Vincent

@tully I used to live in a european city with a church in the center, of course. The Church had a noticeable asymmetry: obviously the intent was to finish both towards but people just stopped believing in God or like labor was allocated by the markets instead of the Church or what-have-you, and it just never got finished. Sometimes they projected light shows on the side of the building. I think about how people essentially volunteered their time and energy and money for hundreds of years on this thing which just suddenly stopped making sense to them, and I often wonder what things we venerate with our time and energy today that our descendants will be dumbfounded by when they even bother to think about it.

@aparrish Capital wants to eliminate labor as much as possible. They will pay a premium for it. Yes, they could have educated countless people with that money, but people want health care, can form unions, quit, use their expertise to found competing companies, etc, etc etc. Generative AI could be substantially worse than employees but many firms would prefer the AI.

@shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place @RickiTarr@beige.party There is actually something somewhat deep here. This joke is about the fact that mathematicians can believe something is "obvious" even if the route to getting there is complex or circuitous. Why this is the case is pretty deep. In principal, when we do math, we perform a series of manipulations on sentences in a formal system with the rules of the system and thus nothing we discover is genuinely novel - all mathematical proofs are already latent in the system. Yet we find some proofs non-obvious, others obvious, some proofs feel like "coincidences" and others do not. Consider this paper by Lange: "What are Mathematical Coincidences and Why do they Matter?" http://marclange.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/mathcoincMINDpublished.pdf

@kickingvegas@sfba.social You could just ask an AI to do this and all it would take is 10000x the amount of energy.

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social I think its interesting how banal these delusions are. Its like the worst possible psychedelic or religious experience. Imagine Moses talking to the burning bush and the bush says "Wow, Moses - you are exactly right! If you create an app you could make Millions."

@nixCraft I think many CEO types would read this and conclude that you fire all the engineers who don't care and just let the two people who do care use the AI to make themselves more productive. I don't know if this is a sensible narrative, but I think the vast majority AI boosterism is deeply related to the fact that companies just don't like paying people and will accept a lot of hassle just to get rid of the people. AIs might produce shit code, but they can't unionize, call out your bullshit, ask for pay raises or better benefits and they can't suddenly leave for another job.

@gendor@merveilles.town I think this is true, and I guess I don't object to UBI, but I think we need a lot more than that. Basic Income will always been paltry and used to discipline labor by keeping it as small as possible. We should have a much more expansive policy of human nurturing than "throw a little cash at them".

@jameschip@merveilles.town Yes. Big yes. A game has to let me save whenever or I am never going to have time to play it till I retire.