> This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market, and a much bigger issue? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.

The globalized free market wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so 90s-era understandings of how things are "supposed" to be will need to be revised.

> What happens if the parents became citizens after their children were born. Will the children be deemed non-US ?

There are already laws about that. IIRC, all minor children become citizens when a parent is naturalized.

That seems fine, but what about Adult Children ? And maybe their children.

Their parents had them and some became citizens once they became adults (kids 18+ years old).

If ended it will be a big mess I think. But if they do end it, maybe this rule will be applied starting 'today', not retroactively.

> Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like.

As a matter of present law, maybe not. Doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

And this thing isn't merely "[doing] something you don't like."

Your insipid post wasted some of all of our time. Does that mean you now owe all of us?

> On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.

It was always there, and used. It was just typically restricted to pretty formal, polished writing (I should know, I have coworkers who fuss over em and en spaces). I bet if you looked, you'd find regular use of em-dashes in Newsweek articles, going back decades.

The things LLMs did was inject it into unsophisticated writing. It's really only an LLM tell if it's overused or used in an unexpected context (e.g. an 8th-grader's essay, an email message).

I suspect em-dashes are particularly American.

I tend to insert space before and after on the very rare occasion I might use one . . . However I'm from the colonies and I've just learnt my preference is likely due to British influence.

I mostly just use a double hyphen in casual/lazy writing like emails (or HN comments :-)) but use an em-dash in anything more formal. En-dashes just seem pedantic and I don't really use them in general.

I always found it a bit amusing how we have three kinds of dashes/hyphens while we have double quotes that serve 3 or 4 different purposes :-)

Yes, there were always common in academic writing and such, but you rarely saw them in casual text.

> My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.

My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.

Nothing says "this product is useful" quite like forcing people to use it and punishing people who don't. If it was that good, there'd be organic demand to use it. People would be begging to use it, going around their boss's back to use it.

The fact that companies have to force you to use it with quotas and threats is damning.

> My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.

“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”

Yeah. Well. There are company that require TPS reports, too.

It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.

But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.

It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.

Those kinds of reports seem to be a thing at all big tech corps now.

> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate.

There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around automatically to describe tech.

Yes, much the way some used to (still do?) try and emulate Steve Jobs. There's always some successful person these types are trying to be.

> But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI."

So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Does Seattle have more employee-workers and San Francisco has more people hustling for their startup?

I assume Bali (being a vacation destination) is full people who are wealthy enough to feel they're insulated from whatever will happen.

I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well.

Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast.

Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you all are building shit that doesn’t make the world better, it just devalues the human”. I think LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat.

Edit: are -> aren't. Stupid autocorrect.

Western Washington is very much a "work to live" place, and in a lot of ways there's a feedback loop to ensure it stays that way: surrounded by fellow "work to live" folks who would far rather just get our work done well and head out to the mountains, forests, and seas, the hustle bros will usually leave within a few years. I've watched it happen with quite a number of type-A folks. Exceptions for folks who make it into certain orgs in Amazon or into startup leadership, those seem to be safe places for hustlers around here.

Anyway. I think you're spot on with the "you all are building shit that doesn't make the world better, it just devalues the human" vibe. Regardless of what employers in WA may force folks to build, that's the mentality here, and AI evangelists don't make many friends... nor did blockchain evangelists, or evangelists of any of the spin-off hype trains ("Web3", NFTs, etc). I guess the "cloud" hype train stuck here, but that happened before I moved out west.

Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn) in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.

My SF friends think they have a shot at working at a company whose AI products are good (cursor, anthropic, etc.), so that removes a lot of the hopelessness.

Working for a month out of Bali was wonderful, it's mostly Australians and Dutch people working remotely. Especially those who ran their own businesses were super encouraging (though maybe that's just because entrepreneurs are more supportive of other entrepreneurs).

When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available).

I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.

This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that.

What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?

Universal p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶c̶l̶i̶p̶ Money Machine. I'd probably read that short story.

When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.

Better hope it’s not something like potable water. Not even joking.

Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI, who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer hardware.

Unlikely. Unless some new technology comes around that completely invalidates existing GPUs and Nvidia cannot pivot to it quickly enough, there's just no way. They're too big, too rich, too powerful. They basically own the dedicated GPU market, with AMD holding maybe a piddly 10% at best.

Once the bubble pops, there will be a recession, lots of regular people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford anything even IF prices come down.

They've got you coming and going.

Yup. As much as I am skeptical of AI and do believe this is a bubble, I don't want to see a repeat of ~2000.

> Better “thinking” computers will breed worse thinking people, huh?

I actually think that will be the case. We're designing society for the technology, not the technology for the people in it. The human brain wasn't built to fit whatever gap is left by AI, regardless of how many words the technologists spew to claim otherwise.

For instance: AI already is undermining education by enabling mental laziness students (why learn the material when ChatGPT can do your homework for you). It seems the current argument is that AI will replace entry-level roles but leave space for experienced and skilled people (but block the path to get there). Some of the things LLMs do a mediocre but often acceptable job at are the things one needs to do to build and hone higher-level skills.

> Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.

Exactly. Some people forget we live in a capitalist society, which does not prioritize or support the contentment of the masses. We exist to work for the owners or starve, they're not going to pay us to enjoy ourselves.