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albatross79

176 karma · joined December 24, 2025

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albatross79··on Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak
Garbage company going into a death spiral.
albatross79··on With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX
His innovation has been to show that you don't need to make a product that works or makes sense. You just need to make products that get oceans of fools excited and get 30% of the way there. By that point you've locked in their childish fantasies and their money comes with it. Institutional money follows and you're on your way to being the richest man in the world. The tech product fetishism that the iPhone brought about has enabled a lot of it. A lot of people are still looking for the high that a new phone used to bring.
albatross79··on SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading
Degenerate scammers
albatross79··on It's death
There's no grasping it, you can't grasp not existing. There will be no grasping when you're not around.
albatross79··on It's death
It's very easy to grasp, do you remember what it was like before your first memory? No? That's what it's like.
albatross79··on Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
Have they done a study on how being fake in the office all day and having to tolerate other people's narcissism affects one's mental health too?
albatross79··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
There no feasible escalation path for the US. Trump has alienated allies and much of his anti war supporters. A forever war quagmire in a country 3x larger than Iraq is unlikely, as is carpet bombing. So what's left? A JCPOA style agreement with a Maga bumper sticker on it, with heavy concessions to Iran to prevent them from racing to a bomb, which is the best option from their pov at this point.
albatross79··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
That's veto power, what other kind of control do they need?
albatross79··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
If Israel can have them, yes. Ideally, neither Israel nor Iran would have them.
albatross79··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Not true, but I am skeptical that a one sided account would be adequate. Take care.
albatross79··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Your strongest example should be good enough. So far you've got 1) flights between Venezuela and Iran 2) whitehouse.gov.

Even if Trump's Whitehouse was a good source and you took it at face value, most of the items in that list are by Iranian proxy, i.e. Iranian intelligence involvement. So by comparison you'd have to include Israel and CIA actions and then it's just a mess to figure out who's worse.

But even then, I don't see anything in there that's as evil as blowing apart dozens of school children in one blow, mistake or not.

albatross79··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Unsanctioned flights between Iran and a third country is tantamount to waging a war on the US in your view?
albatross79··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
>> has A attacked B?

> Yes, C attacked D

albatross79··on Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
So? Flying is a chore. What do you expect to find with FTL travel anyway? We pretty much know what's out there and it doesn't look all that interesting. It's a lot of rocks. Maybe there are some weird life forms that would be interesting in an academic way.

Otherwise it looks very much like we are outliers and that nature's purpose, if it has any, is different and orthogonal to ours. This human drama is just a side show.

albatross79··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.
albatross79··on Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
No, because when you grow up life becomes short and full of mundane things like making money and raising children, and you realize those were all fantasies someone made up and sold to you, and even if those things came true it would not suddenly add adventure to your life, which was the real hook.
albatross79··on Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y
That's just what the owners tend to say after the dog has ripped some child apart. It's the "I didn't know it was loaded" defense.
albatross79··on Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance
They're smartphones on wheels, the only people who love them are tech fetishists and bureaucrats forcing emissions mandates on everyone else.
albatross79··on Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff
There is slop and there is cringe, you've managed to create both.
albatross79··on John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
Carmack can be enthusiastic about AI because it's no threat to him, he's already set. He's not going to be laid off, and if he is, he can just do coding as a hobby for the rest of his life. He doesn't need to worry about what blue collar job to retrain for in middle age to be able to pay his mortgage and clothe his kids.

And it is a form of cheating to take a gift and profit off of it, keeping all the profits for yourself, it goes against the spirit of it. Until now that was fine, because there was a sense that it made more things possible and created jobs, and these projects were improved through reciprocal contribution.

AI vacuumed everything up for itself and turned around and said now I'm going to replace you.

albatross79··on Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US
Why wouldn't it be, you think the body was made to run all day? Most animals lay around all day with some bursts of activity. The exercise fad is just a peculiar neuroticism modern Westerners have.
albatross79··on Strike on girls' school that killed 150 in Iran 'likely' carried out by US
This is heinous.
albatross79··on Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
Well if you tell people your auto complete algorithm is actually a potentially sentient AI and it goes on to auto complete someone's suicidal science fiction fantasy, what did you expect. Everyone calling these things "AI" is complicit. You can't rely on everyone understanding that you're just a greedy scammer trying to fool investors, there are side effects.
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
It's a common sense definition that covers the broad features of AI as most people would have imagined it before LLMs came along. If you have a better one I'm open to it.

Also, agents are just LLMs with harnessing. Attaching a plow to a horse makes it more useful too, but it doesn't change the intrinsic nature of a horse.

albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
There's rational discussion and then there's motivated obfuscation. If your definition of AI is so loose that it applies to a system that can't count objects reliabily, then what is there to discuss? Is a broken clock intelligent because it tells the time correctly twice a day?
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
There's nothing vague about it. Intelligence is understanding. I think you're just motivated to be confused because you want to fit this thing into that box and it doesn't really fit. So maybe output is an that matters, are we auto completers, can you be intelligent without knowing, etc etc.
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
The heart of the matter is a system that produces correct output in a wide variety of scenarios, including ones outside our scope of experience or understanding. That would be a one definition of AI. LLMs are not that, and I don't understand the desperate insistence that they are. Just accept what it is. A good auto complete is useful, a crappy AI is a marketing scam.
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
I think his claim basically boils down to "if you're expecting AI, LLMs don't cut it". And I think he's basically right on that count. There's a lot of tooling and harnessing being put in place to course correct them on the job, and from the other angle standards are simply being lowered to accommodate them. So they can be made to be useful, but they're still not what you would want from an actual AI. Marcus wants to augment them with symbolic AI. I don't know how feasible that is, but he's not fundamentally against AI, he's just against the notion that LLMs are AI. Which given how they've been marketed and how the public is encouraged to think about them, is a worthwhile point to make.
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
Has he said they're going to amount to nothing?
albatross79··on Marcus AI Claims Dataset
Sounds about right, boosters are always vaguely claiming he's been obviously and ridiculously wrong, but when you actually listen to him he's tracked very well with the state of AI. GPT 5 was supposed to be AGI remember?
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