infamouscow

This really ends one of two ways. Either California's defaults on it's unfunded pension liabilities and screws a whole generation of government workers, or there's a federal bailout and people in states like Texas and Florida stop paying federal taxes.

I don't understand this fascination with Epstein, maybe someone can tell me what I'm missing.

It's pretty clear Epstein was in involved with intelligence agencies. Which ones, or if he was acting independent isn't interesting to me. The reality of the world is at a nation-state level, anything outside your borders is anarchy. Intelligence agencies take advantage of that—it why throughout human history the punishment for espionage has been a slow and painful death. Another reality of the world is the panopticon also applies to intelligence agencies, and sometimes they need financial institutions and other transnational corporations to look the other way on things, e.g., there's a lot of civilian ships in shipping lanes comprised entirely of paramilitary folks.

Why would intelligence agencies risk uncovering the financial networks necessary to do their job, and why would they implicate many companies and individuals inside those companies for very serious crimes?

From an anarchist perspective, the idea that a government can't allow certain companies and individuals managing significant geopolitical and economic interests to break the law is nonsensical. If a government passed a law that required everyone to starve, out of self preservation the government would simply allow everyone to break the law. The real world is no different.

If you believe Epstein was some puppet-master of the ruling class for some other ambiguous evil person/group, what do you think you think is going to happen if that were to be made public? Imagine such revelations get 9/11-level media coverage. Do you honestly believe that the ruling class will miraculously step-aside?

This is bad faith and not a serious position.

During WW2, the Allies used flame throwers for goodness sake and killed a lot of innocent people taking Europe back from the Nazis.

If you made this argument in the 1940s, you would've been dragged out of your home and beaten half to death. And it would be for good reason. :)

There's no pseudo-intellectual moral argument that stands up to might-is-right. In the real world, that's how it works, regardless how much you disagree.

Up until ~1800, the way societies handled this kind of depravity was to hit the bad actors with sticks or rocks until their skull opened up so the evil spirits could leave their bodies.

It's unfortunate that most societies have outlawed this practice. I'm certain if that were in place today, we wouldn't have this problem.

I've yet to hear any alternative solution that's as effective.

The idea OpenAI or Anthropic won't train on your data—even with an enterprise contract—is a fantasy at best, and dilusion at worst.

Most people assume the post-WW2 consensus is a permanent baseline. Historically, there's no evidence to support that expectation, but it's easy to see why the illusion persists. Acknowledging that the current order is temporary is terrifying, particularly for those who thrive under it.

IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.

And then people are shocked when insurance executives are publicly slayed.

Because of accounting tricks, quarterly financials don't accurately reflect the size of this fiery money pit.

The datacenter build-outs are all majority (>50% ownership) financed by other companies, with a shell company owned by the hyperscaler as a minority owner. The data center then grants the hyperscaler an exclusive leasing agreement, and because the shell company is a minority owner, legally, it's not their debt.

The only reason this has worked is because there's such a long delay taking delivery on GPUs. When these capital allocators start paying for GPUs in data centers which haven't yet broken ground, then we'll see a very visceral market reaction. Some of that has already happened, but there's enough momentum that it can be absorbed and dismissed as an anomaly. But with governments unexpectedly passing moratoriums on data centers everywhere, it's only a matter of time before there's no data center to offload those GPUs to. That's when the music stops.

I believe that was Zitron's central thesis and why he started reporting on this. It mirrors the mortgage-backed securities situation that led to the 2008 GFC, except with even fewer guard rails to prevent financial calamity.

Investors are very savvy and keenly aware of what's going to happen. There's just zero incentive to pull the fire alarm and risk being blamed for crashing the market. If you're wondering why everyone's running toward the exits instead of treating these tech companies as 10+ year investments, you have your answer.

I think a lot of CTOs that signed enterprise contracts with Anthropic are going to be in for a rude surprise.

It's one thing to generate some code and ship it, but it's another when your developers don't understand said code and it brings down production. If the model refuses to assist debugging the problem because it triggers some safety mechanism, you might be fucked.

The alternative is letting bad actors conquer and subjugate you.

Unless you're a total pacifist, it's a genuinely stupid and unserious position that warrants invective ridicule and mockery.

I mentioned this in another comment, but was downvoted rather than greeted with pushback from people volunteering to become my personal slaves. If that sounds ridiculous, please understand that's exactly what these retards (or bots) desire. That's what their position invites to happen.

(I also can't change their mind, so might as well get some morally clean slaves out of it. I might even let them free if they realize the error of their ways, which is something a conquering force would never do.)

This is not a serious position.

Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.

Because it's preferable to what happens when the body politic decides they've had enough, particularly in the US.

So how exactly are you supposed to distinguish needing to improve the documentation from the fact that half the population—through no fault of their own—might be fundemenetally incapable of understanding the documentation? You can only polish something so much. Without a limiting principle this becomes unfalsifiable and an endless time sink.

Another commenter replied, but was downvoted by angry employees of Microsoft for a fairly anodyne statement.

Microsoft management knows this. It's not like there haven't been attempts to solve these core problems. The issue is GitHub was built by exceptional engineers, and none of those people are still around.

I maintain all these problems began when they migrated off Erlang and egitd. :)

OpenAI just needs to stay afloat a few quarters after Anthropic's IPO.

I'd emphasize their practices as being the culprit.

Migrating to different cloud vendors, while difficult, is something that people have done many times before. There's only finite number of incongruences that appear when moving cloud vendors. It's rather difficult to explain the ongoing problems several years after the fact.

Anyone that's worked at a startup knows that one of the best things about it is reflecting on all of the asinine, if not genuinely stupid policies of your previous employer so as not to repeat them. Without any insider knowledge, the practices and procedures GitHub had prior to acquisition probably look nothing like those post-acquisition.

TFA explains why sardines sourced from around USA, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are harder to come by.

Where are your sardines be sourced?

Prison is clearly not a deterrent to violent criminals. Let the psychopaths do whatever to them. 100% sure the rate of violent crime drops precipitously when medieval punishment is likely.

The scam is usually a phone call from a loved one in jail or the hospital. It immediately creates a sense of panic and fully explains the random phone number. The voice doesn't have to sound like you either.

Yes, but the strategy is a lost cause as we're seeing.

In virtually any other situation, companies would be able to successfully grease politicians. The problem for AI companies is they spent the last several years broadcasting that their tech is going to take everyone job, and consequently their livelihood.

No matter how much you bribe a politician, you can't hold and maintain elected office when the voters overwhelmingly do not want something.

This is what I voted for.

I wouldn't have known about them until reading your comment. Thank you, I now have some exploring to do :)

They want to be the successor to Enron.

If someone accuses you of using AI because of em-dashes, reply with something condescending like "I'm sorry you were poorly educated, but some of us can and do read books." It does wonders to put jackasses in their place.

Yes, had SCOTUS ruled differently in Citizens United, the scope of the ruling would have likely been narrowly focused.

Every time SCOTUS makes a ruling, there are thousands of extremely talented activist lawyers that immediate begin working on legal strategies to further expand a ruling in ways they believe are favorable to their political ends. You have to understand, there are lawyers who focus on specific justices and study the idiosyncrasies of their rulings/philosophy so they can reverse-engineer legal outcomes as they desire.

In United States v. Jones, Ginsburg and Thomas ruled that attaching a GPS tracker to a car and monitoring it was a Fourth Amendment search. Thomas believes physically attaching the device is a property trespass and constitutes a search. Ginsburg believed prolonged GPS surveillance violates a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Even though Ginsburg and Thomas are polar opposites, if you understand how they rule, you can still get the outcome you want with the right case.

The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.

A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.

If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.

This would mean that all media companies in the US would be prevented from publishing anything that could be perceived as negative about any candidate running for elected office, regardless of factual basis and regardless of if it were satire.

A candidate would simply go to any circuit court judge and get an injunction against the media company. If the media company did not comply, the judge would find the officers in contempt. Marshals would then arrest and throw the companies officers in jail indefinitely until they complied.

That's what you're asking for. It's genuinely stupid. I say this as someone that would declare a national emergency on day 1 of being elected just to have the Air Force turn most media company HQs into smoldering craters.

I don't think there will be any bailouts for these AI companies. There's no political will to do so in both parties. The grizzly alternative is a DeFlock movement, but instead of cutting down poles, it will be people's heads.

I could see someone sadly taking their own life over this.