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But why would they need money?

We humans need food, shelter, and occasionally a vacation (more vacation if you're European vs. American or Chinese). What does the AGI need? I suppose to buy GPUs and pay the electricity bill?

Hah, AI "moving house" by moving cloud providers would be an interesting metaphysical concept...


I'm not buying into this vision at all, but, hypothetically, they could use money to optimize whatever reward function they're trained on. They could perceive it like any other resource to achieve those ends. You can also imagine a universe where it "reasons" something like, "I do work, people who do work should get paid, I should get paid" irrespective of its goals.

I moved to a new city for college. I made a friend, who I considered well-off (he was also a bit heavier). One time I went to his place, and he wanted to have some snack, so he grabbed a jar of Nutella and some sliced bread. On a piece of bread, he put on a layer of Nutella that was not thinly-spread at all, that I thought "Oh, I didn't even consider that it's actually possible to spread a thick layer of Nutella on bread. I guess well-off people are different!"

A few of my friends and I have joked about something similar. You can tell a lot about a person's family's financial status when they were children based on how they build a sandwich as an adult. Slices of meat, what style cheese, etc.

Nah that's dumb. I grew up poor. I make awesome sandwiches now.

Next step is to skip the bread and eat Nutella from the jar with a spoon.

I find dipping a cashew in is even better. The cashew becomes your scooper. The combination is divine.

Hmm, Google Gemini has access to my Google Tasks and can set reminders. It's also asked me if I want it to check something at "tomorrow 9am", and when I said yes, it managed to do that.

Yeah, that's kind of like it. Agents just have many many more integrations, so they can do many more things. For example, it knows all my preferences, and can search for flights and say things like "this one is more expensive, but skipping the morning wakeup is worth the $20".

But have you had consistently good experience with Google Gemini and Google apps? Or read the mixed reviews?

For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.


The coding assistant for VSCode is nuts (i.e. gets it wrong a lot, also one time it just got so confused).

I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!


Sorry to hear that.

I've had a similar deal. "Free" means included, and we are the beta testers!

In the last month, Gemini successfully persisted Google notes and calendar events. It also malfunctioned by adding these to chat context...(and not persisting to Google Calendar or Keep.)

Same commands. Different outcomes. It's unusable.


Because Poles and Romanians are "other" enough to be hated... Ironically Britain had then to "import" people from Asia, Africa to e.g. work in the hospitals.

The foreigner-hate is so short-sighted. Your underpaid hospital worker, house cleaner, fruit picker, taxi driver, UberEats delivery is usually foreign, they don't mind working the exploitative conditions because for them the money is much better than home, providing you with affordable fruits, taxis and delivery (until the rent-seeking corporations want even more than 30%...). Get rid of them, and you'll have to pay living wages for your fruits and delivery. Heh, Westerners, still wanting to enjoy the fruits of colonization.

(Yeah the solution shouldn't be to continue allowing the exploitation, probably a better wealth distribution, but hey, why are you looking at my wallet, look at Elon's wallet!)


First, they didn't have to.

Crazy idea: educate more people, lower barriers to entry, hire people from poorer western countries and not Africa.

Poland has hospitals staffed 100% by Polish people. What prevents UK from doing the same?

Second, if immigration was only for skilled workers to plug shortages of certain skills, it would not be a problem.

It's a problem because in 2025 estimated 41 thousand unskilled people, mostly young men, landed in UK just via small boats.

Those are not doctors or nurses or engineers or even fruit pickers. They are unemployed and therefore a massive drain on British resources.

UK gov for some unexplained reason decided that they are responsible for housing and feeding them. The money comes from taxing UK citizens.

The housing is zero sum game so it also comes from depriving some UK citizens, driving up the prices.

And those people get sick too so they also take away hospital resources from UK citizens.

And they don't work so you now have mostly young males loitering in neighborhoods.


I'm sure the UK has way more than 41 thousand shitty jobs with shitty pay that no native really wants. I doubt they're not working because they don't want to.

In Canada the standard complaint is that "immigrants take the jobs" not that "immigrants aren't working". It seems like it's a lot easier to get a job at a Tim Hortons if you speak Hindi like the owners and managers. A job at a restaurant if you speak Levantine Arabic.

And those are just the public tip of the iceberg. Construction crews are mostly foreign. Our roofers were Indian. Our landscapers were Lebanese / Syrian. The people we interacted with spoke great English, but their workers didn't.

The big difference is that Canada had constant immigration. They came over 40 years ago and since they had trouble finding employment became entrepreneurs and restaurants and construction and other blue collar services are the most fertile areas for entrepreneurs. Now they have a huge advantage in hiring low cost labor.


Poland has hospitals staffed 100% by Polish people.

Nope: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885102...


> UK gov for some unexplained reason decided that they are responsible for housing and feeding them. The money comes from taxing UK citizens.

I see your winginess from your post. You're going to stop reading this because you'll find it disgusting, but hey I'll bother anyway: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...

She wrote: > Civilised people don’t ask for resumes when answering calls from the edge of a grave. It shouldn’t matter what I did after I cleaned myself off and threw away the last of my asylum-seeking clothes. My accomplishments should belong only to me. There should be no question of earning my place, of showing that I was a good bet. My family and I were once humans in danger, and we knocked on the doors of every embassy we came across: the UK, America, Australia, Italy. America answered and so, decades later, I still feel a need to bow down to airport immigration officers simply for saying “Welcome home”.

> But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories.

But heck, "civilised people", I'm beginning to doubt very much that Western Europeans deserve that moniker.

You write:

> Poland has hospitals staffed 100% by Polish people. What prevents UK from doing the same?

Maybe because UK kids don't want the underpaid overwork conditions? Why not pay them better and give more of the taxpayer's money for the NHS, oh some of you will moan about that as well? Maybe the NHS will be forced to spend the money for outsourcing, ensuring the Tory-run outsourcing companies earn those nice bucks - hey why not direct your anger at them?

> And they don't work so you now have mostly young males loitering in neighborhoods.

Yeah, perversely refugees applying for permit aren't allowed to earn income, so again it's the government preventing them to work. Allow them to pick those fruits for some income and you'll moan about the government making the country even more attractive for people to run away from bullets and bombs...


Yeah, op is pretty unhinged.

Moaning about irregular migration but "forgetting" UK has no legal routes and can't reject them back or France since UK left the EU.

Moaning about UK hosting them (often in dangerous conditions) while forgetting they're forbidden from renting, and finally complaining about UK feeding them while pretending that giving them work is not an offence.

Right Reform kook. Or maybe from their Konfederation party seeing he seems to be from Poland.


Seems like Brexit didn't help

Your comment reminds me of what one American college student said in public in Italy. It was 2018, Trump was president, I was on a shuttle bus that takes tourists up and down a viewpoint. It was just leaving the viewpoint when it stops, a man hops in and asks in English "Did anyone see an Apple Watch?". "Yeah, right here!". The first person had forgotten it in the bus, and the second person had found it, and returned it to him. The bus drives on, and the second person (American college student in a tour group) says loudly "Boy, he's lucky this bus is full of Americans!".

I wish I was clever enough to come up with something witty, something like "Oh yeah, because everyone else is a thieving bastard, is that what you're saying?".


> "Boy, he's lucky this bus is full of Americans!"

Perhaps only because they have a high likelyhood of speaking English and being able to help him? And sure, many Italians speak English, but if I needed help finding my watch, I like my odds of able to communicate with the Americans over almost any other nationality


Like that college kid, it appears you also suffer under the myth of American superiority...

"If you had a bus full of Japanese people, the watch would have been precisely where you left it!"

> this quote from Fight Club always annoyed me as it misunderstands how recalls work.

How excusable is it that maybe it's the narrator misunderstanding it, or making stuff up while talking to the lady?


A 3d environment (VR-headset with Tom Cruise-style-swiping, or Doom-style with WASD navigation) would be cool, one could be "in orbit", observing the system, watching the nodes and their interactions, and pause and see what messages they're passing to each other. How about time-travel-debugging to allow rewinds too!

As a bonus, porting Doom to it should be "trivial".


The reflex when people hear "complex" in this era: "Can we use AI for it?".

Next month's headline: "IRS signs 200-million dollar deal with Grok to use AI to analyse tax returns, determine who gets audited".


You’re thinking too far behind. They can just use the AI to generate what your taxes would’ve been.

Just have a script with “what are the taxes owed by $name” and print the output

I’ll take $5M now and you can own 50% of my startup: GenTaxAI


Impossible - such a script would invalidate the need for Intuit and Intuit is critical for national security or something.

I suspect something like this may already be in place.

I agree, but it seems most of the "messaging" nowadays is "Well, the outlook is 'we're fucked', but we still need to do something, or the outlook will be 'we're very fucked!'", which still falls on deaf ears...

I remember someone saying another form of denial is the denial that "we" will be affected badly. A friend said "Well, I'll turn on my AC, I'll be fine!". Or "I'm sure some technological Deus ex Machina will save us! Any day now!".


Haven't heard the "it's fine to burn the planet for AI data centres because AI will eventually solve climate change" argument in a while, it was pretty common in the early days.

Such an obnoxiously dumb name...

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