dutchbookmaker

It is still worse than this.

The largest amount of the money is in the unfunded liabilities for social security and healthcare over the next 50 years. It is hard to even know what it is, 60, 70, 80 trillion?

Younger people will end up both paying for this while getting old from higher interest rates and inflation and then when actually old? The money has all been spent. Sorry, no services.

If you think the price of things are bad now try some fiscal dominance and debt monetization. I suspect it is already too late to avoid fiscal dominance. At 50, maybe I won't see it though. At 20? A 20 year old probably has a good chance of fiscal dominance, debit monetization and maybe even USD losing reserve currency status.

I don't know what you think is going to happen if we don't get spending under control.

It is beyond me how younger people especially are not rioting in the streets with the amount of money that the government has been spending.

Funny that I know quite a few baby boomers and every single one has a pension, a 401k, maybe a roth AND gets social security and medicare.

Not a single one has a college degree. All life long factory workers. Some alcoholics. All they did was show up to the factory job. I know my father hasn't read a book in at least 50 years and he might not have read any in school either.

They have no real expenses either besides going out to eat, vacations and sports gambling.

Legal structures in place so that the nursing home will be on the tax payer if needed.

Anyone of retirement age right now that is not doing well in America REALLY fucked up in life.

Of course, this is all being paid for on the tab of younger people. It is a brilliant system if your old.

I can't really think of something that involves learning that these tools wouldn't be helpful with.

Some people talk though as if the books on my bookshelf spontaneously combust if a language model helps me with anything.

Not to mention that I had many professors in college that were so full of shit they put the hallucinations of chatgpt3.5 to shame.

I would say the early web was something new everyday.

You didn't know what you were going to find and you actually did "surf the web". Just clicking through hyperlinks and end up in unexpected places.

I think DeekThink is something different though.

It is able to figure out some things that I know do not have much training data at all.

It is looking at the manual and figuring things out. "That doesn't make sense. Wait, that can't be right. I must have the formula wrong."

I just seen that in the chain of thought.

It is so boring at this point.

If you want to learn about Tiananmen Square then try reading the book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel and Eric Jason Martin.

Amazing book.

Of course, I imagine the people asking this really don't care about Tienanmen Square or China anyway.

It is really someone just being an obnoxious child.

I have ADHD too but I have also over prepared for interviews in the past to try to not have anxiety.

I just ended up sounding like someone reading a prepared answer because I kind of was.

The last two jobs I got, I didn't prepare at all. I just went in then without anxiety because it wasn't all built up in my head and I was actually able to have a nice conversation like a normal person as opposed to sounding like a robot answering test questions.

Banking already has been disrupted too.

It is so easy to move money around now there is no reason to keep that much in savings. It is crazy how easy it is to move money from a savings account to a brokerage account and buy a tbill in 2025 vs 1990.

Retail banking has really been stripped to its absolute bare essentials. There is no growth in banking in the US other than growth by acquisition.

I can't think of a worse investment than a bank startup.

This is because of counter party risk with settlement. It is not hard to figure out. You just have no idea what you are talking about.

No one in America really has the right to speak about a society at 200% inflation.

People couldn't even deal with 9% here.

There is no point in saving money at all with 200% inflation.

It is completely alien concept and unimaginable to anyone living in the US.

At some point they had to do something drastic.

"wait" I suspect we are all in a bit of denial.

When was the last time the US got their lunch ate in technology?

Sputnik might be a bit hyperbolic but after using the model all day and as someone who had been thinking of a pro subscription, it is hard to grasp the ramifications.

There is just no good reference point that I can think of.

Meanwhile, Huawei Harmony just embedded the digital yuan at the system level.

All the ETFs mean is that it will be so much easier to get out of the position and cause even bigger cascades of selling than before when the next shock happens.

You can't have a reserve currency with an asset that has so much volatility it can't even function as a currency.

The worst part is I don't even know video games at all but just assumed someone else was playing for him when I first heard this.

All I know about video games is people play them 24/7. It was completely obvious to me he wasn't going to invest his time in something so stupid.

The idea the world's richest man who is trying to amass political power could be this delusional is deeply disturbing.

I think it is because we conflate the current Chinese system with the old Mao/Soviet Union system because all call themselves "communist".

The vast majority are completely ignorant of what Socialism with Chinese characteristics mean.

I can't imagine even 5% of the US population knows who Deng Xiaoping was.

The idea there are many parts of the Chinese economy that are more Laissez-faire capitalist than anything we have had in the US in a long time would just not compute for most Americans.

I never tried the $200 a month subscription but it just solved a problem for me that neither o1 or claude was able to solve and did it for free. I like everything about it better.

All I can think is "Wait, this is completely insane!"

I just tried DeepSeek for the first time and immediately canceled my OpenAI subscription.

Seeing the chain of thought is now just mandatory for me after one prompt. That is absolutely incredible in terms of my own understanding of the question I asked.

Even the chat UI feels better and less clunky. Now picture 20 years from now when the Chinese companies have access to digital Yuan transaction data along with all the Chinese video surveillance data. At some point, I don't see how US Companies can possibly compete in this space.

This is the first time I am actually worried we might really bankrupt the country trying to keep up with a race we can not possibly win.

My understanding of the problems with high speed rail in the US is more fundamental than money.

The problem is loose vs strong property rights.

We don't have the political will in the US to use eminent domain like we did to build the interstates. High speed rail ultimately needs a straight path but if you can't make property acquisitions to build the straight rail path then this is all a non-starter in the US.

As a super straight CIS guy who worships Wendy Carlos and Selofan, I wish I could join too. I am sure ya'll talk about the coolest things.

It just makes me sad how before the internet there really were not these barriers. The "freaks" of society all got together around art, music, fashion in an apolitical way.

This ultimately is the opposite of "inclusive" but I get why. It still makes me sad.

I have been a musician at this point for 35+ years. The quote from the Suno CEO is beyond absurd.

I have spent quite a number of hours with MusicLM in AI test kitchen. To me, that is actually a new form of music synthesis. Synthesis in the context of FM, subtractive, etc.

I suspect MusicLM had some tracks removed from the training data because it use to make absolutely wildly creative psytrance clips and now it just doesn't.

Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new.

I think the only way to really use these tools creatively would be to produce your own trained model with AudioLM. The creative use then is in the musical output and not selling the model as yet another SaaS for $x.99 a month.

Of course, you could use Suno to create loops and sample material. The way midjourney is the greatest thing possible for digital collage in Krita/Photoshop.

GenAI art though on its own be it midjourney, stable diffusion, Suno, MusicLM, whatever already jumped the shark for me a year ago. The problem ultimately is the output is just so very limited.

The biggest thing I have read is to be able to take several readings and take an average.

That pretty much means you have to get something for home but they cost almost nothing and they are the most obvious thing to purchase with a FSA/HSA.

This is all nonsense.

People don't want to watch two chess computers play even if they can both smoke Magnus Carlsen.

Art is an even more extreme version of this. Part of what makes a Dali painting a Dali painting is the mimetic desire of the general weirdness of the human Salvador Dalí.

AI can't displace human mimetic desire. AI art is just worthless muzak playing in the background at Dennys. Non-artistic/non-creative people right now are amazed at how they can make muzak but muzak is shit by its very nature.

I think it really depends how much improvement we get in AI from here.

I work at a small business and understand the entire system as a whole.

Most the complexity we have is in the UI so non-technical people can interact and work with company data/databases. Our SaaS is really the same thing but stuff we didn't want to build in house. There is no rocket science being done here.

At some level of AI accuracy though it would seem like there would be a phase transition that most of this UI goes away along with the need for many of the employees.

Right now there is no risk of this happening but at some level of accuracy we go from 200 people to like 20 with the only future head count coming in sales. Most likely though I would expect a competitor to eat our lunch in the phase transition and we go from 200 to zero.

Pushing 50 here, I am trying to think right now of my AI hedge/career change to something more creative/artistic that being a human itself has value. I managed to avoid working in a factory like my father by being a shitty computer but there might be no market for shitty human computers in 10 years.

This all is the most minor aspect of Trattato di Sociologia Generale. Treatise on General Sociology, the translation is the 4 volume The Mind and Society.

The whole point is that we have these arbitrary subject divisions of knowledge for convenience. Physics, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. Then he spends 4 volumes trying to describe what he sees as the mechanics of society without worrying about these divisions of knowledge.

I have been stuck on volume 2 for years. It is brutal read.

A Pareto distribution is a type of power law distribution.

80/20 is Joseph Juran's pathetic simplification. It is something MBAs can easily remember. It is like the most minor and trivial of Pareto's thought.

The main idea of his thought is that society is largely based on types of "non-logical conduct". Pseudo-logical conduct. The best I have been able to understand it is that Pareto believed society operates on unthinking, almost quasi religious beliefs, then after the fact we invent logical and scientific sounding reasons for the action/behavior and fool ourselves into believing the action/behavior was logically arrived at from the start.

His work is trying to catalog these non-logical conducts like a butterfly collector collecting types of butterflys.

Basically, nothing much at all to do with 80/20 or fascism.

Pretty sure all the big Italian political philosophers from that time believed in the Iron Law Of Oligarchy politically. Democracy being basically a type of performance art while it doesn't matter the system, you always get oligarchy in reality.

I am almost 50 and I have never booked a reservation for a restaurant in my entire life.

The Rome trip is even more absurd. Part of the fun of a trip is figuring out what you want to do.

This seems like a product aimed at the delusional, self important, managerial class.

Maybe not next year but it reminds me of 30 years ago when my grandfather found it offensive any American would buy a Toyota.

While it is hard to predict the future, a good bet is that global trade will win out in the end on a long time frame.

Right now it seems more and more like we will all just end up using Chinese AI. All this regulation is doing is forcing Chinese companies to figure out how to do more with less.

Who cares if Chinese AGI is a year behind OpenAI/Anthropic. At some level, progress will stall and then OpenAI/Anthropic will be on the clock before being undercut out of business on price.

They are probably just positioning now for when that happens and they have to become some kind of regulated utility for US government AI use.

Just another example of having our head up our ass as Americans. Seems like what we are doing will almost guarantee most the world outside the US is using Chinese AI in the future.

Each addiction has its own special properties.

The special properties of the addiction are what make it hard for the person to quit that is addicted.

These type of comparisons for social media seem like bargaining by the social media addict trying to find the least harmful addiction to frame their own addiction as.

I have quit social media, cigarettes, alcohol and I limit junk food far more than normal. Quitting social media has cut me off from many social circles and being in the know with even my own extended family.

But make no mistake though. Cigarettes are an order of magnitude harder to quit than any of these. Alan Carr's book is amazing because it is almost a type of hypnosis that gives you the will power to not cave when cigarettes start playing all the mind games of why you should just smoke one in the first month after quitting. You have to convince yourself it is easy and anyone can do it exactly because it is so hard.

Comparing social media addiction to cigarettes is just not helpful though. Cigarettes are much more addictive but social media is addictive in its own special way.

If anything social media and sex addiction have much in common. You can deal with the addiction by going cold turkey but then if you want to get back to a normal life you have to figure out something other than abstinence.

2015 though is word vectors King – Man + Woman = Queen.

10 years on from that I don't think what we have now is so shocking.

The main problem is this waive of the hand "..and then AGI".

Who knows, maybe we even find AGI is not as useful as what it seems like it would be right now.

It mostly worries me the way "AGI" has taken on this mythic, modern quest for the holy grail/philosophers stone feel.

What also gets left out of this is the wage equilibrium of millions of out of work humans undercutting robots for factory work.

It is hardly impossible there are remote white color workers at 30 right now who have to get a 6am-3pm/3pm-11pm/11pm-6am factory job at 50.

It is such a miserable thought I think the idea of societal collapse is more comforting.