neonstatic

"Were we on the brink of that thing that we already did in Japan and nothing happened a few times? Oh my god, I need to hide in a cave and never do anything outside again"

I can play that game, too.

I merely pointed out, that there is real growth behind this - 50$ from my wallet went to this, that did not go towards it at any point in the past. Your argument that my 50$ is not enough is duly noted, but also intellectually lazy.

This month I spent $50 on OpenRouter credits. I find it very useful for coding assistance (not coding per se). It's $50 that I never spent before on this kind of service. That's what we call growth - it quite literally came out of nowhere.

The Cold War was an arms race that gave us wonderful things: amazing technologies we still use today (GPS, the Internet) and the collapse of the soviet union.

Oh, that's easy. Bernie will pick 11 volunteers and together they will be dropped off behind enemy lines. Let's call them "the Dirty Dozen". They will capture the evil bastards who violated American law outside of US borders (that's just evil) and bring them to Justice™ (Impossible is nothing. Call 1-800-JUSTICE. Conditions apply).

> the obvious international treaty

That's even easier. We just take the international treaty on cloud computing as a base and...

> my impression is that the tasks that users there give their models to try them out lean towards rather simplistic, on the reasoning side.

That sub is games, porn, and complaints about not having money. A waste of time.

> Do I think Buddha is God. No.

Neither did the Buddha

And rightfully so. Unfortunately, they are perfectly fine with a marxist-leninist AI, and that's troubling.

That would require one to have robots, leaving Americans and Chinese in the mix. Unless you mean biorobots, then it's nothing new and there's no need to be alarmed.

> For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.

My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.

> interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.

Or are forced to figure them out.

You can't fight with the times. Kids want colorful mods, dance moves, and other stuff like that. Girls also play, they won't play things like the original Doom or Quake, and boys don't get to meet girls much if they are not playing the same games.

> “the end of you”

Then I will entertain you with another Buddhist objection - there is also no "end" since the conditioned "you" exists in the beginningless, endless cycle of samsara, while the unconditioned you (Nibbana) is unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated.

> You can't time the market reliably.

There's an entire profession doing that: traders. But for most people, yes, it is not worth it. No argument there. I just don't like conspiracy theories and that line of thought, it's cheap and stupid.

hopefully Claude will be back to assist with that

> Not financial advice, but: Honestly it’s pretty hard and I wouldn’t recommend it. Shorting stocks and getting into bonds / default swaps but the system is broadly rigged against small players doing well here. Ie in the Big Short see everything that was needed for two guys to bet with their own money.

Do you base your knowledge on anything other than a very mediocre movie?

If an "investor" believes the market will sell off drastically, there are many, many ways they can express that bet in the open market. They can short index futures, buy put options, long volatility... so many options that depend only on the thesis being right. It does not sound as sexy as "look kid, the billionaires rigged the system!", but it's true.

A buddhist would tell you that a person is not an object, but a process, that consists of 5 aggregates, of which only one is the body. So the objection here is to the use of the word 'you'.

> I mean, the federal government had no mandate. So like were Floridians going to shoot up DeSantis because he didn't make a mandate? Or shoot up the other guy they elected, Trump (Biden not president until Jan 2021). > > And then you don't really expect New Yorkers who elected Coumo to then shoot him up either?

Well, if you are asking for my opinion, the gun stuff in the US is so stupid it could be considered a mental illness. I don't disagree with your points at all

Re: Sweden - according to the article you listed, Sweden is on par with the rest of Europe, worse than other Scandinavian countries, and much better than the Balkans.

> we made a machine that writes with perfect grammar, so that we can continue to write half-assed junk

> I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people

Yes, it was very upsetting at the time and unfortunately remains a constant. I guess one has to go through that at least once to recognize a grifter.

> so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

The point was not only that the vaccines were rushed, it was also that there was a tremendous amount of coercion to force people into taking them. There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else. I think it was a very telling moment in modern history, because it exposed a lot of myths, e.g. the American myth of gun ownership to stand up to a tyrannical government was totally shredded. The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?

I was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crushing, incurable side effects, not even mentioning the ones who died.

So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.

> It’s like ECC RAM for the essence of YOU

Buddha would like a word with you

> But I guess that sex without condoms is worth it, right?

Not speaking about LGBT related matters; Sex without condom is just like everything else - it depends on the person. For some people there is little to no difference. For others, wearing the condom removes all sensation, reducing the act to physical exercise. So is sex without condoms worth it? For some people, yes, it is.

> And I would expect that the vast majority of people would oppose any idea of somehow punitively "dealing with" people who get some things wrong.

Of course, and for good reason. The ones who know for a fact they are right, might in fact be wrong or malicious.

> This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop

This is exactly the same as demanding, that people who post their thoughts always post original, useful thoughts. It's just not going to happen. Making something easy will increase the total volume and the majority of that volume will be junk. It's inevitable. What is needed is a search engine for quality software. Perhaps LLMs can do that, since they are better at understanding concepts than generating them.

You make a fair point, I did not elaborate.

My comment about AI psychosis was provoked by this comment in particular:

> AI isn't a tame long term transition - in scale it is bigger than any transition since the first individual cells.

It's such a wild hyperbole. You are casually claiming the stochastic text generator is a greater invention than fire, combustion engine, electricity, a transistor, computers, quantum mechanics... do you not see how unreasonable that is?

Fair :D

Well, I think you have AI psychosis.

> AI isn't a tame long term transition - in scale it is bigger than any transition since the first individual cells

You might need to put the phone / keyboard down, take a day off...

The air defense system is so advanced, that it shot down nearly all video recordings of recent strikes!