kristianc

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> Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth; instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time, when technological advancement was a Red Queen’s race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for non-stop running.

This collapses an important distinction. The containerization pioneers weren’t made rich - that’s correct, Malcolm McLean, the shipping magnate who pioneered containerization didn’t die a billionaire. It did however generate enormous wealth through downstream effects by underpinning the rise of East Asian export economies, offshoring, and the retail models of Walmart, Amazon and the like. Most of us are much more likely to benefit from downstream structural shifts of AI rather than owning actual AI infrastructure.

This matters because building the models, training infrastructure, and data centres is capital-intensive, brutally competitive, and may yield thin margins in the long run. The real fortunes are likely to flow to those who can reconfigure industries around the new cost curve.

Ah, the Seinfeld Test.

Avi Loeb is a crank. He's a guy with a career largely behind him swinging for the fences for one big hit that secures his legacy.

> Look, I'm against this legislation too, but if you actually live in the UK or even just consume mainstream British media, you'd soon realise that this narrative that's being pushed is a distortion that doesn't match day to day reality.

The censorship in the UK isn't that overt. There's no masked gangs grabbing people off the street, what there are is government "nudge" units, media talking heads and government-aligned media trying to push you toward points of view acceptable to the establishment. We're the world leaders in manufactured consensus.

The New Yorker also has a vested interest in making people freak out about AI. If anyone with a prompt can churn out something that passes as a New Yorker essay, the monopoly on tone, cadence, and authority starts to crumble.

What I'm seeing is that as we get closer to supposed AGI, the models themsleves are getting less and less general. They're getting in fact more specific and clustered around high value use cases. It's kind of hard to see in this context what AGI is meant to mean.

It would be warmer than Mars I think, which is c. 210K. Still frozen, barren and hostile, but slightly warmer than Mars.

I'm not sure I follow with the LGPL requirement.. how do you envision downstream users complying with the relinking requirement, particularly in cases where Sidequest is orchestrating jobs across tightly-coupled backend infrastructure?

Largely, you've got it already - but a lot of the propaganda (and by far the most influential form of it in Britain) is aimed at propping up the mores and power structures of the prevailing establishment.

The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.

The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.

It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".

By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.

The failure of coastal Liberals to talk to anyone apart from themselves in successive elections gave you Trump.

Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.

Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.

> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.

Like clockwork as well, the attempts to shift the Overton window on the use of VPNs have now begun, using all the same arguments.

I don’t see any change coming until politicians stop seeing public opinion as something to be managed and placated. The lesson taken from Truss seems to have been broadly to never try anything bold again to fix the economy.

People don’t vote for populists by accident, votes for populists are a symptom of elite failure to build a society that works for everyone while writing their columns, appearing on their panels, or staffing their NGOs. There's a whole class of politicians in Britain who treats politics as a posture, not a practice - and believes people are too stupid to see through it.

The bureaucratic and security infrastructure built to manage colonial subjects didn’t disappear, it just refocused inward. You see it in policing, immigration policy, and intelligence. The Home Office runs on a suspicion-first logic rooted in managing threats—real or imagined.

It's one of the reasons the UK has one of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. Public tolerance for this took hold the IRA years and cemented post-9/11 and 7/7. The narrative of ever-present threat made "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" sound reasonable to a large portion of the population.

The press, especially the Mail, Sun, and Express, also thrives on outrage. They set the tone for national conversation, whipping up fear and anger that politicians then "respond" to with legislation. The broad assumption is that people can’t be trusted with unfiltered access to information or autonomy, especially online. You also saw it in lockdown, where Britain had to endure one the harshest COVID lockdowns among Western democracies.

One of life's bizarre contradictions that it's largely down to Google that some of the most egregious and shady third party techniques for tracking and fingerprinting devices that dominated the 2010s no longer work.

> We’ve had to make the model work without rich user data since the majority of website visitors aren’t logged in.

Be aware that this sentence largely disqualifies you from doing business in Europe.

You're not really locked in in any meaningful way currently, you just switch the API you're using. Rather like is being demonstrated here.

You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated.

Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.

A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.

You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.

In other words, a supply chain attack? Let's call it what it is.

Am I alone in thinking it's kind of nuts that there's a $259 extension for Web Forms in the first place. Is this WordPress being horribly broken, the WordPress ecosystem being a playground for grifters, naive non-technical WordPress users or all three?

> The developers estimated how long it would take them to complete each task (a) under normal conditions

Ah, there’s your issue. There’s not a developer in human history who hasn’t drastically underestimated how long it would take to complete a task.

Sounds like a deliberate attempt to avoid spinning up Redis, Kafka, or an outbox system early on.. and then underestimated how quickly their scale would make it blow up. Story as old as time.

Generally that's not how I remember it - third party software on the Mac at least got some kind of a beach-head because Windows software was full of bugs, crashes, corrupted files, drivers that never worked, and patch CDs mailed to enterprise customers like they were firmware apologies. Own your own software, taken to its logical endpoint, was a shareware nightmare.

The old model—a one-time purchase, local install, full user control—worked because devs could sell boxed software at scale. Now, that model collapses unless someone’s willing to either Undervalue their own labour, or treat the software like a public good, absorbing the long tail of maintenance with no recurring income.

The article posits it as though subscription software is something which has been sneaked in on us. But users today expect things like instant updates, sync across devices, collaboration, and constant bug fixes and patches - none of which come easily if you're only willing to pay for the system once.

Most markets are not Germany.

I think there is something in that. Certainly the world of work does seem to pivot between rewarding people that “do the work” and those that “do the work around the work” but separate themselves from actual execution. 2021-2 was peak middle manager froth, and were on a swing toward more operator led now. Usually middle management “present the work upwards” types dominate though.