Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.

The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.

I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.

Brutalism was invented in the UK and should be honored by its birthplace.

I proffer it’s because TikTok has advanced the idea social media is about consumption. It’s easier to watch than to create or contribute and as we have more options now to simply watch online, as more people stream as their primary source of media, the options are “work for free” or “watch”.

This is not the easiest setting.

I became American as a previously British citizen. I had been employed in the UK, by a company in California who wanted to relocate me to the US and did (I was an early H1-B).

I then moved to another company after 18 months. Both my first and second companies were applying for my green card and renewing my paperwork as needed for me.

Later I stopped working for a US company but still had a VISA and married a US citizen. I then handled my green card application, and citizenship, myself without lawyers.

As a highly qualified individual who had already been screened multiple times to get H1-Bs I knew I would pass further screening. I also knew I had no criminal records or adverse history globally.

In short I got my green card and my citizenship without any further professional legal help. I paid nothing but my own costs.

It took a couple of years but it is possible.

The process is torturous and repetitive. You have to resubmit the same information multiple times, and some of the requirements are extremely expensive.

To whit, I was required to produce a “Police letter” from every country I had lived in, signed by the local police, attesting to the fact I hadn’t broken any laws overseas.

I had lived in 4 continents at that point. Thus I had to arrange to send my ID to multiple countries and to pay, in some cases, for letters to be written, delivered as originals on paper and then (hilariously) pay to have them translated for a US government who only wants to work in English and apparently trusts whatever translation you send (this was pre LLM).

So though I could do all this, in one case paying an ex colleague to manage the police in Eastern Europe on my behalf, for many others this would be impossible and require lawyers and the huge markups they would charge for these services. I would guess them hiring another team of lawyers in another country with each stage doubling the costs of the ones beneath them meaning a single police letter ends up costing many thousands.

The system is thus absolutely limited to those with connections, deep pockets or sponsorship.

Also for those who think this is good insurance, I also know Central Europeans who bribed their local authorities to facilitate their green cards, covering adverse information and putting them at the tops of lists. Ie for $50k or so they got essentially instant residency status.

Also the need for people to leave the US before re entering when processing paperwork (so that if rejected you have already self deported) means you need to be able to stop working, or work remotely, and to be able to fund living in your old home country for an indefinite period.

I moved in with my parents but had they not been an option I would have had to rent a place in London - a vast expense - just to comply.

The system is incredibly broken.

What year was this? I also did everything on my own after marrying an American citizen (2010-15) and I didn't have to do anything so extreme!

The broader point is that if you start from the premise that LLMs cannot ever be considered the way sentient beings are then all abuse becomes reasonable.

We are in danger of unscientifically returning to the point at which newborn babies weren’t considered to feel pain.

Given our lack of a definition for sentience it’s unscientific to presume no system has any sentient trait at any level.

What would "abuse" of an LLM look like? Saying something mean to it? Shutting it off?

The idea 1984 is about Russia would have surprised people at the time. That’s an ironic twist of history Orwell could have written about himself.

Maybe they are getting 1984 confused with animal farm?

The recent HN front-page post linked to Asimov's review of 1984—Asimov claimed it was Stalinism through and through (writing the review in 1980, FWIW).

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the statistics. 10% of top level adults is a smaller percentage of elite performers than should have been represented by the class of hothoused kids. I.e. it should have been 12% or 15%.

I don't think so? If 0.01% of kids are prodigies then the fact that 10% of them go on to become elite adults means that a prodigy has a far better chance at becoming elite than someone taken at random from the general population of kids.

Your brain is cooked.

LLM cliches are just condensed real world cliches.

Work as middle of the road as this sits right at the heart of that. It’s supposed to be warm and it’s entirely digital, hence the ways of conveying warmth are the same.

I have worked with Aardman. Unsurprisingly everything is shot digitally.

It’s telling that non tech stories about Palestine are routinely flagged here but non tech stories about Iran are let through.

The most important influencer in social media, by far, is Dua Lipa. She absolutely mogs this guy.