The "guardrails" are bloat if you're using a proper sandbox. This seems like a matter of using the right harness for the environment it's running in, rather than one always being better than the other.

If you're open to using remote Linux VM's and a web-based interface, I quite like exe.dev and Shelley.

uBlock Origin Light is still pretty good though. Maybe it's good enough for most people?

It seems like if real estate becomes a more uncertain investment, it has more to do with climate change than AI.

This suggests to me more separation into industrial versus residential areas. (Or what is the mining for?)

Historically, mechanized agriculture allowed most people to move to cities, then to suburbs. Industry became globalized and off-shored.

These changes in land use have gone on for a long time. Now we’re getting more solar farms and data centers. Due to Internet shopping, malls close and get converted into residential. There are more warehouses, but shoppers don’t go there.

You could think of it as people being increasingly alienated from where the work is done. The logical conclusion is something like a retirement community where goods and services are delivered where possible and the people who work locally are directly providing services to other people there.

And retirees are people who secured an income through whatever means and don’t have to work anymore. They don’t have to worry about how AI will affect their job.

I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods

Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.

What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.

The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.

As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.

It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.

Yes, that makes more sense. AI is the continuation of automation. I don’t think it’s going to eliminate management entirely, but you can certainly get to the point where the owner is basically just an investor and they hire a professional management firm.

This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.

good enough LLMs aren't genies lol

Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.

Seems like there is skill in knowing what to ask the genie for, no matter how powerful the genie is? How is that not going to be an issue?

That said, there are things people had to worry about last year with weaker models that aren't really a problem anymore, so some of the knowledge you get by "keeping up" becomes obsolete and could be skipped by waiting.

Context: I vibe code most of my production code, but I come from a long FED career so I'm vibe-coding small things, constantly tweaking, refining prompts, picking work to do that fits with the existing work, etc. So I'm either "doing it wrong" or "being careful". Anyway, that's the perspective I have ATM...

So, it seems to me that there's quite a lot of skill to using these "god boxes": which models, connecting to your systems, hosting the code, running the model, running the code, not breaking your production pipelines, having a production pipeline in the first place.

Sure, the god boxes help with a lot of that. But they don't help setting up the accounts, connecting your code hosting to your production servers. You can't currently just give random people in your org access to an LLM account and have them safely make production changes w/out some engineering knowledge and oversight. In NGOs, especially the small ones, they already outsource all that to 3rd parties so they don't have to worry about it. But with "just the right amount" of in-house knowledge, gear, config (maybe one office computer hooked up with Claude, or a small GHCP account, with GH + hosting configured), it's possible that anyone in the company might be able to add to the company's suite of useful small tools, or add features.

(I also think there's more to "hey claude, make feature X" than we're capturing here, but as I said at the top, I might be doing it wrong.)

They know it's a temporary job going in, though. How is this different than having an intern?

If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.

Interns don't typically have a job description that describes trying to push a specific software system from a vendor.

It certainly is a management problem, as non-profits are certainly not well known for having strong management.

In China, after the collapse of a dynasty, there eventually was another dynasty. It wasn’t the same rulers, but a similar pattern recurred.

Also, the Roman Empire had terrible civil wars and recovered. Until it didn’t.

They're still based on controlling shares and extracting profits from workers. Very similar.

Oddly, for some companies, the money comes from advertisers. When this started becoming a thing, I figured it would be a bubble and eventually businesses would wise up, but they've kept on paying for decades now.