The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...

I agree that this definitely is labor suppression, but it has a real cause: the end of low interest rates and inflation. They can no longer "grow" their way into their 6 month bonuses, so they basically have to trim fat and if they all collude on doing it, it _can_ work. If they dont all collude, someone gets cheap engine for growth.

collusion to suppress wages predates tbe raising of interest rates or inflation increases.

all the big tech companies used to have no-poach agreements to not hire from each other, such that they didnt have to compete on price

That real world activity is my underlying belief, but we shouldnt ignore that the free money era ended quickly and for these execs do continue to earn their ungainly bonuses, they have to cut costs. Modern texhnology/capitalism allows them to make the same choices without directing collusion.

Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"

High interest rates benefit creditors and hurt debtors. These companies hold a lot of cash equivalent assets (think bonds, etc). Their balance sheets only grew. High interest rates haven't hurt these companies, but instead fattened them up. They are hoarding cash! Imagine earning high interest on that cash.

My thesis is most of these companies grow by VC funding and leveraged buyout of smaller firms. This requires cheap debt servicing.

Also the end of full R&D expensing, which made software engineers in particular much more expensive in the US.

But that got rolled back in the last budget bill if i was following correctly

Is the hypothesis that the next 24 months will be measurably better for software engineering jobs than the last 24 months?

Hard to say. There's kind of a lot going on.

Either the tax treatment has an effect or it doesn't. If the market doesn't get better we can at the very least say that the whole tax thing was overstated.

not if 996 is still a thing

I can’t imagine anyone colluding with LBT, unless they told him it was collusion to fool him, and he fell for it.

Doing more with less is warning sign like “curve ahead”.

And the agentic focus is not forward-thinking.

Our present is to a small degree agentic, and that will increase, but that won’t sustain because (1) latency and (2) technological evolution.

It’s more likely that everyone will have their own AI on-board which will have all of the data it needs in local storage that gets regular updates. Evolving to current agentic flows won’t help with that type of processing.

Erm, what?

He’s from the future, dammit!

Thank you. This thread is full of people acting as though price gouging during emergencies hasn't been illegal since before the Internet.

Not a California thing either. Southern states have similar laws thanks to common natural disasters like hurricanes.

That's a great point: immigrants are great for the existing voting populace. They count for the census, but if you keep them on a program like H-1B, they'll live their whole lives without being able to vote. The existing voters have their votes count more and more with H-1B population growth. A great gig when you've got something like Prop 13 making sure the newcomers pay most of the taxes too. What a racket!

It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.

But this is why the government should enforce existing laws and include provisions like must pay x above median average salary for the role to discourage fraud.

They do that already. H1b has a minimum salary requirement. I agree it should be higher but it exists. The median H1B is 130k.

Yup, if you take the restrictions off, none of these companies would want them. They love the restrictions. Americans can just up and quit on them, but not temporary workers.

Exactly. It's a very cynical and corrupt game being passed off in the name of "innovation" and "competiton" XD

If you want to argue for a fundamentally non-material mind (ie, that human cognition happens in a physically impossible, spiritual plane), then cool. Though you might want to give some consideration to how much it seems like physical processes on the brain can demonstrably affect cognition.

If you aren't arguing for a non-materialist position, then the distinction between "artificial" and human intelligence isn't meaningful. A powerful enough computer could simulate the material processes in your brain. If as the OP claims it is mathematically impossible for a computer to generate intelligence, no matter how powerful that computer, then it is impossible for your brain to do so (via material processes).

There's no reason to assume our current pursuit is not a dead end for any number of reasons we do not yet understand. There is a lot of faith we are capturing the same thing based on perceptions, which have a lot to do with the individual observer. It seems very important to some folks that our natural process is a mirror of what our technology does. The same result does not mean it is the same process or anything other than a mirage -- though one that may trick a lot of us.

Every generation tries to map its most complex technology onto its understanding of nature. "AGI" has a specific meaning today, but if you want it to mean atheism versus theism or whatever materialist argument, you're far outside of science and technology. Like our fathers of the Enlightenment with their watchmaker god. The idea there is some way for humans to break free of nature seems like a religious belief to me, but whether you agree or not, certainly there is room for doubting that faith, since we're outside the realm of what science can explore.

"Current LLMs are not going to get to AGI" is a different and much weaker claim than "AGI is mathematically impossible."

I was responding to the claim that an observer bound by a system may understand and replicate all phenomenon within that system. It's quite a bold claim which has already exited the bounds of science, IMHO. That you're using the language of religion and philosophy is the point.

Nope, try again. "You can't possibly learn enough about a system to simulate it" is still a different and weaker claim than "It is mathematically impossible to compute this thing that is being computed."

But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.

You're arguing with the article not me. I replied to

> How is your brain doing it then?

Do you have an answer? What indication do we have that any AGI we would create would have to follow the same process to achieve the result? Can humans recreate all phenomenon observed in the universe? You're arguing yes in all of these then? I'd love to read more of that argument. I don't care about this proof though. I don't think I've indicated I think AGI is impossible. I care far more about why someone would be convinced it must be possible for humans to recreate in the exact same manner as the brain, which this commenter and you seem to think. I know humans have not shown we can fully model our observations cohesively.

> But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.

record scratch What? Did I agree to all of these premises? Do you have some backing for the three or four assumptions you've made in this sentence? You still need to show humans not only could be but are capable of replicating the system. I am asking you for some argument out there that says everything we observe in nature humans can replicate in the exact same way it occurs. That's a much stronger statement than such intelligence exists. You can just link a book. I am not sold on one way or the other, but you seem very confident. Is there some argument I can read? To me, our models in physics point to a fragmented and contradictory understanding of our world to get results. But yes, results are results, but that doesn't mean we are doing anything but modeling -- but can we model everything? Is that the implication of evolution?

We seem to be wandering into capital-S Science vs. science, and I'm not really into religious discussions here. I would love to understand why you seem to think I'm so dimwitted as to dismiss with an edge, when all of this stems from a glib reply to a glib reply that I am no less convinced is in fact glib and fatuous. (And that original comment was not yours, lest you feel insulted in the same way you have insulted me.)

That's kind of distinction with no distinction though, in this context. Our brains are physical machines, and computers are physical machines. Sure, one is wetware and based on chemistry, biology, and some electricity, while the other is based on electricity, logic gates, and bits and bytes, but still... if one can be intelligent, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to think that the other can't as well.

Oh certainly there is: why assume we will ever be able to fully replicate the natural process? We may very well be bound here by our own bodies.

"artificial" literally means "man-made". It does not imply anything about how the created thing works, and whether or not it is different from the corresponding natural equivalent.

I am replying to "How does your brain do it then?" So I guess we agree. You should take it up with OP.

OP's point is that given that the brain does it, and given that it is possible in principle to simulate the brain (even if we don't know how yet), the result of such a simulation would necessarily be "AGI", disproving the original claim that "AGI is mathematically impossible".

Timid? Dude seems pretty ruthless by all anecdotes and how his company has operated. But he has a quiet demeanor and Southern accent, so many will assume he is weak and stupid. He seems to use it to his advantage.

We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.

60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.

That narrative is BS. Kids stopped going into CS in America because of the Dotcom bust. The number didn't recover until 2014. Driven in large part by the Great Recession encouraging more kids to go into STEM -- certainly my Land Grant school in the Deep South could barely keep up with the surge. Kids that did STEM recently? Worst entry-level job market we've maybe ever seen. But the kids who did a different major and likely have better short term prospects are the problem?

But that narrative certainly shifts any blame away from the winners in recent years and onto "flyover state" Americans. And now the same folks who told kids to learn to code want them learning woodshop? Come on.

I most definitely am reminded of how few people leave an archaeological mark when I read these. Though from my perspective, I see him as one of the special ones, even if we know very little. There are so few folks remembered even a generation later -- even the wealthiest industrialists and movie stars quickly fade.