. During the Bush Jr. years America was not highly thought of.
I'm an American traveling through Scandinavia and Northern continental Europe for the last three weeks, now in the UK.
I haven't experienced a bit of grief. Their opinion of our politics is generally separate from how they treat me personally, and I do the same for people of other nationalities.
American cultural dominance is everywhere. I can barely find a pub or restaurant not playing American music, for instance.
> I'm not sure it's all that new. During the Bush Jr. years America was not highly thought of.
From my Eastern European perspective, this is something fundamentally different. Sure, many people were critical of Bush Jr., but still, you could, with a bit of effort, construct some semi-reasonable narrative even around Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump? That feels like an entirely different league.
I grew up in Czechoslovakia, still occupied by Russians at the time. Seeing Trump clap at Putin's landing, seeing US soldiers on their knees rolling red carpet for Putin... this broke something in me. I honestly almost threw up. And that meeting with Zelenskyj in the White House, that will stay with me until I die.
I spent some time in the US when I was at college, and I will always cherish those memories - these were the best seven months of my life. Coincidentally, I was in the US during the Bush Jr. presidency. And despite my dislike for him, I was always defending the US. Somewhat irrationally, I was always trying to justify even the questionable things. But now, that's gone and buried. As far as I am concerned, the US I loved no longer exists. Now it is another Russia-like hostile country that we need to protect ourselves from.
And the personal experience you mention - sure, most people can separate citizens from their state. I can have a civil discussion with a Russian. I was always friendly to my Russian colleagues, immigrants who now live here. But that does not mean I am not hoping with all my heart that their state goes to hell.
Considering how many places are actively going to sh*t in the world right now, I'm not surprised that people have grown weary of keeping track of which are the 'bad' countries we're supposed to dislike, at the same time, thanks to globalized work and social media, people have realized that people are people everywhere, and governments are varying degrees of shitty in every country, with people even in the supposedly more democratic ones feeling powerless in affecting how they are governed.
I know a ton of Russian emigrees, and basically nobody gives them grief (until some of them start talking politics).
> I'm not sure it's all that new. During the Bush Jr. years America was not highly thought of.
Yes, but the decline is precipitous now. It's gone from "eh, we don't like Americans much, but they're a useful ally" to "wow these guys are fucking insane and we need to divest ASAP".
> Their opinion of our politics is generally separate from how they treat me personally, and I do the same for people of other nationalities.
That is such a sane thing to do. I was always astonished and sad how often strangers in foreign countries instantly link my origin to the actions of the people in power. As if this is completely under my control and with no doubt I support and approve whatever they do.
Considering millions of russians taking participation in war, doing atrocities, tens of millions of russians are supporting war economy and fact that there are thousands russians agents deployed to western countries it's safe to treat all russians that way.
It's not easy to figure out if person is a gru/fsb agent. To play safe it's better to restrict visa to all russians.
Also, russians who left russia usually continue to financially support war economy.
The default should be to treat people with respect and give benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, treating people as guilty because of where they were born is always a crappy thing to do.
> That is such a sane thing to do. I was always astonished and sad how often strangers in foreign countries instantly link my origin to the actions of the people in power. As if this is completely under my control and with no doubt I support and approve whatever they do.
I've never witnessed this happen. People (in person) are usually not aggressive and would not tell what's on their mind. Maybe if a Ukrainian and a Russian are to meet in a bar, things can get heated.
Mind to share the countries where you saw this happen?
Fortunately nobody was aggressive to me. It was vice versa to a point which made me deeply uncomfortable. Once people learned that I am originally from Russia (even though I am not Russian and I don't live there for many years), people in e.g. Algeria or Tunis or some SE Asia countries were shouting Russian politician names with approval. Some of them tried to lecture me on politics there, assuming I fully approve government actions. Eventually I simply stopped mentioning my origin whenever it was possible, cause I really have no desire to go into same discussion over and over again. And people won't listen anyway.
There's no comparison to the W Bush years. He was a buffoon that was mocked, but few if any seriously did things like boycott travel to the USA. Now boycotting travel to the USA is commonplace and travel to the USA has plunged.
People are nice and will continue to be nice to nice American tourists but make no mistake, there has been a severe shift both in the actions of regular people and business.
If anything, it would be nice if a few places were left that didn't have American cultural artifacts everywhere. My experience in the Middle East was often wondering if I were actually in either an American colony or else some place that had dedicated itself to being a kind of museum of American culture, movies, models, advertising, and so forth.
100%. I'm excited to find somewhere not playing disco and skater boy, and instead supporting their local music.
Hell, here in the UK I'm happy to hear Sheeran even though he's not really my style typically.
I don't mention that because I like American cultural dominance, merely because it is so ubiquitous.
I was in the middle of South Africa in the oughts and there were bootleg Britney Spears albums... Kind of shocking and I honestly don't exactly understand the appeal of American pop, but it's widespread...
My experience here in Antwerp is that a lot of places also play French, Italian, German, Swedish (Abba), Greek, Mexican, Brazilian, and many others, and of course Flemish music mixed with British and American. Never only (or mainly) American for as long as I live (I'm 55).
This interview with a former Turkish NBA player who protested things happening in China with simple statements on his shoes convinced me the NBA has no morals whatsoever.
What's the narrative? Human rights abuse is bad, speaking out about it got him fired? I have a hard time seeing some nafarious angle to what he talked about other than China doesn't want their shit called out.
I'm a professional woodworker. One-off tables in a garage might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins, and cabinetry in homes is a great business. You're likely not exposed to cabinet or architectural woodwork shops that build high-end homes, or that just do renovation for that matter.