eucyclos

Did the enlightenment not have a taboo around questioning e.g. the fundamental equality of all human beings?

Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.

Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.

Seeing Elon buy Twitter was like watching a functional alcoholic I admire buy a bar.

But push them he did until the industry had to get on board. I think people underestimate the impact of a pro-change company culture, even if it does run on a cult of personality that is much less pleasant up close than in the occasional earnings call.

This sounds like a refutation of the concept of taboos as a useful category, by the definition I use a taboo is something that may not be discussed openly. There's a theory that a culture without taboos is past it's peak in some important way- does crocker have any response to that criticism?

There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.

Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much about. Pretty telling if true.

That's got to be more about processes around it than the tool itself though, right?

It might be more accurate to say humans will only work at the bottlenecks soon, unless I've misunderstood the vector of your commentary.

Very cool! I'm chaperoning a python club for teens these days, I should make use of this concept!

A religion you vibe with is probably the one shot for this. In my case that's a flavor of Buddhism with strong deity practices. Atheists home about imaginary friends, but...

When I was in corporate I'd talk about cover your ass mode and get'er done mode. And while realistically I know both are necessary, I was always annoyed at the need to have a cya mode. I get a bit of schadenfreude from the thougt of the market being harder for the people who don't seem to have a get'er done mode, and a bit of his at the thought it might be because there's less concern over whom to bother if something needs to be fixed later.

Maybe not, but you might want to see ads because 1) they fund a huge part of the free internet so you would at least want other people to see them and 2) if they were targeted not at what you're most likely to buy today but at what would most help you achieve goals you'r struggling with, they'd be a constant source of useful information and motivation as you go about your day. Aligning incentives between you and advertisers turns ads from friction to tailwind, and advertisers already want to align with what incentivises you if the alternative is having their ads blocked.

That second point is the part that seems obvious to me but I have a hard time communicating.

Wow, that us useful feedback, thanks! I'll update that this weekend.

I thought tfa would say seeking synergy is a sign one is struggling with ones own deliverables so one tries to add value elsewhere in the organization. Is synergy really such a poorly defined term that it's synonymous with corporate bullshit?

Would the above explanation be better? The website is there because stripe needs a landing page and the text is there because I'm trying to communicate the aspiration the instantiation I can always explain in detail if someone wants to hear how that would work.

Yeah, I gotta make a video walkthrough. Its basically a goal tracker combined with an ad filter - write what you want out of life and block ads, it replaces them with ads that actually align with your long term goals instead of distracting from them. The tokens let you add ads to the network, though you also get some for using the goal tracker.

Here's an example: https://eudaimonia-project.netlify.app/

I'm happy to sell it to you, though it is also free. I guided Claude to write this in three weeks, after never having written a line of JavaScript or set up a server before. I'm sure a better JavaScript programmer than I could do this in three weeks, but there's no way I could. I just had a cool idea for making advertising a force for good, and now I have a working version in beta.

I'd say it is better software, but better is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Claude's execution is average and always will be, that's a function of being a prediction engine. But I genuinely think the idea is better than how advertising works today, and this product would not exist at all if I had to write it myself. And I'm someone who has written code before, enough that I was probably a somewhat early adopter to this whole thing. Multiply that by all the people whose ideas get to live now, and I'm sure some ideas will prove to be better even with average execution. Like an llm, that's a function of statistics.

I had a coworker who became nouveau riche a while back- he made fuck you money day trading during the roaringkitty debacle - and one interesting thing he said about the experience was that he learned certain luxury goods, such as high end watches, don't depreciate. Like gold jewelry one can usually resell them for cost plus inflation. As such, his logic was that a fancy watch is essentially free while a cheap watch costs whatever it costs.

Not sure if that's the truth or clever marketing by purveyors of luxury goods, but it changes the wealth signaling dynamics of fancy watches if it is.

A tool with a mediocre level of skill in everything looks mediocre when the backdrop is our own area of expertise and game changing when the backdrop is an unfamiliar one. But I suspect the real game changer will be that everyone is suddenly a polymath.

The old story of the 'language of the birds' suggests that we can make headway. No one's ever complained of time they wasted listening to birdsong.

Barely pass is still a step change though. Either you can be sure what's on the other end of the line or you can't, and I'd say that, while there are still tests that work sometimes, for a purely text based exchange there are none that will work at all times.

I wrote a book a while back where I argued that coding involves choosing what to work on, writing it, and then debugging it, and that we tend to master these steps in reverse chronological order.

It's weird to look at something that recent and think how dated it reads today. I also wrote about the Turing test as some major milestone of AI development, when in fact the general response to programs passing the Turing test was to shrug and minimize it

I enjoy self improvement, but there is something deeply therapeutic about self non - improvement.

I don't say 'self acceptance' because that's often described as a necessary precursor to changing whatever we find difficult to accept about ourselves.

I have a theory that song used to communicate emotional states precedes and probably evolved into language as we think of it.

I'm in a pretty similar position. I've been wanting to make something to align incentives between advertisers and the people who see ads for years. Finally sat down with Claude last month and now I have a working prototype. It feels surreal, I'm not a 10x programmer by any means. If I can do it, so can a lot of other people. It does feel like I don't have much time to capitalize on the first mover advantage.

But on the other hand... The things we really believe in we'd still cheer if someone else executed the idea better than us. Sure, we might make less money, but the idea gets to live.

And the odds of someone executing better didn't really go up, ai is just average across the board. So at worst, the odds of someone executing our ideas as well as us went up. Could be worse.

Sorry. I'm the weird niche author who puts a copy of his books in these whenever I come across a new one. Author's copies are so bloody cheap and little free libraries are full of weird stuff already, it feels more likely someone looking for books in one will appreciate mine.

Google's support for the open week is a great example because it was obviously a good thing but also obviously built into their business model that they'd take that position. That made them a much more trustworthy company in those days, because abandoning that position would have required not just losing money for a while but changing their internal structure.

It doesn't take billions to move one's household though. Sure, the billionaires will have advance warning and sweeter welcome packages wherever they end up going, but leaving a country where the tax rate is a poor value proposition doesn't exactly get harder if one is a net producer in the ideenrevolutionsfieber economy.

On the plus side, llms do everything normies do for pennies on the dollar. We just need to outlast them as they fade into irrelevance.