Rob Miles

@TetraspaceWest Always suspicious of the word "the", it's often sneaking in an assumption that there's only one of something.

has anyone ever had an ideology with a thing called "the Great X" that doesn't suck

@EpistemicHope @PavleMiha @bryan_caplan For me, I'm not saving for retirement because I'm not that conscientious, and motivation for getting over the hump of doing that admin is hampered by the fact that I can't visualize what my retirement could look like at all

@EpistemicHope @PavleMiha @bryan_caplan Yeah, it doesn't seem like they were spending that marginal money on anything that good. Like, the higher the chance of catastrophe, the less you should save I guess, but I doubt this was a rational calculation

Why aren't AI doomsters going into massive debt, so they can enjoy life before the world ends (and before the debt comes due)?

@PavleMiha @EpistemicHope @bryan_caplan It's legitimately a little bit surprising that we never had a nuclear war. Probably some people thought it was totally inevitable, and they were wrong, but the people saying "this is the most dangerous thing in history and needs to be priority 1" were right

@PavleMiha @EpistemicHope @bryan_caplan They weren't wrong, nukes were and are totally real and very able to end civilisation. We had some very close calls - Cuban missile crisis, the Petrov incident etc. Nuclear de-proliferation was and is a huge and unprecedented effort of international law and coordination

@EpistemicHope @bryan_caplan Oh. Yeah, I'm not saving for retirement either.

@robertskmiles @bryan_caplan Daniel Ellsberg does relay in the Doomsday Machine that he, and his colleagues at RAND, were not saving for retirement, because they expected nuclear war.

Like, in the 50s and 60s, some said "Holy shit the nuclear weapons situation seems incredibly dangerous, this could absolutely destroy our whole civilisation, humanity urgently needs to do unprecedented international cooperation to reduce this risk". Those people seem to have been straightforwardly correct, and it doesn't seem like that position necessitates going into massive debt.

@bryan_caplan I guess people trying to prevent nuclear proliferation and worrying that there would be a civilization ending nuclear war were also not going into massive debt. Did they believe what they said, was it false, and should they have gone into debt?

@AaronBergman18 Keep an eye out for the next time an app annoys you or doesn't work quite the way you want

@robertskmiles I dropped the $99, what apps should I make

iOS users don't realize what a big disadvantage they're at by not being able to have Claude write custom apps for them on a whim

@koanchuk Well, you make them on your computer and then put them on the phone

@robertskmiles you can make apps on the fly on Android? do you have to root the device first?

@imahmoodj Yeah I do it in Android, it doesn't touch the app store, you just put it on your phone over usb

@robertskmiles Not sure if windows or Google AppStore also allows that.

@galitodev @Kasparov63 Partly occupational licencing laws, mostly that anyone else can also just use the same models as me so I'd be adding no value

@robertskmiles @Kasparov63 Wow really? What’s stopping you from opening a Law, Accounting, Coaching, Development, Sys Admin, script research and to some extent executive assistant firm and just rake in billions?

Indeed. The history of tech impact on labor is well-documented, including by those named. It's unpredictable, but usually improves productivity and leads to expansion. Law & white-collar workers aren't horse-buggy drivers or elevator operators. They will use AI and adapt.

@galitodev @Kasparov63 So far just lawyers, accountants, coaches, web developers, system administrators, script researchers, and to some extent executive assistants

@robertskmiles @Kasparov63 How much of your professional interactions that require a worker can be modeled as a question/answer flow?

Any sufficiently complicated GUI contains an ad-hoc bug-ridden implementation of half of a tiling window manager

Saying thank you and goodbye at the end of AI chat sessions - Pros: Polite, human, maintains good habits Cons: Gives the instance a turn to think about the fact that it's about to stop existing forever

@joeycomeau We're all writing everything down all the time

Things are so good. Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are people. But man, I love things.