As always with these people, note that the replies make frequent reference to “loopholes” and people “exploiting the system” without ever being specific about what those loopholes are.

The heartwarming story of the PHI sponge helping the professional racist also hate fat people.

Then again, there is a lot of synergy between the inevitable antifatness and his usual project of hating black people.

Also, real talk: I got a jar opener when my wife moved in and it is a goddamn revelation how much easier that things makes life. Absolutely recommended purchase. You want to have a sandwich but you closed the jar before you came down with a cold? No worries. You stick the yeast towards the back of the fridge because you haven’t made your own bread since you got the cold and that was fuck long ago? Not a problem. You have a third reason why this fucking jar is stickier than you would normally have the capacity to handle (and trust me, you will)? Not anymore you don’t.

The fewer checks there are on state power the more valuable corruption becomes.

That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.

I found the paragraph that best shows why I hate this:

Globalization became the symbolic villain for the collapse of blue-collar manufacturing communities in America. Entire towns watched factories disappear while political and economic elites insisted the disruption was both inevitable and beneficial.

This is a basically accurate description of what happened.

Whether every fear surrounding globalization was technically correct almost ceased to matter politically because millions of people experienced the same emotional reality: the economy was being reorganized for someone else’s benefit while their communities absorbed the damage.

Again, I this is actually a pretty salient description of what happened. Sure, maybe if you add everything up the benefits outweigh the costs in some abstract way, but it still hurts when those costs are imposed on you and yours without any input. The economic decision-makers decided to sacrifice those people’s livelihoods and their futures in exchange for number go up, and they knew it was happening even as they couldn’t do anything to stop them.

This whole piece acts like the backlash to outsourcing was irrational and dumb, like those salt-of-the-earth morons didn’t know what was good for them. But the author is either too deep in the neoliberal soup to recognize this as the wrong and cruel argument it is or they recognize this and lack the courage to commit to that position openly.

AI is increasingly becoming that same symbolic villain for white-collar America

Emphasis added. I don’t think the villainy behind these AI projects is symbolic at all. Symptomatic of deeper systemic problems maybe, but very real. People aren’t failing to grant this transformative technology it’s moment in the sun, they are clearly seeing the transformation that the tech oligarchs are trying to impose on them and doing their damndest to reject it. This still leaves a whole lot of fights left to decide what the future should look like, but I find it legitimately heartening to see so many people from so many different parts of society coming together and loudly declaring “Not this!”

If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.

If I had to guess based on the practicing medical professional line I would guess that she had used LLM-based transcribers or image recognition tools for medical imaging. Those normally don’t use the kind of chatbot interface that lends itself to these problems. No attempt to imitate another person who can be “independently” validating the delusional thoughts.

The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.

Yep. The broker is effectively buying at $19.80 and still selling to their customer at $20.00. Now, crypto is actually innovative in just how easy this is to do. In fact it’s almost required since the transactions are processed in bulk and the miners get to decide what order all the transactions in that block go in. The public mempool also means that even if the miners aren’t doing it themselves anyone who wants to front-run basically has a whole conga line of good-faith users (suckers) to get set in front of and identify the most profitable position. Without the miner’s privilege you’ll need to deal with transaction fees and it’s going to be harder to find opportunities, but it’s so easy to search that I wouldn’t expect it to matter.

For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.

Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.

I think the more telling aspect here isn’t the possible employment impacts, it’s the fact that it’s making all the things it’s supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people’s livelihoods, it’s also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don’t know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people’s concerns, I think there’s decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.

I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn’t be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you’re looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn’t move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.

In modern terms I imagine that variety plays into it to a degree. Grains you can use to make a lot of different foods, make animal feed, reduce to corn syrup or ethanol or whatever other products (in the US at least that’s the majority of our corn production) and so on. Even before you get into the question of long-term investments versus immediate payoffs under capitalism (how long does an orchard take to start paying off?) there’s just more varieties of products and a deeper market for cereals.

So I’m not able to provide the kind of proper citations that I want to here, but it looks like there are a few factors here. Most importantly, cereal grains have a very short growing season, which in some instances lets you get multiple crops from the same land in a year. More importantly, it massively increases your resiliency. Like, it you plant an orchard of walnuts or something, it takes a decade between planting and being able to actually harvest, by which time your community has starved or moved along if that was your primary source of food.

Of course potatoes and yams also have a fairly short season, and you do see yams come up as a staple in parts of Africa, for example. But the other big advantages cereals have are in preservation and byproducts. Grain will dry itself out and keep for a long time compared to most other crops, and can be ground into flour, fermented into alcohol, boiled and eaten as raw grain, etc. Potatoes don’t keep nearly as well, going to seed a relatively short while after harvest. Additionally, the threshing process gives you straw in addition to the grains, which can be used as building materials, animal feed, and a variety of other things. Most plants don’t lend themselves to that many purposes as easily, though this is hard (in my inexpert opinion) to judge correlation vs causation on. Did we find lots of ways to use straw because we were already growing grains and therefore had a bunch of straw leftover? I don’t know and I don’t know how to find out, or even if it matters on a broader scale.

However, one specific consequence of this contrast is that in 18th-centuey Ireland the absurdly complex chains of subdivided plots being leased by multiple layers of absentee landlords meant that for most Irish farmers maximizing nutrition per acre was vital for being able to feed their families on the meager lands they could afford to cultivate. This is a large part of the reason why they took to the potato so strongly when it was introduced, and in turn is part of why the same blight that had swept through all of Europe with minimal fanfare absolutely devastated the country. It’s not the only reason, but it was a large part of setting the stage for what happened next.

Anyways, thanks for giving me an interesting question to research instead of doing any of the shit I actually needed to be doing.

I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.

With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it’s basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they’ve created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I mean, to be fair that’s not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.

I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

I’m not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren’t inviting good programmers to work with you. You’re inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I’m sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

It’s not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it’s that it’s uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.

But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.