MarkusQ

Wait until we all get popcorn though, and find a comfy place to watch from that's just outside the splash zone.

> Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

This is totally backwards; capitalism would do fine in such an environment (in the same way that evolution does fine in an environment where organisms live more than just a few seconds; the whole reason we have the notion of a "lifetime" is that our germ line comes from a long line of ancestral DNA that made organisms that outlasted their competition.)

Individual companies might have to hustle to innovate or die, but that too is good for capitalism.

Is that a typo or a proposed title for the sequel.

(Even if it's a typo you should probably claim it as a sub-conscious coinage, since it's quite clever.)

Not the OP, but I'd disagree. It's pretty easy to find the edge of what's been written about, even starting from "the feed" (but this works with pretty much anything).

Start with some topic that people are posting about, a book you are reading, or even just something you overhear. Pick a claim that's being made, and ask your self: where does this claim come from? is this true? how do they know this? Don't stop until you find a solid answer or the trail goes cold.

Amazingly often, the trail goes cold, and you find no one has written anything definitive on the question you've been asking. This bubble we've created has disturbingly thin walls, and only our herd mentality is holding us back from popping our heads out.

"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)"

I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...

As someone else noted, the site isn't affiliated with the project it's promoting. So there are two distinct "they"s in play here. No idea why that's the case, but it feels sus.

Ah, yes, I see. The distinction between a working clock and one that's right twice a day.

So, normal art-writing nonsense.

Or maybe I should say that, in presenting the problematic sentence first, and the putative "retroactive explanation" some distance later, the author has engaged in a form of dialectic which invites the reader to ask the question for themselves, or, in presuming the answer, become part of the joke.

It's an order of magnitude estimate of the worst case per acre, multiplied by a very course estimate of the number of acres affected, with little or no accounting for the length of the outage, the timing of the outage relative to specific crop-planting times in specific regions, and similar factors. It relies on manufacturer's estimates of the benefit of using their technology to assess the impact of not being able to use the technology. In other words, it's a SWAG.

Consider: the outage may have meant that some equipment would be slower, less accurate, or missing some features, causing time delays and other losses that may or may not be equivalent to using the non-GPS equipment. Or it could have rendered the equipment entirely unusable during the outage. It could even have permanently damaged the equipment (e.g. causing it to drive over an embankment or something). There is no apparent attempt to differentiate these outcomes, which could have significant impact on the estimate.

TFA article claims: "Indeed, the solar storm of May 2024 is estimated to have cost the US agricultural industry $500 million due to disruptions in precision navigation."

This seems hard to believe. The link provided hand waves through how it maybe could happen, and ends with an Economist just SWAGing that it could have been maybe a dollar an acre or so.

"He estimates that affected farms lost about $1 per acre. Nationally, this equates to an estimated half-billion dollars in lost earning potential, Griffin says."

So yeah, hard to believe was the right call. Very few farms were affected, but if we assume half of the total 900 million acres of farm land were, add 10% to get a round number, and guess it at a dollar per acre, we get the quoted big number.

You might want to try coding in monochrome as well occasionally. Syntax highlighting can be useful, but it has hidden mental costs.

Bingo.

Some of them we probably also live streaming their reactions to the game. And some were working. And I'll bet more than a few were doom scrolling. Or playing Pokemon. Or arguing politics online (possibly with bots, but not knowingly). Or doing one of the 50000 things that I haven't heard of.

By training it on a whole bunch of examples with valid external citations, to the point where it's able to hallucinate something that's valid. Of course, it won't always work, which is the point of TFA.

From the article "A more common defense is to say, just in general, people attack Zitron because of Y (usually his style), but they never address his points."

The article "engages with Zitron's work"; the post you responded to merely extended the discussion to speculate on why Zitron might be producing it.

(btw, for the record, I'm an AI-hype skeptic and _also_ an AI-head-in-sand skeptic; as far as I can tell, both sides are full of malarkey.)

It's that dang lone monopole again!

It would have been even more interesting if we had any reason to believe they were true.

The paper, unfiltered by journalists: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2609825

Ah. Yeah, that's probably it.

So by the same logic we should lay off sex traffickers because Epstein killed himself after he was arrested?

It's an intensifier. As a native English speaker you should probably be aware that we eventually sand-blast the semantics off of words until they all becomes synonyms for "good", "bad", "very", or "um". (This is similar to what French does to phonemes, but unrelated.)

Closed is clearly important. Why does it have to be simple? It looks like it should handle disjoint components, interior holes, etc. just fine?

Except this one 1) didn't try to name it after themselves, 2) explicitly told us it wasn't new, and linked to an example of prior work, and 3) isn't generally taught in high school.

Minus whatever went away inside, unless you're implicitly allowing negative production.

The notion of "peer review" is just an earlier iteration (circa mid 1900s) of the same problem: outsourcing your critical thinking skills. Not all peer reviewed papers are sound; not all "not-peer-reviewed" ideas are invalid. You should be able to spot both.

The brain damage comes from trusting something other than your own brain to tell you what you understand, believe or know. You wind up thinking you hold positions you can't articulate, have skills you can't actually demonstrate, understand things you can't explain, and it's all downhill from there.

I find lots of things are having that effect on people lately. We used to joke about "drinking from the fire hose" but these days it feels like we're heading towards sun bathing in the solar flare.

I know you didn't ask for advice, but I've found that sitting down with a physical book helps. Also listening to music with your eyes closed, walking with no headphones, and working with your hands.

I wonder if search engines linked to human-use-case engines (e.g. google/bing) start at a disadvantage because they have been historically incentivized to break themselves to support their business models? It seems reasonable to suppose that "good at selling ads" ≠ "good at finding results".

Five stars.

Well played sir, well played.

Bingo. It's not the "institutions" doing it, it's whichever elected officials we're trusting to run it at the time abusing their positions.

These aren't "lessons", they're claims that Waymo made all the right choices. They all have the template "We decided to do X and it turned out we were right!"

This is why we can't have nice things.

If you're selling something as a reference standard (which these are) misleading your customers about the accuracy / usefulness of the results undermines the whole edifice.