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Cake day: January 8th, 2025

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  • The question of ‘What is the purpose of government?’ is simultaneously deeply important to society and yet rarely, if ever, addressed in a useful context. I have watched people argue about multiple policies, speaking past each other the whole time, just because they had different baseline assumptions as to the purpose of government and couldn’t even see their opponents had a different definition.





  • Amusingly, cook is probably the safest of those positions for the time being. The physicality and necessity of presence makes it harder to automate. Lawyer, doctor, and teacher can be done remotely, and is based largely on knowledge, so they are prime targets. People are already trying it. Drivers you could see being done remotely if we had faster, more ubiquitous, net connections, so it’s doable as well. It’s basically already happening. But cooking… AI doesn’t seem like it would give you the right kind of inputs and outputs to do that any easier/faster/cheaper. It’s already possible to make a food vending machine. The limitations of vending machines aren’t really that they need an easier interface on their database. AI won’t really help there. And to go beyond that and try to make an AI powered restaurant probably wouldn’t be profitable. It’s barely profitable to run a regular restaurant most of the time. If you try to put in the probable millions to automate a restaurant, it’d probably go the same way as the self-checkout lanes at stores, which is to say poorly.


  • HR is the bane of progress. HR is there for only one purpose, to keep the company from receiving lawsuits. It does not matter if the person they hire is competent, convivial, corrigible, or even capable of just showing up. They only pay attention to whether it follows their departments’ regulated practices.

    In hiring, HR is called upon to select someone, from a pool of sometimes thousands of candidates, based first on their resume/CV, a document broadly expected to be full of lies and exaggeration, (which increases likelihood of hiring someone dishonest) and which can have no visible indications of what the applicant can actually do, then based on an/a series of interviews, a practice which only tests the candidate’s ability to bullshit/be charming for short formalized conversations. (increasing likelihood of selecting for neurotypicality or unreasoning confidence) No HR person knows enough about essentially anything else anyone does to actually be able to tell the difference between a beam collimator and a retroencabulator, and staffing agencies make it even less likely because they are even further from the work.