Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.
It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes). You'll likely lose more in annoying the rest of your team and burning your own cycles with surveillance than you'll gain from it.
> It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes).
The main purpose of the tracking of the “edge cases” is basically insurance in the event of a law suit.
Yes, it irritates the folks with good intentions, but a good manager will keep the tracking tax as light as possible for the folks who are actually working.
The amount of headache it saves when the lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit comes around is quite a bit.
I've long maintained that kids must learn end to end what it takes to put content on the web themselves (registering a domain, writing some html, exposing it on a server, etc.) so they understand that _truly anyone can do this_. Learning both that creating "authoritative" looking content is trivial and that they are _not_ beholden to a specific walled garden owner in order to share content on the web.
I don't know if AI books are or will be as good or better than human written, but to me this is the problem - "Even though artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, AI-made books are already flooding the market." There is no scarcity problem in books. There are already way more that I would enjoy reading than I will ever actually read. It's already tough to prioritize which ones to get to without having vastly more to sort through. And people _enjoy_ writing books. I don't want to support automating something away that people enjoy doing, is produced in abundance, and is very low cost to obtain already.
Seriously, we have a Haagen-bot[0] problem ("the robot that eats ice cream so you don't have to") widespread across the field where people are trying to figure out how they can get their piece of the new ML world.
Part of it is that people aren't thinking about what's actually scarce. Let alone what a world more optimized for people might be like.
> I don't want to support automating something away that people enjoy doing, is produced in abundance, and is very low cost to obtain already.
I was surprised at the time how cheap the original Pebbles were, they were nearly exactly what I wanted and I would have been willing to pay more for mine. In fact I ultimately paid more to replace mine with a watch I like less. When Pebble folded I wondered if having too low of price ultimately hurt them - if they didn't pick up enough customers to make up on volume what they left off the table on per-unit revenue? I hope the relaunch is successful, and I assume they have all manner of internal data that says I'm wrong, but my initial reaction to the listed prices is the same as it was to the originals - they seem too low. (I'm setting aside the caveat about a potential price change due to tariffs and assuming they launch at current list price.)
There's a big difference: it's 2025 and there are no shortage of competitors that look better and have more features than a $150 Pebble 2 or $225 Time 2. Unlike 2015 the market already has a $200 Apple Watch, $60 Amazfit Bip, $55 CMF Watch Pro, and a $220 Coros Pace which will track an ultramarathon. All these devices are made by mature companies and have multiple revisions.
I liked my Pebbles, but I won't spend $300 on one because the chance of failure (again) is so great.
I'm not sure why manufacturers would care - it's a ten year old device with limited appeal. Chinese manufacturers already make better, cheaper watches.
> I'm setting aside the caveat about a potential price change due to tariffs and assuming they launch at current list price
As you should, because if they raise the price because of tariffs they won't see a dime of it. It's less raising the price and more that they don't yet know how much tax they'll be expected to collect and remit.
PhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy
Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)
Just a little correction. Doctor is Latin and roughly means "someone who has learned a lot."
Science also originally referred to knowledge. What we think of as "science" used to be called the natural sciences. Sometimes people get confused because I have a B.S. in Classics because science has lost that broader meaning.
Indeed, in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas asks if theology is a science, and concludes that it is. He also gave lip service to logical rigor and falsifiability, in the latter case by encouraging the discipline of asking contrary questions and answering them. What he didn't do was appeal to empirical data, to any great extent.
I think the reasoning behind "doctor of philosophy" may be lost to history. All knowing Wikipedia suggests that it didn't happen at once. My take was that the requirements for a modern PhD were added long after the title was adopted.
I suspect there was a time when a person could be well versed in multiple of what are now separated fields, and that you had to be a philosopher to make sense of science and math. Also, as science was flexing its own wings, claiming to be a philosopher might have been a way to gain an air of respectability, just like calling a physician "doctor" when the main impact of medicine was to kill rich people.
It is still called natural science, but it used to be called natural philosophy.
And it is interesting, as you say, that when it comes to Bachelor/Master/Doctor of Science/Art/Philosophy (even professor), these are all titles formed from arbitrary terms that have been enshrined by the institutions that give people these titles.
I’m less concerned about the supply of handymen inflating and more concerned about demand falling. If AI really does replace a huge portion of the people with the money to hire handymen and plumbers and the property to need them where do they get the work from? More people will DIY out of necessity even if the results are worse because they won’t have another option and fewer people will have the property to maintain in the first place.
> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
it's actually a reasonably cost-effective way to collect music by going to used book stores and buying used CDs, then ripping them and serving them to yourself with something like Navidrome so that you have the convenience of streaming w/ the physical disk on a shelf somewhere
I can't stand the stupid streaming "But not on THIS service" model of movie watching, so this is how I do movies. $5 on ebay gets you pretty much any DVD you want, $100 or so for a box set of some television show, and ripping DVDs is literally one click. I've wanted to switch to BluRays lately, because HD, and they are barely more expensive than DVDs on ebay, but ripping blurays is NOT trivial.
Standard Blu Rays? Are you sure about that? I started ripping my blus at the beginning of the year and don't remember it being more difficult than buying any random Blu ray drive, downloading MakeMKV and clicking the start button.
Now, I'll 100% agree about 4K Blu rays. I got lucky in that I bought one of the handful of drives that supports ripping 4k disks (since its encryption keys were leaked?) but even after that it required finding and flashing custom firmware that was a hassle. But I got it working which is cool.
Even if X isn't the right solution to my use case I still often want to know _why_ X (or my implementation of X) doesn't work. The answer to that might be a really valuable learning independent of the problem at hand.
I was in university when Snake Eater came out and I got to play it when I went home during the Christmas break. I got to The End fight and had to go back. When I came back during March break I didn't have to win the fight because he died.
I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to figure out how to look at the case before looking up the answer.
You know the PlayStation Classic mini-console that came out a few years back? They incorporated that puzzle into the console's packaging: the back of the PSClassic's box includes thumbnails for the 20 or so games that come installed, and MGS's thumbnail is just a picture of Meryl's codec convo screen. It cracked me up when I first saw it.
4th wall breaking stuff is cool. A few other big games that break the fourth wall in boss fights: Arkham Asylum (Scarecrow), Undertale (Flowey), Pony Island (Asmodeus.exe). Nier does something similar.
I know I am in an (extreme) minority with lots of people considering it a classic, but honestly while it is creative I always thought that was total bullshit and an example of extremely gimicky game design. It literally made me never play another Kojima game after that.
IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about trying the second controller port.
(Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
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