I don't think thats the problem. Moreso something like this that was intended to help people that needed it is being taken advantage of. Every cafe with $6 espressos will ask you for a tip nowadays. What's worse is that a lot of places default to adding a 15% tip when these screens show! And there is no way of knowing where these tips are going unless you pay cash.
Those are legally not gratuities in the US but a “service charge” if they are mandatory. The worst part is that you have no guarantee it is actually distributed to employees, and it is charged sales tax unlike gratuities.
It usually is posted but not always obvious, I know to look for it for large parties but the counter service places it’s easy to sneak in because I’m order so rapidly I’m not scanning around for signs and fine print disclosures. It’s a dark pattern of getting you to order before you realize what’s going on
What do you think mathematics is? "Just a hobby"? Developments in mathematics made possible the industrial revolution, the information age, everything! Do you think the world will be the same when math is "solved"?
Maybe don't take words out of my mouth. I studied math when I was younger, and got to the top 0.001% in mathematics competitions. Why did I study so hard? In order:
1. I recognized that understanding math had incredibly profitable applications.
2. It was a sport.
3. It was a hobby.
Do I think the world will look the same when math is "solved"? Absolutely not! And we're seeing it transform right before our eyes. I routinely ask Claude, "here's the general idea for a math/cs/ai problem I'm working on, can you help me figure out the maths? oh and then implement it too."
Could I figure this out myself? Of course. Having the idea is halfway to formalizing it in math. But I remember even last year working on GPU kernels by hand and having a bunch of little arithmetic or indexing errors burn me, because I'm just slower and less perfect at doing the math correctly. Now I basically just tell Claude, "go optimize a GPU kernel for this problem". I still have to tell it what to look out for (architectural, algorithmic, memory improvements), but I'm sure the next model won't even need that.
You don't know what you're talking about. Just because it was created by an LLM, and verified in Lean, does not make it true. The whole point of writing a proof is for it to be understandable.
Suppose I directed some llm agents to factor the primes from network logs of your machine. I then publish the private and public key in full. You would not change your keys of course because its not true right?
The situation is overblown, but the writing of Doctorow is clearly unreliable at this point.
Jabbing at this opponent of choice by declaring Python is "an easy-to-master programming language" just shows he has no technical ability and has run out of good arguments
> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.
Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.
