Melting_Harps

> Real trustworthy bloke

You do realize he became King maker by position himself in YC, who is the owner/operator of Hackernews. What makes you think you are not being traced here, and your messages are not being used to train his LLM?

As far as him being a conman, if you haven't realized that most of the SV elite, that this place worships, are all conmen (See Trump Dinner this week) with clear ties to the intelligence agency (see newly appointed generals who are C-suite in several Mag 7 corps) who will placate a fascist in order to push their agenda(s) then you simply aren't paying attention.

His scam coin is the most insipid of his rap sheet at this point, and I say this as a person who has seen all kind of grifting in that space.

> Stewart is coming around and waking up to the idea that "woke" policies were rejected, and the democrats need re-framing/a reckoning. IMHO, he is largely the voice of democratic reckoning. Biden wasn't kicked out until Stewart's public evisceration and declaration that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes. He at least adapts with increasing information.

I just finished watching his interview with Ezra Klien, and as an on/off viewer of the TDS from back in his anti-war rants from 2003 or so (still in HS so kind of fuzzy on dates) to today I have seen a noticeable difference; he has finally realized that it's not that 'fraud, waste, abuse' in government doesn't occur on both sides of the isles (that much is probably always clear) it's that the two-party paradigm have in fact insidiously profited in their own specific ways from their respective MOs, and political theater aside are entirely complicit with it as it maintains the status quo.

Anything that deviates from the norm (eg Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul) is to be brandished too extreme, or unelectable and a loss to the other isle is a better result as it is something that detracts from the business as usual approach in modern US politics. The faces/names might change, but the tactics are the same, denying access to RNC/DNC platforms removing or outright denying delegates etc... it's all been done on both sides.

Just look at the face of the man melt when he hears how the Rural Broadband Bill process purposely rendered itself moot, and perhaps made the cluster** of DOGE become an inevitability--the obvious profiteer in chief Musk being the only one to really 'win' because of his innate and impeccable ability to award himself and his corps Govt contracts while championing and branding himself the best CEO the private sector has to offer.

Not only that, watch the interview with Maria Ressa when he realizes that the same Zuck that got Obama elected and then cozied up to Trump when he needed to has been the cause and reason why extremes of political fascism in the Philippines has risen, via Cambridge Analytica, and is part of the same agenda that has been playing out in US elections since 2016.

I don't know what to say about the TDS Host alumni, I reserve judgment on their POVs at this point, but I was a big fan of John Oliver since his days on The Bugle but if/when both him and Jon get together on a stand-up tour like he did with Chappele targeted at their primary demographic I think they can exert their collective influence to their hard-liner leftist audience to see that in actuality the Left-Right paradigm is in actuality a very parasitic symbiosis where the host (The US populace and perhaps World at large) will always suffer if it is the only form of governance we can either fathom or implement.

It's clear that resources and technology aren't the limiting factor in solving a large amount of Humanity's problems, it's that entrenched power (and those who benefit from it) refuse to relinquish any of it and will sooner destroy itself, and us with it, before it ever corrects itself.

> But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.

This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo.

The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date.

The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress.

Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress.

And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.

> the issue is that the top-tier sports (e.g., football, volleyball, basketball, etc.) capture the majority of money/value

This, I met the daughter of a colleague who was one of the UK Olympian rowers/crew and after I fed her and got her 2 drinks in she started telling me what her 'off-season' activities consisted of: her father as much as he tried could only afford to pay a fraction of her training costs and living expenses and they were well off land owners from Cornwall.

She basically got her Captains lisc and took the affluent people from the City on everything from booze cruises, to hen nights in the English channel to France etc...

The debauchery was obscene and made her witness some of the darkest aspects of humanity to pursue this dream she had, which was admirable in a way, but I knew that after a few years when she got really injured, or aged out or the money simply ran dry this would be her REAL life.

OF wasn't a thing back then, but I wonder if given the choice she would prefer the choice of uploading anon sexy feet pics or babysitting people go into drunk or coke fueled stupors where she is psychically restraining people from falling into the water while heavily intoxicated causing her to lose her license, or livelihood or at best increase her insurance rates.

Then again OF has the same problem where the top talent takes <90% of the money, and those are often managed and curated by agencies which have been dubbed the E-pimps of OF [0].

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/magazine/e-pimps-onlyfans...

> No need to listen to the gatekeepers. Rave is a verb. Raves are where people rave!

While true, I think in this case it is referring to the noun, which peaked in the 90s early 2000s underground movement and was the basis for the PLUR culture that is uniquely absent in the club scene; and I say that as a person who has mainly been into clubs as I was too young at the time but knew plenty of those candy-ravers growing up but was really into various genres of psy music (ambient then, techno and then finally trance) before I ever went out to party.

I read the article, and it's maonly focused on techno heavy parts of Berlin and OZ but I know there is a contingent of early dubstepers and to a lesser extend DnB (which was more widely accepted at the time) here on HN that grew up and went to events that were analogous to this as we listened to pirate radio from the UK and went to underground parties out in warehouses and in outdoor parties when things were only starting up because we couldn't go to Plastic People in London.

This is the closest we had to the early rave scene, where everyone sort of knew everyone (including the artists, promoters or venue owners) and we still called it 'raving' as you mentioned, but these became the state-side analogues (Dub-Warz [0] in EC and SMOG [1] in WC) to DMZ [2] nights and eventually to things like Red Bull Academy sponsored events and Outlook festival [3] [4] when adoption had peaked.

All of this is to say, that the verb and the noun represent unique periods, that latter I think can still be found in festivals but have ultimately a more corporate and capitalistic motivation than just a bunch of party people bootstrapping and renting a bunch of generators and PAs and taking them out into a warehouse, desert or forest and dancing all night and day.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP9ve9YEjGY

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T150ZZZ0Luo

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TziN0N40X3E

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbRb2Ds9s58

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXNSbjhREDY

> Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy?

Simply put, you are arbitrarily punishing those who consume these products (which I will repeat I do not purchase myself) in often high cost areas (eg Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder) to align with a specific ideology that these areas ascribe to, at least on the surface.

I feel like a boomer saying this and it seems like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because it's something that on the surface makes sense to a degree--relying on the old adage of tax it and you get less of it--and even appears to be well intentioned way to make people make 'healthier' choices, but from what I've seen in practice is a bureaucratic way to modify behaviour in people's everyday lives that ultimately only causes a minor inconvenience/friction for those resolved to circumvent and the initiative's results seem dubious at best and over-reaching at worst.

I genuinely don't think in practice it's about health either as you can easily go around the other aisle and buy all the high sodium, poly-saturated chips with as much or more HFCS and MSG and countless amounts of dyes and food preservatives to your hearts content with no tax implication and are often encouraged to be purchased in bulk, so it seems perplexing that this is really the success they make it out to be.

It seems to me like a bike-shedding initiative if I have ever seen one as it avoids the much bigger issue of how un-healthy the American diet really is.

> Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production)...

Because as you have mentioned, the obscenely lucrative farm subsides of corn for mega farms is the crux of the issue here and by extension all of the lobbying by big business that takes place for these chemicals that are actually shaping what the American diet itself is; I believe we would be better served addressing that obvious and glaring problem, and forcing producers of these products to have to do without these highly subsidized and addictive chemicals in their products and letting consumers decide whether to consume them of their own volition at actual market rates rather than this window dressing approach.

> And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study.

I don't have much to say, other than personally I feel it's a tacit nod to the fact they found the results they wanted from this study, because it resoundingly relies on justifying a higher sales tax and this further encourages other parts of WA to adopt it and further establish it as a form of tax revenue while trying to provide a 'social good' which can be monetized.

Again, it's not entirely hard to bypass and because it 'may' show some minor benefit to justify itself seems like how most poorly formed versions of bureaucratic gate-keeping works.

But, to take the contrarian position [0] to even my own argument it seems that in the 5 states they launched this with income taxes have also 'benefited' from these taxes. But its hard/impossible to properly measure that these consumers didn't just purchase things in a nearby city with no additional tax or just online so I think it's parameters can derive the favourable results it claims. And the following claim regarding 'significant evidence' doesn't really compel me to say it was vastly evaluated:

> But the study also looked at adjacent zip codes to the SSB-taxed cities: finding no statistically significant evidence that purchases had increased in these neighboring areas.

Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.

0: https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2024/01/11/US-sugar-ta...

PS: That 2nd quote was not yours, but the other users who wanted to address tobacco use: I keep doing this having grown up on IRC/forums but since HN doesn't do attribution. I should find a solution to this, but making 2 posts seems tedious, I guess I can pre-fix with @ or something.

> I'm curious if you have data showing this?

Regarding the sugar tax? Only empirical/anecdotal, I'm afraid: the fact is, as mentioned in my statement and in a response below, is that it's a geographical based tax, which while annoying can be trivially circumvented. (And even then black-markets emerge to meet that demand, or better known as System-D.)

A better analysis would be the effects of better health and the decrease in tobacco smokers in younger generations over the last decades, which is mainly a product of discretion. I can assure you having lived with a pack a day people no amount of advertising, gross tumor pictures on the side of the box, high costs/taxes came close to people just realizing it's a horrible thing to do to your health.

Arguably this led to the mass vaping trend, and a myriad of other ailments associated to that, but still what remains is that tax while a deterrent is no match for proper market-product-fit--how ever dangerous, or stupid one may think said behavour is.

> There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.

Here is the thing, I spent a lot of time in Europe where smoking is still incredibly prevalent and culturally relevant and the taxes are still incredibly high, the result: people just buy loose tobacco and roll it themselves to bypass the higher tax on pre-roll stuff offered every where.

The ancillary products sold in 'head-shops' become a niche market unto themselves for these people and divert that tax money into another sector, proving that while markets have many flaws they tend to be effective at navigating any and all legislative hurdles even in an incredibly highly regulated market-place.

I think this specific matter seems to be a bigger issue with people who feel the need to judge or deem people's actions 'right or wrong' based on their own subjective values when it comes to personal body autonomy, and think they know better and want to deter them in any way possible which I think this is ultimately what this is about: not Society's health.

If that were the case, I think resources are better utilized in helping people address the MASSIVE mental health crisis in the US.

Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.

> It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.

As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why?

When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff.

Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well!

Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.

> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.

It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas).

It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place.

It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively.

The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now.

I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore.

Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price.

I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax).

In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.

> So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.

For the most part yeah, we ate previously opened jars of pickled veg anti-pasto, salumi and ragu while drinking non-fancy house wine, but when I was living and working with a legacy family in Maranello we'd sometimes go to Modena/Bologna/Reggio Emilia to a patrons/business partners home where expectations were different... we did a multi-course menu, but that was a business arrangement or celebration of some sort, hardly what I'd call a regular Sunday dinner.

I just liked going to the nonna's home to have whatever was made and rest for a bit and get away from work as I had already spent over 60+ hours on the farm/kitchen by weeks end.

Those days were so exhausting but incredibly fulfilling.

> Ah yes Italians, famous for being stingy with portions, feeding you the minimum portion possible.

So, this is an often [0] repeated misconception: you have to differ from family style eating, and that of professional cuisine gastronomy. The former is what you are attributing this POV, whereas a professional kitchen that focuses on the tre/quattro piatti format (prix fixe) the whole point is to provide small(er) portions between courses, often in order to get the waiter/sommelier to drop the wine card to match the palette/dish, which is where the real money is made in restaurants.

When I ran kitchens in Italy, we often sold proteins at a loss (at least the first 5-10 orders) in order to promote the local wine/vineyards that we got a massive discount on by buying half the harvest/yield seasons anf sometimes years ahead and could mark-up the bottle--it's your basic loss leader approach, and pre-service is often where these things are tweaked and refined with a very clear intention for FOH to move the booze to make up for the losses in the kitchen. The owner I worked for during this time had a family owned dairy/caseficco business where we got our cheeses where we also got lamb from as well depending on the time of year.

Its fun, to an extent, especially with weekend specials and selling out low-cost high margin dishes every night, but honestly after 3 seasons of this I realized I was just a middle man for back room deals with vineyards/distilleries that happened long before I ever worked there. I realized I preferred to cook seasonal in agrotourism settings as it hit all the goals I wanted to accomplish, and took the spot light more towards the farms/farmer, where I also worked at in the morning while working in kitchens in Europe.

Sidenote: While I had half of Sundays off and free access to a table on the slow hours (along with anything on the menu and maybe a bottle of lambrusco or prosecco on a good week) when I was in Italy, the truth is I would peddle my bike to the nona's house to eat for like 4-5 hours with a nap which had those generous portions you are mentioning.

0: http://partaste.com/understanding-italian-menu/

> "we have reason to believe AGI can ultimately be built with less than $10B in hardware"

As a person who actually builds this infrastructure for Data Centers: Bwahaha!!!

This guy should have been laughed out of the room, and probably been out of a job if ANYONE took this guy serious. There are Elon levels of dillusions, and then there is this!

> What’s your issue with Armstrong? First I’ve heard anyone say he is despised?

The fact that I actually know what he has done since he and his Goldman Sachs cronies got involved, and leveraged thier SV connections to get backing to start coinbase which has been a constant thorn in our side ever since MTGX went down.

That people who admit to '[being] a fan of Elon and Twitter...' are oblivious to the constant gaslighting, scams, and derision he has inflicted within the bitcoin community isn't a shock, what is disappointing is how few critics there are of his for his actions.

He tried to scam noobs into thinking Bcash was Bitcoin on Coinbase during the USAF, that was the final nail in the coffin after a long history of reversing transactions and closing accounts etc... but as I said they hold an obscene amount of Bitcoin despite having been hostile towards Bitcoin and what it represents.

> The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.

While I agree on your conclusion, your reasoning is not entirely correct; urban farming is a byproduct, at east in MI, of a broken food chain wherein people left in the wake of financial disaster (2008) were left to fend for themselves and had to 'return to the land' while still being forced to stay close-by in order to just survive. Detroit was a food desert, the local, state and Federal government did nothing and corporate interests di-vested mainly from any real healthy options or grocery stores, what was left was what plagues the modern American diet (highly processed junk) and when the people of Detroit realized the help was never coming they took it upon themselves to create what has become the largest urban farming operation in the US.

Again, your conclusion may be correct, these people could not leave Detroit mainly for ecnomic reasons and were therefore 'Urbanites,' but rest assure this was not a hobby-farm approach they took, but rather the sullen and resentful resignation that they must feed themselves: what has since occurred has been amazing to watch, many chefs and artists returned back to Detroit and have made it an impact in self-organization and food security circles.

If I had more time I'd also make an argument for why the economies of scale tend to favor open field farming, but isn't that much better due to the vast needs of Govt. subsidies and the ever diminishing returns on investment when it comes to farming, conventional or organic, or in my case when I farmed: biodynamic.

You need only look to US/European farmers following the path of their Indian counterparts in mass suicides due to the unrelenting pressures and high debt loads in order to feed the masses.

Personally speaking, I think a huge missed opportunity was lost when many of the disillusioned in both West/East took to lying flat or quiet quitting etc... what should have been done was incentivize these people with low no interest loans and give them swaths of land to find purpose in regenerative Agriculture in order to remediate the soils and help offset climate control. Instead they just got chopped up in the meat grinder that is the depressing work force where they wallow in depression and suicidal ideation benefiting no one and making society more precarious day by day by making them gravitate towards extremism.

Sorry, I had a call and had do work rather than pretend o work while on HN after I posted this on the day ahead of thanksgiving. :0

0: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/founders-and-ceo-crypto...

>but I'm really quite uncomfortable to see a large financial services company bragging that it defeated government regulatory efforts and its customers can now freely transact with a money laundering service.

You should, but not becuse of what you said but because it's selective application of the Law; for example this is still being upheld [0] as we speak and clearly innocent people are having their lives ruined for using software on something that only until recently wasn't even considered money by the IRS/FINRA et al.

What you should feel uncomfortable with is the weight of a YC backed crypto exchange, ran by one of the most despised members of the community, being able to skirt around the legal system while others who do not have the political or business clout are held to a different standard in what was deemed 'overstepping' it's powers:

> U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruling, so they can't be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control "overstepped its congressionally defined authority" when it did so.

PS: Armstrong represents the most reprehensible aspects of the Bitcoin community, but sadly due to a myriad of reasons (connections to banking and VC world being the top of that list) is now a custodial service for most of the non-self custody clients in this space. I cannot emphasize what a terrible outcome this is, and can only hope some good (like Samurai getting let go) comes from this travesty.

> Which law prevents a convicted felon from running for and/or winning the presidency race and why are those currently tasked with enforcement not enforcing it?

Judicial branch, specifically in the court of NY has delayed sentencing in order to appear 'impartial' and reach a proper outcome on his legal fate [0]. Whcich is apparently a direct correlation from the Supreme Court's outcome on Presidential immunity.

People got all worked up about their rulings but did nothing that mattered, in fact if this presidential race proved anything is that they want a despot in power rather than a mediocre former DA or a nearly senile old man. Ultimately, it shows that Democratic Republics are not just capable of one-off anomalies, his first presidency, but that they tend to skew this way over time. I'm less mad about the outcome of this election then I am with the electorate that saw these people do what they did during COVID and not follow thier own laws and inside trade etc... while not demanding a better system!

I'm not sure you will get the answer you want, but this is only possible because of a complicit Supreme Court can install itself as permanent interpreters of the Law for Life and are appointed for mainly political influence and money rather than competence or merit.

The Founders (for all their wisdom) were explicit in the framing of this country for what were essentially the landed gentry, so why wouldn't it work out like this after wealth and status had been concentrated in such few hands?

0: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/06/politics/judge-delays-trumps-...

> It'll be a moot point soon, DoJ will be too busy dragging Democrat bodies through the streets to quote the probable future AG.

And you're not worried of the 2 trillion the future man of 'effective efficiency' [Effective altruism pun intended here as these are all of the same ilk) slashing any and all jobs that pose a threat to his fiefdoms with their pesky unions or workers rights? The guy litterly piloted the slash and burn everything in sight to cut costs and 'get lean' which every other lemming C-exec followed in tandem.

Honestly, this DoJ under Khan simply didn't go far enough to gut them and you guys were too busy gorging at the trough to unionize when you had momentum, so now you too will feel the wrath of these corpo-raiders who hallowed out midlle America to save a buck and a bonus now that 'AI can make you a rockstar programmer' and you will be expected to 10x every review or you're put on PIP.

It's hard to feel sorry for you, you did this to yourselves and didn't push back when you had the leverage.

It's funny, what I see is he will put tariff exemptions on his corps given just how much they rely on global supplies to make a Tesla and lots of stuff from SpaceX like optics are supplied by foreign companies. Because, hey if the crooks who voted for bailouts and golden parachutes did it, why can't he?

The best the 'Chief Scientist/CEO' can do is tell it's Taiwanese suppliers to go to Thailand [0],so as to not disrupt the flow of goods due to pesky things like invasion/annihilation from the CCP, which unless I'm mistaken will still be subject to those hefty tariffs they went on about throughout the campaign.

0: https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/22925817/spacex...

> Think about the hell that most people go through, who have no concept of an adblocker.

Mobile users mainly have no grasp of this, and that is what most people Globally have used to be on-bordered statistically speaking, and they don't know anything else--I was watching a friend show me a recipe online not too long ago on his 1200 iphone and when ad showed up I just looked perplexed to disgusted to him. I told him to get an adblock to avoid that, he simply locked at me and said he 'didn't want to pay for it' and I just let it go and watched the ad in silence.

This is a person who spends an ungodly amount of time on tiktok as well, we were watching trending desert recipes and there are tons of them there that people want try so he justified all the ads he watches as 'market research.'

I regret to say that this is the norm, the dude has a MSc in Structural/Civil Engineering from a reputable University so it's not a schooling thing, just more like of a 'not online before smartphone' kind of thing to me.

> I don't buy it. I'm an introvert but happily married now. But I can still see the appeal of a very personalized AI

That doesn't surprise me, some of the most loneliest people are married after all, hence why extra martial affairs have been monetized from everything from online porn/camsites to Ashley Madison--with married men being targeted demographic.

I guess my point is that for those who cannot find a way to engage with another Human in person, this seems like the only way to 'conform' to social norms while not being depressingly alone. This maybe modern darwnism playing out in the 21st century where all external stress factors have been mostly alleviated in affluent Western societies, because it is the undeveloped World who is keeping the species going fertility wise, but confining the genetic pool to such non-diversity has its issues, though.

But as I said, personally if left to my own devices I can go weeks without speaking to anyone and be entirely fine and jump right back into the fray when I need/feel to: oddly enough when most were locked down during the pandemic and 'going crazy' from isolation I was an 'essential worker' and continued everything but my gym/clubbing/dating life (I saw my friends, also essential workers, in person on a regular basis): only to get burned out by 2021 and hide for a Summer in the Adriatic Sea in a remote island almost entirely by myself--a few close friends would occasionally come to check up on me so we swam and bbq'd at the beach near my house.

It took me a day or two when I returned to normal civilization, I forgot how loud it was to be in a city, but was entirely fine and started dating again by Fall of '21.

Says it all:

>OM: When I see “Her,” I see two aspects to the movie. One is very dystopian, and the other is that it is a love story. It was a story of someone who was lonely and looked for a connection. Silicon Valley has totally missed that part. Valley’s missing empathy gene is reinforced in how everyone talks about agents and personal agents. So what is that more optimistic, more humanistic future we can build from an AI perspective?

I can't think of a more pointless use-case of 'AI' than these round-about ways to solve what seems to be the root-cause of all of these 'moonshot' projects: people who build these tools lack or are completely absent of social skills. (Never mind the loneliness epidemic of Gen Z and Alpha who were born with the modern Internet.)

I'm like many of you am an introvert by nature, I always had to take 2-3 days off after a conference when I was a founder because of the toll it took on me, but I can't think of anything other than continuous exposure to have ever worked get over this issue... but more importantly the fact that it is stuff like this that continues to funnel money from VCs just make me think what an absolute waste of capital takes place at this phase of this technology.

The guy admits he builds the same thing over and over, and assuming that this takes off I just can't help but affirm my intuition that most of these usecases vary from useless to complete vaourware.

We are so far away from the future where this tech can actually be used to create models and train them to solve things like climate change or even traffic, instead we are in the iterate the 'pokemon go but with AI' phase... which I will remind you was an ad-based venture from google.

We really need to create a new internet, the signal to noise ratio ever since social media has been so abysmal.

> but you lose credibility if you call the guy who is leading multiple companies...

Leads? How many Musk corps have you worked at? I have been at 2 of Elon's and one of Kimbal's, I can tell you from from first hand experience, neither of them 'lead' anything there and their titles are merely on paper.

They were merely figureheads, who came in for photo ops and to be seen on occasion (especially when things went wrong) and made their presence felt but that is the extent of it. Elon didn't sleep on the factory floor during Model 3 hell, he was shit posting photos of himself at Sparks in NV at the time: Panasonic was having major issues and was a major choke point for the battery packs all the while the assembly lines for M3 were being revised without his 'insight' at all.

I'm convinced it was him who did the whole crowdfund Elon a couch non-sense, despite him being a damn billionaire who can buy the entire work force a couch without noticing in his bank account, the whole thing smelled of a typical Elon clout chasing tactic.

(All he does is shit post all day on Twitter, how can he lead anything with his posting history?!)

Rather they both rely on an extensive team to handle day to day operations, and a deep pool of exploitable talent to achieve the goals: who eventually burn out in the process after countless iterations before things work correctly.

Go look at the average lifespan of workers at Tesla/SpaceX. It's incredibly short, in the best case of both it's only long enough to vest (the pay is horrible, but the stock options make up for it if you make it that long) but often layoffs or targeted firings (union threats) are often the cause for premature terminations as well.

It's really not hard to see that SpaceX is run by Shotwell, even as an outsider, and I wish she would stage a coup already as she has the loyalty of the rank and file there, unfortunately Elon's title as 'chief engineer' there remains and the way he has structured these companies post-paypal means he cannot be ousted.

That doesn't mean he shouldn't be, as he does more harm than good at this point.

Again, people want to simp for Elon having no first-hand experience and posting behind throwaways online is the extent of his marketing prowess (the only thing I think he really excels at) which makes him like a modern PT Barnum.

> I think you’re exactly right, it’s a show for insiders to know what these 4 people think so the next time they directly or indirectly encounter them they are known quantities. Its masked as news & informative media but its principally brand marketing for these 4 people and their funds & companies.

I use it as a 'weight' of sorts when dealing with topics i know about, mainly Bitcoin and AI since I'm involved both those spaces--they really have a limited grasp about some basic concepts, and when you realize that Chamath (the biggest winner of the 4) has a very limited grasp about bitcoin, and admitadly cannot even grasp basic things like how to self-custody you start to realize why these guys are so scummy and him being called the SPAC-King is not a highly regarded moniker at all.

Admittedly, they did call the top on the '22 crypto winter, mainly becauwe I think they had already sold all f thier holdings and were looking for a sale--see Chamath's portfolio where BTC and Grok are his best performers

I don't want to to talk about Sacks or Kraft because his proximity to trump will now make him a defacto king-maker and make everything he touches seem like it was a well thoughout plan, as he was the one who ushered the SV/VC crowd to embrace Trump after Theil et al had laid the ground in true Paypal mafia style.

They are entertainment, the same way Cramer from MSNBC is, but what it does reveal is the narrative they want to push: what you glean from that is entirely up to you, inverse Cramer made a real killing for a bit on WSB. My real questions is what the depth will these Musk boot-lickers go, and who buys 1k+ tickets in order to go to these events? It's probably teh smae who will lie to your face that Twitter was a wild success despite having lost almost all of it's vaklue when this 'genius' CEO (who is now supposed to be in Government in the Trump cabinet) exposed himself to be the absolute incompetent fraud that he is.

> In my past life, I was a chef. I owned a restaurant in Ireland. I only purchased the cheapest Chinese truffles money could buy. Why? People only want to taste the oil anyway. I've worked with high end white truffles and the flavor is very vague. I'd estimate that I've eaten several hundred grams of white truffle.

Doesnt that have a lot to do with region? I ask because I worked all over Europe and N. America during my chef days and I can definitely tell you that my stint in Croatia made me realize that truffles are not that highly regarded--I saw black ones thinly sliced on slices of $1.50 pizza slices at the bakery during the heavy season--when they are plentiful, and the oil was entirely non-existant. What wasn't used was canned and labeled a delicacy next to the little spreadable ham things that sold for like 80 cents back then.

While when I was in Italy you rarely saw them on menus outside of 100+ euro a menu places and typically only in season--I worked in mainly farm to tables is in the Emilia Romanga area so we got lots of parama ingredients all year round but truffles were a special occasion kind of affair that was limited to maybe 3 weeks or a so a year.

In London I just took it for granted that this was a marketing ploy to get the people in the city to justify the wildly expensive outings a reservation/menu cost, and in Cornwall they didn't even care about them at all. Germany, and Switzerland were pretty much the same.

I didn't have truffle oil until I got back to the US, and it was used for innocuous things like fries in a steak frites entree.

> In practice, the vast majority of blockchain ledgers record the history of scams, penny stock style trading and money laundering attempts.

It doesn't take long before they make themselves present. Thanks for proving my point.

> If you're a windows users this is really the least of your problems with the new "trusted computing" measures microsoft will implement with the new requirements.

Does user mean 'forced into malicious spyware eco-system in order to complete University tasks under surveillance' these days? If so, yes, I sadly had to give my maxed out 11th gen X1 to M$ spyware to do school work now.

I'm taking a break this semester so it just sits with a dead battery in the closet for now. Such a waste of good hardware.

I think this is why, just like the legacy financial system, these obsolete, bloated forms of spying disguised as an OS will never go away: you're forced into abject compliance with no recourse with only repercussions if you deviate unless you're willing to de-couple entirely.

There are no alternatives if you do work using these enterprise based products, and if you're one of the few lucky WoH class you pretty much allow this thing to monitor you day and night at this point. Same goes for your smart phone, but at least you can just get a dumb phone there and most won't be the wiser.

> I have little interest in the ycombinator legacy of hustle culture, growth hacking, get-millions-for-glorified-todo-app, etc. As far as I can tell it is effectively the underlying reason for why crypto and AI get hyped up to the point where we can't have reasonable discussions about them in forums.

Ohh, well... I'm guilty of drinking that kool-aid, unfortunately and was a boot-strapping fintech founder with the battle scars to show--those scars appear in this discussion thus far by the way.

But I get it, I'm trying to be amicable about this as much as I can, especially fbecause I know no one can deny us anymore in the BTC side at this point, and in the AI side... well, money-hype boom and AI-doomer pr0n cycles aside we are actually building amazing amounts of compute that hopefully can yield amazing results, something like Starship recovery system levels of advancement in many other Industries/Sectors one day, probably very far off in the future but that's the start, right?

Every forest starts with a sappling kind of a thing, and these two technologies emerged from a time when I was in my formidable development period so I saw them as something more than just the marketing side--AI is marketing, ML is really just stats with code to back it up after all. Bitcoin is just a FOSS network using token based cryptographic key encryption.

Stop using throwaways if you want real conversations, it might help you have those conversations you're looking for. :)

zifpanachr23 said:

> AI people sound more dug in to be honest from my perspective. But I guess that's cause the crypto stuff tends to be less overtly religious and more overtly batshit crazy politics and economics, which I'm much more used to dealing with haha. And mostly, everyone has figured out the scam by now on the crypto side.

>>The AI people freak me out cause they are all talking eschatology and shit as if they have stumbled upon the literal ark of the covenant like in raiders of the lost ark or something.

>>>It's a really great act to be honest. They've been clearly studying a lot of the more dishonest American religious culture of the last couple of decades.

I'm going to commit a HN faux pas to prove a point and show you why I think Bitcoin has a valid use case here alone: I decided to repost what he said because there are valid points here and are worth discussing.

Had I the inclination I can hash this into the blockchain for all to see what was written from this poster for the aforementioned reasons for as long as the mainchain continues to be maintained, protected and supported .

This has great utility, and the mere suggestion that you cannot get over that is because those 'crazies offend me and my disposition' and stop there you fail to see why and what this technology can already do--create an actual immutable archive of all Human history if we desire it.

But to his point, yes it's roots in Crypto-Anarchism (which started in CA at the inception of the rise of modern SV btw) has many of you questioning the ''sanity' and 'motives' behind this technology, and you assume they are all the same but rest assure their is a reason for the brain drain from all of tech/STEM/finance during my era and time in Bitcoin.

Most of whom are now incredibly wealthier than they ever were working in academia or private industry if you think money is a measure of one's success--I don't, but most of you do.

The AI people strike me more as a range of the introduction corpos from banking and academia into bitcoin (Gavin's, Hearn) to total con men like Veer and sprinkled in there are the cult memebers you mentioned who honestly think that their techno-utopian trans-humanist dreams are being built one LLM update at a time. It's sad... it's the same thing just different names/faces.