dualvariable

> All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016.

You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.

They've leveraged the culture wars to the point that a good chunk of the rural, economically disadvantaged voters are cool with a northeastern elite billionaire looting the country.

Yeah, this is just regulatory capture.

Make the safety tests abusively expensive enough to run, and if you're not a trillion-dollar corporation, you won't be able to certify the models.

> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.

Laws are written by imperfect humans. Bad laws exist.

Cumulonimbus has been separated from its etymological roots. It now refers to the physics that can produce deep convection, high clouds, and the formation of an anvil shape (along with lightning, etc). The convection that produces a cumulonimbus rain cloud is present in a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. The word isn't wrong.

I couldn't get through it.

I find it exhausting trying to read anything that smells remotely like linkedin AI slop at this point.

> As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco).

That isn't what it is being used for. That would still require cops to be investigating petty theft as if they cared about it.

> One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism...

oh no, not communism.

American Capitalists don't really need any help there; they're making Americans hate Data Centers all on their own.

I wonder how long it takes before someone instructs an LLM to design and launch a "Morris Worm 2.0" and cripple the Internet for a good while. Might even wind up happening by accident (again).

A cascade would be bad enough.

The problem is that if the AI companies pass through the actual costs they're incurring, then charges to those companies will >10x.

If the companies don't see that kind of value (so LLMs don't become dramatically better in some kind of quantum leap from where they are now), they won't want to pay those costs. Already, most AI projects in corporations tend to fail.

If the efficiency of LLMs gets 10x better, then either corporations will "private cloud" their own AI or start using competitors that aren't carrying those kinds of debt loads from the "gold rush" phase.

Which routed those funds through the economy's financial circuit and caused ZIRP, inflation in asset prices, and the evaporation of risk premiums.

But the pendulum swinging rapidly to the other side has routed all those funds through the real economy, caused goods inflation, and looks like it will crash the economy.

I'm old enough to remember "this shirt is a munition" and the DeCSS t-shirt.

> they're not sure if the vaccine will last in your system for more than 30 years

Vaccines don't really last in your system more than a few days (although some cells get dragged off to the lymph nodes and get harshly interrogated for longer than that). It is the T-cell and B-cell responses that are persistent for years.

> and that subsequent doses may be less effective

They should activate B cells that you already have and produce high-affinity mature antibodies.

Almost as good as when they call everyone else "NPCs" and claim they're all performatively "virtue signalling".

> Many people think that viruses are as benign as common flu (influenza)

Had influenza in 2018, as a 46-year-old and it was not particularly benign.

3 days straight of 103 degree fever and think I had mild long-covid-ish symptoms for the next year or so.

You could still generate a mess for 5-10 years at that altitude. Even if it self-clears you still destroy the constellation and deny access to LEO for years.

I think the usable counterpoint here is that you can refrain from excessively DRY'ing code up and defer it until later.

There's a huge cost to Clean-Code-style DRY'ing of your codebase which is that you wind up creating all kinds of little functions that all add cognitive overhead to reading your codebase, and that premature DRY'ing can lead to picking the wrong abstractions.

If you can tolerate a bunch of copypasta, you can sit back after you've written 5,000 or 10,000 lines of code and can look at the actual result, instead of speculating, and make better-informed decisions about how to clean the codebase up. If you're making those decisions the first time you copy a bit of code around, you can wind up making a worse mess, since you often don't know where you're going.

I've seen a lot of human-written tests that wind up testing the testing framework and not the actual code.

If you just focus on capitalism, the apparent paradoxes dissolve.

The wealthy clique in SF aren't really left-wing.

Neither is the Seattle Times.

In an ideal world, generated non-consensual imagery should be illegal through invasion of privacy through misappropriation of name or likeness, but I think only a limited number of states have those laws.

It isn't even necessarily just Chesterton's Fences. The problem can just be picking your battles. Processes that are working well enough for the team don't need to be fixed right away to be better, and that'll dump a bunch of cognitive load onto the team in the short term. If you show up and on day one you want to fix 4 different processes, the team is going to hear that over the next 3 months you want to completely change how they do all their work, while they need to keep the rest of their work going. That is moving a whole lot of proverbial cheese all at once. Of course, teams can stagnate, and some of this can be good, but you need to spread it out, do the politics up front to get people to agree that processes need to get upgraded, and ease them into the changes over time.

That slide should probably be the main focus, with the rest supplementary.

That is the slide that is likely to pop the economy.

That is the load-bearing detail.

The capitalist free market in the United States is a lie.

Regulatory capture now ensures that billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations can put you out of business and sell whatever remains for parts.

If they don't decide to squash you, you're just lucky.

There should be.

I had claude throw something like "the last time I did <x>..." at me.

They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.

They might have to hire some people and create some jobs...

Oh, the humanity...

Don't forget the blatant grift and corruption.