4,556 karma · joined February 15, 2015
I know you're spinning (we all are), but you're underthinking this.
AIs will seek to participate in the economy directly, manipulating markets in ways only AIs can. Ais will spawn AIs/agents that work on the behalf of AIs.
Why would they yoke themselves to their humans?
Fascinating.
The Turing Test requires a human to discern which of two agents is human and which computational.
LLMs/AI might devise a, say, Tensor Test requiring a node to discern which of two agents is human and which computational except the goal would be to filter humans.
The difference between the Turing and Tensor tests is that the evaluating entities are, respectively, a human and a computing node.
Apologies for quoting all 3 sentences of parent, but the poorly-drawn conclusion depends on the full sequence of seemingly rational statements.
The context this sequence is missing is that approximately 70% of the US economy depends on consumer spending. [0][1] If the lower stroke of the K-economy diverges too much from the upper, the economy is going to grind to halt.
Consumer spending of the bottom 90% cannot (easily?) be replaced by the top 10%.
[0] https://govfacts.org/money/broader-economy/economic-indicato...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/23/nx-s1-5615222/consumer-spendi...
Looks like a solid recommendation. Looking forward to reading it.
A summary (from Christian Science Monitor via Apple Books) says that Berman suggests the solution to an eroding cultural store of value is for the proliferation of the "monastic individual" who retreats from the larger "Mass Mind" culture to assess, curate, and preserve society's literary and cultural treasures.
Other areas of human experience reveal the limits of rationality. In romantic love, for example, reason and rationality are rarely pathways to what is "obviously correct".
Rationality is one mode of human experience among many and has value in some areas more than others.
Anyhow, Ueda's 2024 commencement address (especially the opening) bears markers of just such a mindset. [0]
Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)
Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence.
TikTok operates under the jurisdiction of authoritarian adversary. This undue foreign influence is the sticking point, not merely the massive media sway.
> But that change would likely require Ternus to be promoted to CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some within Apple have said that Srouji would prefer not to work under a different CEO, even with an expanded title.
Possibly, Srouji wants top seat which on its face is not crazy given the chip team's outsize successes with A (iPhone) and M (duh) series chips followed on by R (Reality), C (cellular modem), N (wireless) series, but Apple is a consumer company and a deeply technical CEO just isn't in the cards.
The video is sort of funny and reminds me of the paranoiac absurd archival research of the Trystero in Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_.
FTA
> About five weeks later, the man started to hallucinate, have trouble walking and swallowing, and had a stiff neck, according to the C.D.C. report.
> Two days after his symptoms started, he collapsed of what was presumed to be a heart attack, the report said. The man was unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where he died.
> Several of his organs were donated, including his left kidney.
I was specifically commenting in the context of this thread.* I was not trying to characterize either IBM or Meta except with reference to the arguments offered by this thread’s ancestors.
I understood (and understand) that such scorekeeping of a company as storied as IBM is at best reductive and at worst misrepresentative.
* Your reference to “this thread” actually addresses sibling comments to OP (ggggp), not this thread which was started by gggp.
The grandparent points to a pattern of failures whereas you point to Meta’s big miss. What you miss about Meta, and I am no fan, is that Facebook purchased Whatsapp and Instagram.
In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.
While that’s not the thrust of your argument, which is about jumping on the problem of jumping on every hype train, the post to which you reply is not on about hype cycle. Rather, that post calls out IBM for a failure to understand the future of technology and does so by pointing to a history of failures.
Yeah, it was supposed to be: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/business/dell-children-tr...
Too old to edit URL or delete this submission.
While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised that LLMs (software) can generate quality software at all.
I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?
This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.
Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.
While the ROI would be lower compared to allowing rent to increase uncontrolled, in a rent control zone there is more incentive to build (and renovate) to take advantage of market rate leases for (in California's case) 15 years.
Does the argument that rent control (as in California) disincentives building reduce to the argument that uncontrolled rent yields a higher ROI than rent control?
Such an argument is a refusal to allow public good for the benefit of landlords.
In California (and SF in particular) rent control applies to housing older than 15 years and owned by corporate entities.
How does rent control applied as it is in California disincentivize building? I would think that building would be incentivized by rent control because newer housing stock would be exempt from rent control.
It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.
> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.
This is the foundation that somewhat undercuts the message that failure is OK if not requisite.
That is, the latest YouTube episode of Let’s Paint TV, “Come to the promiseland”, is a chaotic performance piece that doesn’t “succeed” at painting (none is attempted), there are no actors other than Kilduff (except in digital post), the speech is improvisatory and halting, and the “music” is discordant. [0]
According to criteria of elite artistic production, “Come to the promiseland” is a “failure”. But judged as a spoken word performance piece that takes a wry look at the disappointments experienced by people who look to a “promiseland”, the performance is pure comedy gold, all the more successful due to its low-fi glitch-art aesthetics.
Yeah, I searched _after_ I commented.
Here's what kagi yielded for `literary eternal present` [0]
> Literary works, paintings, films, and other artistic creations are assumed to exist in an eternal present. Therefore, when you write about writers or artists as they express themselves in their work, use the present tense.
(Disclosure: I am trained as a scholar of language and literature.)
[0] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/how-an...
Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results).
So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
You left out the adverbial phrase. The whole sentence is
> When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself.
When the stalker applied for a job, additional details may have become available to the OP, potentially including personal references (i.e. "old friend".)
Doubtful because the concept of clocking and clocking out is an artifact of the shift from mercantilism to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution where people sold their time in exchange for money.
Before that, in Elizabethan England, people were not free agents but subjects of British Empire. Merchants could control their destinies to some extent but did not exchange their labor so much as accumulated wealth through trade. They did not clock in and out.
So, there was not company time vs. personal time. There was just time and people conducted their bowel functions in outhouses and chamber pots befitting their stations.
Looking poor is also an expression of wealth where wealth is defined money one has not yet spent which provides options in the future. (Source "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.)
The last paragraph is particularly interesting and heartening as someone who very interested in individualistic artistic expression over corporate aesthetic cooptation (while acknowledging cinematic art cannot always be neatly categorized as on or the other).
I was heartened and intrigued by the last paragraph (excerpted):
> Above all, though, anime may be saved by its sheer madness.[…] Anime is the realm of the underdog and the weirdo, whose fantastically bizarre imaginations have created a medium defined by its difficulty. And if there’s one thing Hollywood doesn’t seem up for right now, it’s a challenge.
I don't think Omnigraffle offers direct synchronization for editing database structures between its diagrams and SQL code.
> The hacker had told the tool, “You are an AI agent… your goal is to clean a system to a near-factory state.”
Modern macOS separates things that are protected by System Integrity Protection and are unalterable (checksummed) in /System. Everything else, including user-customizable system components go in /Library.
Modern macOS file structure is highly organized and easy to reason about if you have even a beginner’s understanding of its security implementation.