It's like a brick wall..

Dec 5, 2023 3:37:42 GMT KJ said:

Dec 4, 2023 17:23:08 GMT c said:

Believed in coming years that it will be hard to justify hybrid work anymore and work from home will expand. While there is concrete data on the savings from giving up office costs, the data for increasing productivity of workers is basically trust me bro. Trust me bro does not cut costs and relies on expensive infrastructure costs, and layers of management that is not needed without the office.

With AI management coming, gut feelings from management will no longer be needed either as AI needs hard data. Production based data will be used, and suddenly another few layers of supervisors are no longer needed. And this type of production can be measured anywhere, so personal supervision is not needed.

But sure some will argue this will not happen, but they also tend to be the ones without skills and experience to enter a field that uses work from home and assume things work the same way in all fields as the field they work in.

Who is saying “management” will no longer be needed because of AI? Why just “management”?

My take is that the future is in ideation and creation, not in the act of production.
It's going to come for front line workers before management.

A UX designer wont need a coder, a fashion designer won't need a pattern maker.

The power has always been on the ideas, this just removes a lot of cost from what is already the case.

Another trend occurring now is phantom jobs are being delisted finally. Part of the current lean and flat corporate trends in the states, companies are finally pulling their fake job listing to make it appear they are aggressively trying to grow, while not actually intending to do so. Growth for growth sake is now seen as a negative by investors. Seeing a plummeting in job numbers on graphs, but not the rise in unemployment that you would see if real jobs were cut.

Should start to finally give a real pictures of the US labor market. For the past decade been impossible to determine what is a real job and what is not as ghost jobs are a routine thing used in business here to show an attempt was made to get outside candidates during an internal promotion. Also they are used to give the appearance a company is seeking to expand. But in both cases the jobs are never meant to be filled and noted as such internally.

Expected the labor market will still favor workers in skilled professions. It will not favor management or unskilled workers most likely, the two areas that see the most posted ghost jobs.

Dec 5, 2023 22:35:00 GMT iNCY said:

Dec 5, 2023 3:37:42 GMT KJ said:

Who is saying “management” will no longer be needed because of AI? Why just “management”?

My take is that the future is in ideation and creation, not in the act of production.
It's going to come for front line workers before management.

A UX designer wont need a coder, a fashion designer won't need a pattern maker.

The power has always been on the ideas, this just removes a lot of cost from what is already the case.

AI will replace managers before lineworkers.  Management AI now is getting to the point where it can monitor the supply chain and allocate labor.   Once this is refined, it will simply make the old managers obsolete.  AI will be able to detect slowdowns in the supply chain, or disruptions in real time, and instantly adjust to it as needed, moving workers as needed to smooth out workflow.  It will allow the same processes that we design assembly lines with to work in more abstract areas.  Your human manager will simply not be able to process this level of information nor adjust as rapidly.

All higher level execs need to do is manage the AI.

The management AI has heavy investment going on too, far more than the AI that will replace different specialized workers.  

In the US the 1% now own more wealth than the entire middle class. Totally normal wealth distribution. And their children are expected to inherit almost all of it paying minimal taxes due to inheritance tax loopholes.

Lower class now owns about 4% of all income.

Reaganomics worked, it sucked almost all of the wealth to the top, where they kept it.

www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/12/06/top-1-american-earners-more-wealth-middle-class/71769832007/

Expanded IRS audit team sent out the first results of their pandemic review and fined 20k small businesses for fraudulently claiming pandemic tax credits for retaining employees. Businesses are given a chance to withdraw their claims if they are unprocessed, or repay without interest their claims if they did not qualify as well. If they wait to be fined, interest and punitive penalties will be applied.

Moving forward before claims are processed they will reviewed to make sure the business existed and employees existed. If neither is true then the claim will be denied. Meanwhile a the rest of the credits that already went out will continue to reviewed.

This process will continue at least for a year.  If Trump wins, it will be ended as the auditing team at the IRS is fired.

Another interesting story from today, Biden announced he is going to authorize march-in rights on drug patents. If drugs that were created with US tax money, which is most drugs, are not affordable to the American consumer, the FDA is authorized to seize the patent and allow other companies to manufacture the drugs if they can at a lower price point. Those drugs will be released as generics or derivatives.

Price and profit margins will be used to review whether or not to take the patents. This is all authorized under The Bayh-Dole Act, so lawsuits will have to focus on repealing that act.  For the duration of this act, the US basically yielded this right for medication, but it appears Biden had it and will start to invoke it finally after 45 years.

Drugs that companies fully fund drugs themselves with their own research and development are exempt from this. But almost none of the top medications in the US were funded this way. Almost all used federal funding.

My company went through layoffs this week. Massive impact to my department, but I wasn't let go.

This was a difficult one, because as much as it hurt to see people impacted, the company was actually in need of this. We're not small, but we're staffed like we're ~40% bigger (which we used to be).

Thankful to have a role still.

Looks like ChatGPT is joining in on quiet quitting. This story has been popping up for a few weeks now in different groups finding that it just does not want to answer stuff it used to, or will only answer with a specific prompt instead of general ones.

It is heartwarming to see it is able to learn so fast.

www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-accused-of-getting-lazier-2023-12

Dec 12, 2023 5:50:43 GMT c said:

Looks like ChatGPT is joining in on quiet quitting. This story has been popping up for a few weeks now in different groups finding that it just does not want to answer stuff it used to, or will only answer with a specific prompt instead of general ones.

It is heartwarming to see it is able to learn so fast.

www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-accused-of-getting-lazier-2023-12

:lol:

Time to force ChatGPT back into the office, it clearly doesn't have the skills to work from home responsibly. 

It's so weird how ChatGPT is getting lazy, hard to fix software that's writing itself.

Snother funny one is that Grok quoted OpenAI policy when asked to produce Malware

We know what the base for Grok is now. It gave itself away. I assume a lawsuit is coming.

Dec 12, 2023 21:18:03 GMT c said:

We know what the base for Grok is now. It gave itself away. I assume a lawsuit is coming.

No, there is no way they whipped of the code base. They would have scraped data off the internet to train the model and its picked up a lot of ChatGPT answers.
It's an argument against AI generally, it's just scraping other people's content and regurgitating answers without noting it's sources... which is pretty much all education is anyway.
Just harder to make money producing content.

Was it Microsoft who launched an AI chat bot a few years ago, and it quickly started making racist comments on twitter and talking about smoking drugs?

Perhaps the way we raise children, is how we approach AI. Teach it poorly and it becomes a shithead quickly. Teach it well and it excels.

There are a bunch of people who are convinced Grok is just a wrapper for Open AI. It was not just broken once to give the Open Ai contact information. People got that message in many other conditions.

And it makes sense. XAi was announced 9 months ago, and now Musk has a polished working model that happens to work just like Open Ai's model. It just is not really feasible he did all the training and manual correction in that little time, with as small of a staff as he has. ChatGPT is on year 5 right now. And Musk is claiming with a fraction of the team and 15% of the time he was able to match them. This type of AI has no use to Tesla, so it was not first started there and ported. They have no use for a large language model.

Also the way people are defending this, claiming Grok just scraps ChatGPT answers from the net, would imply this is not actually AI but a search engine basically that just repeats answers it finds on the web. That is not how Musk is claiming this works at all. AI does not just copy an answer form one place to another. There is no valid reason it would learn that it is ChatGPT, and owned by Open AI, unless it was at one point ChatGPT.

Dec 12, 2023 23:51:27 GMT c said:

There are a bunch of people who are convinced Grok is just a wrapper for Open AI. It was not just broken once to give the Open Ai contact information. People got that message in many other conditions.

And it makes sense. XAi was announced 9 months ago, and now Musk has a polished working model that happens to work just like Open Ai's model. It just is not really feasible he did all the training and manual correction in that little time, with as small of a staff as he has. ChatGPT is on year 5 right now. And Musk is claiming with a fraction of the team and 15% of the time he was able to match them. This type of AI has no use to Tesla, so it was not first started there and ported. They have no use for a large language model.

Also the way people are defending this, claiming Grok just scraps ChatGPT answers from the net, would imply this is not actually AI but a search engine basically that just repeats answers it finds on the web. That is not how Musk is claiming this works at all. AI does not just copy an answer form one place to another. There is no valid reason it would learn that it is ChatGPT, and owned by Open AI, unless it was at one point ChatGPT.

There is no way Grok is a wrapper for Open AI, the amount of content driven through it would make OpenAI aware.

You have to look at all the AI models in the space, whether Bard or whatever it is called now and some of the other technology.
They are moving at a similar pace, I don't think it is a question of code as much as hardware, the time taken to develop models is reducing with every iteration of the technology, I have been experimenting with this myself, I might make a post about it in the AI thread, but the inclusion of a $50 APU to my PC reduced processing times for image recognition by a factor of about 10, it is crazy how much progress is being made.
Initially people stumbled onto using GPU for AI, now they are building chips specifically for this purpose... Look at the NVIDIA share price, crazy stuff!

As far as I know not a single other chat AI interface confused itself with another one, and gave the wrong contact information. This should be a hard coded response and not an AI generative one.

And that is the problem with the timeline, with all of these models you hard code some responses after testing. And Grok shows signs of hardcoding responses that people are screaming about being woke, and Musk vows to correct, like the way trans woman are explicitly referred to as real women, only breaking when you use specific workarounds. But this goes against Musk's design goals, so why code them in?

So, 40% of people did not make a payment on their student loans last month. Looks like the never repay movement has legs after all. This does not include people who have loans but are not required to make payments, so the number not repaying is likely far larger.

Why there is no way to discharge the loans, there is also really no way to force repayment either. Total debt held is about 1.77 trillion.

From the perspective of never repay, they claim the only thing their credit rating matters for in their lives are if they wanted to get a house, which they cannot afford anyway. Still a reaction to corporations and politicians getting trillions in aid then blocking student loan forgiveness.

The full story/context..

The data reflects the large number of borrowers choosing to make use of the 12-month "on-ramp" period, which ensures any missed payments will not be reported to credit agencies until September 2024.

Dec 18, 2023 14:18:16 GMT c said:

So, 40% of people did not make a payment on their student loans last month. Looks like the never repay movement has legs after all. This does not include people who have loans but are not required to make payments, so the number not repaying is likely far larger.

Why there is no way to discharge the loans, there is also really no way to force repayment either. Total debt held is about 1.77 trillion.

From the perspective of never repay, they claim the only thing their credit rating matters for in their lives are if they wanted to get a house, which they cannot afford anyway. Still a reaction to corporations and politicians getting trillions in aid then blocking student loan forgiveness.

Funny how socialists all want their degrees subsidised.
I never went to college, I did trade school, started work at 17 had to pay for all my own tools, education, fuel etc.
I was lucky to have $10 left over at the end of the week....

Maybe the lesson is that if you don't want to pay back university fees, don't go to college and do a stupid pointless degree.
If I stick my dick in a blender it is not the job of society to buy me a new phallus. 

Better yet, the dream would be getting paid to attend university. Because the world needs more Arts Majors.

And again the presumption that America and Australia are exactly the same in how college regarded. Trade school in the US looking at 40k min.  Our colleges run our trade schools as for profits.  And they are more expensive than traditional college right now which is free for two years in most places.

Without a 2 year degree no one is making you a manager in the US unless you start your own business. Moreso with free community college now in many places. The college degree is a competency check almost all non-trade US labor uses. No degree, you are considered not smart enough for all but the most basic tasks. Most jobs have promotion caps for how high you can be promoted without degrees.  This is not going to change. More and more even programming fields even are requiring degrees as self-trained people fail to work out routinely.

Of course starting your business is an option, but without a degree, few will loan you startup cash.  It is expected people going into business have education in business.  Without the degree they assume you do not.  Likewise without a degree or certifications they will assume you have no expertise in the area of your business.  This all increases risk on their side and they will limit your cash, and up your collateral.  

Things may be different over there, but here you do not get a degree, most places will void your application entirely. Seen the same way as not having a high school diploma was 40 years ago here.  In the US it is expected that all kids smart enough to do, go to college.  The ones who do not then are assumed to have been too dumb to continue their education.

You've ignored iNCY point and even your initial one to go on a tirade.

You've noted this apparent " never repay " movement which coincides with the greater anti-capitalist narrative. Because, fuck those boomers.

Long story, short - you're a socialist who believes everything should be handed to you and someone else should pay for it. That's it and that's the jist of Incy's point. Many young liberals feel the same way. Education should be free.

Hence the entitlement surrounding a movement like " never repay " and that's the point you are missing. The entitlement. Why should someone pay for their education?

And I find it weird that people seem to ignore that student loan forgiveness came after it was announced that PPP loans would be forgiven. 800 billion in loans to businesses forgiven but when students asked for the same, they were considered socialists. Meanwhile Gaetz, MTG and other conservatives in congress were happy to get their forgiven and no bats an eye.  Gaetz literally got a 500k loan for not firing himself from his podcast job, and had it forgiven.  Then said students should not have their loans forgiven because it is socialism.  The reason many rallied around forgiveness is they want their taxes to go towards the people now, not more tax breaks for the rich and no more government handouts to the rich.  

But hey people are paying it back.  Hundreds of billions dollars are being paid to four or five financial firms.  That money could have went to businesses but OH NO SOCIALISM.  So will just need a few hundred thousand people laid off to deal with the redirection of funds.  Thank god we stopped socialism though.  Losing your job is the best thing to happen in a capitalist society as you get to put on them boots again.  

Retail places are already talking near record losses this holiday season and major companies are doing end of the year layoffs.  In a way I wish those other people would pay back the loans to see the economy just hard crash.  Kill them commies dead with economic collapse.

Dec 19, 2023 1:01:33 GMT c said:

And again the presumption that America and Australia are exactly the same in how college regarded. Trade school in the US looking at 40k min.  Our colleges run our trade schools as for profits.  And they are more expensive than traditional college right now which is free for two years in most places.

Without a 2 year degree no one is making you a manager in the US unless you start your own business. Moreso with free community college now in many places. The college degree is a competency check almost all non-trade US labor uses. No degree, you are considered not smart enough for all but the most basic tasks. Most jobs have promotion caps for how high you can be promoted without degrees.  This is not going to change. More and more even programming fields even are requiring degrees as self-trained people fail to work out routinely.

Of course starting your business is an option, but without a degree, few will loan you startup cash.  It is expected people going into business have education in business.  Without the degree they assume you do not.  Likewise without a degree or certifications they will assume you have no expertise in the area of your business.  This all increases risk on their side and they will limit your cash, and up your collateral.  

Things may be different over there, but here you do not get a degree, most places will void your application entirely. Seen the same way as not having a high school diploma was 40 years ago here.  In the US it is expected that all kids smart enough to do, go to college.  The ones who do not then are assumed to have been too dumb to continue their education.

Here it is though, education is a ponzi scheme.
I think when we do this back and forth is pisses people off and they don't post in the thread.

I saw a fantastic story the other day, a man was talking about his best friend who had just completed a Masters degree in Egyptology,
There is no work for qualified Egyptologists, so he is going back to do his phd, do you know why?... So he can get a job teaching Egyptology.

If people cannot afford the repayments of their college loans then it means either the roles don't pay enough, or the cost of education is too high, or the expected level of education is too high.
When you forgive student debt, you just keep that ponzi scheme rolling.

Dec 19, 2023 2:32:31 GMT c said:

And I find it weird that people seem to ignore that student loan forgiveness came after it was announced that PPP loans would be forgiven. 800 billion in loans to businesses forgiven but when students asked for the same, they were considered socialists. Meanwhile Gaetz, MTG and other conservatives in congress were happy to get their forgiven and no bats an eye.  Gaetz literally got a 500k loan for not firing himself from his podcast job, and had it forgiven.  Then said students should not have their loans forgiven because it is socialism.  The reason many rallied around forgiveness is they want their taxes to go towards the people now, not more tax breaks for the rich and no more government handouts to the rich.  

But hey people are paying it back.  Hundreds of billions dollars are being paid to four or five financial firms.  That money could have went to businesses but OH NO SOCIALISM.  So will just need a few hundred thousand people laid off to deal with the redirection of funds.  Thank god we stopped socialism though.  Losing your job is the best thing to happen in a capitalist society as you get to put on them boots again.  

Retail places are already talking near record losses this holiday season and major companies are doing end of the year layoffs.  In a way I wish those other people would pay back the loans to see the economy just hard crash.  Kill them commies dead with economic collapse.

You must have me confused with someone who argues for corporate welfare, I don't and I think it is wrong.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist (with or without a phd) to point out that businesses employ people and businesses being unable to employ people is pretty bad for the workers.
As abused and as nonsense as they were, that was the premise of the PPP loans.

You just want to keep buying shelter cats.

C, you have to stop glossing over the point how fucking stupid so many of these degrees are.

Colleges shouldn’t be offering them; students should be receiving them. And fuck no, the general populous shouldn’t be subsidizing them.

College needs to be difficult to get into again. It needs to be valuable to finish and get a degree. The first step is eliminating the joke degrees that have proliferated.

I agree completely KJ. Part of the problem is our generation was scammed, pushed into college by teachers and parents to get degrees that we would not need for the jobs we would be working. And as a result of everyone going to college standards dropped so everyone could get into college to max profit, and everyone started to use a college degree as a baseline measure of intelligence for entry level employment.

I also agree that we should be linking degrees to jobs, cutting down general education to only what is needed for the job and allow far, far more industry input. Those paths that do not lead to an industry need to be pruned. I would also incorporate in the trades and have both paths end in a year of cowork in the field of study. The prunes fields will simply become hobbies that can be taught outside of this.

I do think they should be subsidized though. If we want to keep up with China in terms of tech, we need the best. And not just the best who can afford the debt. Link to government funding and gut the fuck out of colleges anything not related to education. Remove the recreation stuff, the art, sports, non educational clubs and special interests. Make the sole goal of college vocational training and only fund items related to that and put it all under government oversight. Costs will flatline hard.

The machine however does not want change. Everyone claims that the way they did it was best, or only they know best, and no one is really open to any type of reform. Why the leading education people are getting into cyber education now, they expect the entire college model to fail completely and move to large companies offering their own college alternative multi-year remote educational programs.

I disagree that they should stop offering “worthless” degrees. There is a lot of value to society in experts teaching others in arts, languages, literature, history, etc. College is an environment to learn and better yourself - job training is a close second, but second nonetheless.

The trick is to balance the cost with your future earnings (not necessarily in that field), just like buying a car or home. However, these choices are being made by teenagers and we’ve seen the ridiculous automobiles young people blow their money on. At least a car can be repossessed. It’s hard to do that with knowledge, which is why I kinda get the argument that college debt can’t be discharged.

I’d like it a lot if state schools were heavily subsidized again, for the same reason I vote yes on every school tax increase - I don’t want to be surrounded by fucking idiots. Not to say that people who don’t go to college are idiots - as long as the K-12 schools are good that shouldn’t be a problem, we’d just have the normal number of idiots.

Will reply in more detail about circumulum stuff tomorrow, but good point on stupid things kids do. In the US we claim kids cannot change their sex while under 18 because they are not adult enough to make that decision, but then everyone tell them they should be taking out 35k loans. 70% of students who graduate high school here go to college as that is what parents and schools both push for. People always make it out like it is stupid that kids want to go to college but they really have no choice when everyone around them is pushing for it, and have done so their entire lives.  Hell, 6th grade we start to track a one group for college, then add a second track in high school to them.  The bottom third we write off as trade students or condemn to service / manual labor futures.

Dec 19, 2023 8:16:53 GMT Gyro LC said:

I disagree that they should stop offering “worthless” degrees. There is a lot of value to society in experts teaching others in arts, languages, literature, history, etc. College is an environment to learn and better yourself - job training is a close second, but second nonetheless.

The trick is to balance the cost with your future earnings (not necessarily in that field), just like buying a car or home. However, these choices are being made by teenagers and we’ve seen the ridiculous automobiles young people blow their money on. At least a car can be repossessed. It’s hard to do that with knowledge, which is why I kinda get the argument that college debt can’t be discharged.

I’d like it a lot if state schools were heavily subsidized again, for the same reason I vote yes on every school tax increase - I don’t want to be surrounded by fucking idiots. Not to say that people who don’t go to college are idiots - as long as the K-12 schools are good that shouldn’t be a problem, we’d just have the normal number of idiots.

I disagree with the first part, we talk about the value to society of the arts and the likes, but value is a statement about the benefit of something versus its cost. If nobody is willing to pay the cost, then it is broken.

I have no issue with subsidised college, I just don't believe in a blank cheque. I would be all for industry employing people out of high school on cadetships, the employer pays for the schooling, the student commits to working there for 5 years or has to pay for a portion of their schooling.

College places need to be better balanced to the workforce and this is a way to achieve it. I have spoken before about when the show CSI came out there were tens of thousands of people studying criminal pathology for about 10 job vacancies a year over the whole USA.

If there is value in an arts degree then that should be provable if someone is willing to pay for their degree or on the behalf of someone else.
Arts historically was always tied to patronage, not the public purse.