I have a hobby and I don't get compensated for it (quite the opposite). It's not making art, but if art were my calling I could quite easily see myself making it without any hope of monetary reward. There are plenty of people who have the same hobby as me and don't have a job -- they pursue it as is it's a job, though most are not paid either. I view that as some combination of privilege and laziness.

If there's any problem here it's that people don't have enough time to pursue hobbies. I only have enough time because I work from home (no time wasted commuting). Perhaps the government should focus on where we as a society waste people's time and energy such that they have none left over for hobbies.

I pay alot of taxes. Probably more annually in the last decade than I made in total my first decade working.

Many of my peers spend alot of time agonizing about this stuff and spending both mental energy and significant capital in avoidance. I get a higher ROI focusing on more valuable activities. Besides, art is an economic engine. If you studied it, I’d guess those tax credits in Ireland generate multiples in domestic economic activity.

It seems dubious to claim that the tax break is a net positive for the country's economy. If art were so economically viable I suspect it would pay for itself and not need government incentives. I have no problem with the government paying a muralist to beautify some public space, but this is not that. This is subsidizing art that already has some economic value to someone, just not very much.

I feel like what is actually happening is subsidizing the buying of art, as the artist themselves can afford to charge a lower price due to the tax break. So you are encouraging the population to buy more art. And I guess that has some hypothetical returns in terms of life satisfaction and civility...? I think if they framed it this way, as a tax benefit available to anyone instead of exclusively to a select few, it might be more well received. I think of the mortgage interest tax break in the USA (which is actually almost completely negated at this point by the growing standard deduction) in the same way. It encourages people to settle down, maintain a job, and buy into society, so it helps build social stability and reduces violence.

I think we as a society strive to make gp correct that money is representative of value, and rightfully so.

Anyone partaking in any activity that has value to others should be given money. That is literally what this basic income/tax break for artists is for. Someone thought producing art had value and pure capitalism wasn't correctly matching that value with monetary rewards.

There are lots of rich churches and church leaders out there. That's because they serve a human need, and those humans are willing to direct some of their finite resources towards that provider. (I'm talking about the collections plate if you didn't catch that.)

Now obviously money on its own is not value. It should represent value that you delivered to someone else in the past, and is helpful for getting whatever value your life needs. You mentioned philosophy --- that yoga retreat in the Andes isn't free, is it?

Now sometimes we muddy the waters, for example we permit lotteries where the winner takes home a good deal of money without providing any value to anyone. That debases money, and I think it has no part in society, but I'm unfortunately swimming against the tide on that one.

"Non violent communication" is a philosophy that I find is rooted in the mentality that you are always right, you just weren't polite enough when you expressed yourself. It invariably assumes that any pushback must be completely emotional and superficial. I am really glad I don't have to use it when dealing with my agentic sidekicks. Probably the only good thing coming out of this revolution.

An AI agent right now isn't really going to react to feedback in a visceral way and for the most part will revert to people pleasing. If you're unlucky the provider added some supervision that blocks your account if you're straight up abusive, but that's not the agent's own doing, it's that the provider gave it a bodyguard.

One human might respond better to a non-violent form of communication, and another might prefer you to give it to them straight because, like you, they think non-violent communication is bullshit or indirect. You have to be aware of the psychology of the person you're talking to if you want to communicate effectively.

To answer your other questions: instructions, including the general directive to follow nearby precedent. In my experience AI code is harder to understand because it's too verbose with too many low-value comments (explaining already clear parts of code). Much like the angry blog post here which uses way too many words and still misses the point of the rejection.

But if you specifically told it to obfuscate function names I'm sure it would be happy to do so. It's not entirely clear to me how that would affect a future agent's ability to interpret that file, because it still does use tools like grep to find call sites, and that wouldn't work so well if the function name is simply `f`. So the actual answer to "what's stopping it?" might be that we created it in our own image.