> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical.
Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale.
Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put together a coherent business plan. The people you need to work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere. How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs, and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to work and was still disposable.
If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
In theory plastic food 'waste' could be far more recyclable if it were standardized on plastics that were recyclable and we had a deposit system.
Needless to say the food and drink industry has spent an epic fuckton on lobbying to ensure that doesn't happen. Remember to give a proper fuck you to the Coca-cola corp about this.
> How different the output is each time you generate something from an LLM is a property called 'prompt adherence'. It's not really a big deal in coding LLMs, (...)
I strongly disagree. Nowadays most LLMs support updating context with chat history. This means the output of a LLM will be influenced by what prompts you have been feeding it. You can see glaring changes in what a coding agent does based on what topics you researched.
To take the example a step further, some LLMs even update their system prompts to include context such as where you are in the world at that precise moment and the time of the year. Once I had ChatGPT generate a complete example project based around an event that was taking place at a city I happened to be cruising through at that moment.
> LLMs got good at search last year. You need to use the right ones though - ChatGPT Thinking mode and Google AI mode (that's https://www.google.com/ai - which is NOT the same as regular Google's "AI overviews" which are still mostly trash) are both excellent.
I disagree. You might have seen some improvements in the results, but all LLMs still hallucinate quite hard on simple queries where you prompt them to cite their sources. You'll see ChatGPT insist quite hard that the source of their assertions is the 404 link that it asserts is working.
This is just completely the opposite to what i've experienced within Claude and Gemini. Sources are identified and if inaccessible are not included in the citations. I recently tried a quite specific search aimed towards finding information about specific memo's and essays cited within a 90s memo by bill gates, and it was succesful at finding a vast majority of them, something google search failed with.
I don't want to say that it's a skill issue, but you may just be using the wrong tools for the job.
> Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing.
You might want to review how you approach these tools. Complaining that you need to rewrite 70% of the code screams of poor prompting, with too vague inputs, no constraints, and no feedback at all.
Using agents to help you write code is far from a one-shot task, but if throwing out 70% of what you create screams out that you are prompting the agent to create crap.
> 1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept.
I think you need to take a humble pill, review how you are putting together these prompts, figure out what you are doing wrong in prompts and processes, and work up from where you are at this point. If 70% of your output is crap, the problem is in your input.
I recommend you spend 20 minutes with your agent of choice prompting it to help you improve your prompts. Check instruction files, spec-driven approaches, context files, etc. Even a plain old README.md helps a lot. Prompt your agent to generate it for you. From there, instead of one-shot prompts try to break down a task into multiple sub steps with small deliverables. Always iterate on your instruction files. It you spend a few minutes on this, you will quickly halve your churn rate.
> If this works better for you than a Logitech or Kensington trackball, sweet, use it. But so far all the reviews are like "I've never used a trackball, but this looks cool".
Most people never saw a trackball, let alone used it.
Mainly because either your PC comes with a mouse, or you use a laptop which comes with a touchpad.
Your regular ~$50 sucks because it follows the form factor of a mouse even though you don't have to move it around. If you grew used to one then you don't notice the poor form factor, but it's awkward and still forces to move your hand away of a keyboard.
The Charybdis, Dactyl, and CCK-ball kind of address the problem by making it reachable by a thumb, but they don't eliminate it completely because it still forces you to follow an awkward user flow.
This product feels like a trackball that lets you place it where it makes sense. I think it's an improvement.
I have faith that keyboards with embedded touchpad such as the Kinesis Form fix this issue, but I'm not willing to shelf ~$300 for an experiment. I'd rather try out a split keyboard and have a boring touchpad where it feels right. Multi-finger touch gestures kind of eliminate any other flow. Hopefully keychron will consider that too.
> Your regular ~$50 sucks because it follows the form factor of a mouse even though you don't have to move it around.
I don't understand - between the Kensington Orbit, Kensington TB550, Elecom HUGE, Nulea M505, M511 & M514 and the Micropack V05M - what ergonomic form factors are we missing?
Only the Kensington Orbit is a different form factor. Every single one of the remaining examples follow the mouse form factor, which forces the user to move a hand away from the keyboard to operate a device to the side. Some of your example products even double as a mouse. What exactly don't you understand?
Ah, then I see what you mean. I was thinking of the different form factors in terms of which fingers are moving the ball, how your wrists are oriented, etc.
I think this assertion is too vague and arguably wrong. It's unclear which traits would lead a Git alternative to be claimed as better, and even if those traits, if they exist, are relevant. It's also unclear if the tradeoffs of switching tooling away from Git are worth whatever hypothetical benefit there is to be had.
I would make the bold claim that Git is undoubtedly better than any conceivable alternative, and state that the network effect is a consequence and not a side-effect. Anyone is free to try to argue against it by pointing out concrete arguments.
Git is only better in the same sense that Windows is better than Linux. I really need the tools I use that only run on Windows. I prefer Linux for a lot of things, including daily web development, but the experience of developing Unreal Engine on Linux is lacking. I love fossil and the many features it provides in itself and would use it for everything, except that it doesn't have (working) Intellij plugin for integration, a good GitHub alternative, etc.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
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