paimapi

ah it's always a lovely day to drop some historical reference points

https://www.fastcompany.com/90781961/how-automakers-insidiou...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city

Big Agriculture (eg subsidies, dereg). Car manufacturers. Healthcare insurance (or insurance of any stripe when it comes to natural disasters and over-insuring and then needing bail outs).

It's almost like avoiding accountability for the sake of the share value is a systemic problem encouraged by the way we have currently arranged ourselves

In your hypothetical, none of the money is re-invested which would be an utterly ludicrous thing to do. It also doesn't account for the GDP growth typically associated from people having lower healthcare\transportation costs and how quality of life increases translates to much higher productivity (see Brazil's experiment giving money to mothers in favelas, for eg, and the uplift of the entire economy). It's not a difficult extrapolation - if you're not bogged down with medical or student loans or rent or etc, you have disposable capital to purchase things and hire services

But the money in your hypothetical would literally just disappear into the void, never to touch the US economy again. It imagines a world where SNAP beneficiaries purchase nothing with their cards, the money simply vanishing, as if eaten by a deep god, not even existing as shit on the ground for two enterprising economists to consume and stimulate GDP growth with

This is a transparently bad thought experiment jury-rigged for failure

you can thank Sergey 'Do No Evil' Brin for that: https://theconversation.com/why-a-vote-on-taxing-californias...

I remember doing the math when the last company I worked for was sold, and how much of a percentage of the wealth our founders received alone would be subtracted if they had made all the hundreds of us millionaires. I think the math equated to roughly 0.006% or so of their total wealth to basically instill a new millionaire class in my city which likely would have led to a little boom in spending + business creation

of the few people who did get an actual decent share and not piddly RSUs, I believe more than half stayed on in very senior roles and still do some of the best work at the company today. it's always astonishing how proportionally little of an impact wealth redistribution would have on the ultra-wealthy, and how disproportionately large of an impact that would have on the quality of life for the rest of us

I'm not. AGI is almost necessarily closer to ASI than it is to human intelligence by definition. it's become pretty obvious that even what seems like irrelevant domain knowledge has utility applied to other domains - that's why we're pursuing general-use models

presumably, an 'AGI' that is generally as good as a really good human at every task under-the-sun will already be much better than most humans at the task because it can incorporate cross-domain knowledge and apply it in a reasonable fashion. it's like the parable of Newton and the apple - the domain knowledge that an apple falls according to certain rules observed through historic experience igniting the creative spark that led to universal gravitation

it really does feel like 'intelligence' is becoming so much more of a marketing term moreso than it is any actual definitive measure. I was acquaintances with a cognitive science post-doc many years ago who trained under the same program that Douglas Hofstadter was part of (and who he saw as a great popular science communicator but perhaps a bit over-rated when it came to his own research)

my very naive question to him back then was how close we were to understanding human cognition. we were both fans of grand strategy games (though the few hundred hours of Stellaris I played vs his thousands in EU4 paled in comparison) and I was asking if it was possible to map human cognition to the same array of interdependent logical chains-of-reasoning that games like that could be boiled down to

his answer, in short, was 'we are so, so, so far away and no, that's, at best, a reductive mental model of intelligence'

I keep that conversation in mind whenever I hear about all this talk of AGI - that realistically we're so far away from actual AGI in the same way that the inventor(s) of the wheel were from a gas-powered car, and there's many paradigm shifts to go in how we even understand what the nature of intelligence is before we get there

has been for a long time - there's a sound engineer who developed quite a following (and is fairly involved with local movement hackerspaces) who demo'd how easy it was to hack Flock cameras nearly a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

the Flock response has been 'it doesn't count if a Youtuber did it' lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ADb-qQ5hMY

I think the future of development will be a lot of automated quality checks like these on AI-drafted code that humans review and ensures that it doesn't muck up the business logic and actually fulfills the acceptance criteria. that said, I don't think existing toolsets are really great at actually measuring code quality

I've been in the process of reviewing and validating a lot of tools like this (qlty, Sonarqube, fallow, etc) and the false positive rate is anywhere from 20% to 80% for a lot of our sniff tests (zizmor produces an overwhelming majority of false positives here for what feels like arbitrary and very context-dependent GHA requirements)

the last thing I want to do is to annoy the hell out of our devs by requiring checks like these to pass especially since it's only a small percentage of them who vibe code everything and then also vibe response to code reviews. I feel like that's the anti-pattern that we'd push people towards by requiring checks like these to pass

another avenue of exploration has been requiring test coverage but also good test quality metrics (eg are there negative tests? mutation testing? empty asserts?) something that seems quite easy to spin up into a skill and pair with a deterministic harness. trash-tests is a neat little project that incorporates some of this: https://github.com/frangelbarrera/trash-tests (disclosure: I am not the repo owner or even a contributor, just a quality nerd who loves underdogs lol)

all in all, it really does feel like we'll need a revamp of the SDLC with our current expected velocities

>But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM

so then don't add it in as highly advertised feature until it is. doing things right and living up to your core values is a lot to expect from businesses these days but, at minimum, a non-profit foundation should be able to live up to these goals, yes?

arguably, this is what sales cares about and the half-measures taken to tackle what must be the Mt. Everest of tech debt at Salesforce is what leads to large, systemically degraded customer trust in products that keep shipping bugs

chess is not just a rigorous set of rules, it is rules as foundation with layers of strategy on top. and so is, for example, scientific methodology or chemical interactions or virtually everything else under-the-sun that comprises human knowledge

knowledge for chess is derived from memorizing strategies that have been well-defined for decades paired with in-game reasoning processes. this is not at all different from any other body of knowledge. Noble gases, laws of thermodynamics, organic chemistry just to name a few - these are all 'strategies' that define observed phenomena, analytical frameworks that trace a logical, rational set of interactions and which can predict the next

for an AGI, all of this should be a cakewalk, trained as it were to surpass human capability in any and every domain [0] (thus the G for 'general' and not 'N' for 'narrow' [1]). it should be a natural at everything, infinitely adaptable on-the-fly. the whole point of AGI is that it surpasses human capabilities even at our frontiers and bleeding edge (unless you're private enterprise and you've moved the goalposts for industry [2])

currently, it's only AGI-seeming if it gets benchmaxxed enough. otherwise it sucks at what it does and then is only barely competent at tasks if paired with enough skills and tests to make it more diligent at its work. this makes sense to me - for any probabilistically trained tool, even one that you post-train and fill with nothing but the best-quality evidence, the ultimate result is the lowest-common-denominator output for your sample set. there's no natural reasoning the AI does itself to make itself better at what it does - it's all human curation and categorization of sources ingested paired with RLHF post-training that we can get the mediocre-at-chess-at-best results that we see now and the benchmaxxed scores against whatever arbitrary and pre-defined measure

that's not AGI by any classical definition. that's a cool, useful, and powerful tool that makes our lives easier, much like a hammer, nail, and studs make mounting a picture frame easier than if we only had our hands alone

[0] https://ischool.syracuse.edu/types-of-ai/#:~:text=General%20...

[1] https://aiethicslab.rutgers.edu/e-floating-buttons/weak-ai-n...

[2] https://aibusiness.com/ml/what-exactly-is-artificial-general...

is that what I'm saying? or am I talking about AGI? perhaps there's some irony here to be explored when it comes to basic reading comprehension gaps

if company A does a piss poor job at auditing and vetting their vendors then company A shares a proximate responsibility billable and criminally liable to say 50% of the damages (along with company B for accepting a contract they were not able to fulfill)

I think the best way to prison reform is to start jailing execs who inflict mass suffering via process decisions en masse. maybe then Sergey Brin will decide to drop a quarter billion in something other than opposing a wealth tax

two birds, one stone as they say

so prove it! get a public repo out there, have it play against some open source engines

also I think the operative letter in AGI is the G - and if the G is short for 'variably competent savant-like hyperfocus on certain kinds of software coding and not any other general skill' then its not really G at all, is it?

"I want to replace the human experience with SQL queries" in a nutshell

if chats are so important to you, write it down, with your hand. journaling is fun and great and there's evidence that it's good for your mental health because it allows you intentional time for introspection and insight-building

>hit the version refusal but found that you just lie to the upgrade tooling that it's newer and then the version number doesn't change after flashing.

good for right to repair but man is this not a major vulnerability? we need to start going after tech companies not employing best practices like mutation testing esp with how easy those tests are to write now

if only we prosecuted corporations as people instead of just giving them the civil liberties of one

re the Feynman point, couldn't the same argument be said about, for eg, developers no longer manually writing machine code, relying on compilers instead? and the people maintaining those translation layers not knowing the phenomena that results in a transistor flip, trusting the engineering to do what it's said to do? I think an example of the kind of question this leads to would be "do you really understand software if you don't understand electrical engineering and microprocessor architectures?"

there's a level of obfuscation for any knowledge work where you rely on existing but incomprehensible-to-you systems that you just trust to work. are you unable to do any kind of mathematical work if you don't understand every single layer of proof that exists under-the-sun that touches your subject matter - or can you trust that some of these antecedents have been battle-tested and are functionally true for your purpose?

you could make an effective argument about the state of modern general-purpose LLMs that's founded on the idea that they are fundamentally untrustworthy and all results need to be validated but the larger categorical narrative, that the only true way to understand something is to know the logic from the most base principles, seems faulty

another important part isn't just the ideology targeting - it's the directive for local and national law enforcement for form Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) targeting individuals and organizations in this vein. JTTFs are already mobilized and targeting people - see https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/06/12/federal-prosecutor...

I think of that poem, First They Came:

  First they came for the Communists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Communist
  Then they came for the Socialists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Socialist
  Then they came for the trade unionists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a trade unionist
  Then they came for the Jews
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Jew
  Then they came for me
  And there was no one left
  To speak out for me

replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...

it's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years)

the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing

and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier

how is that in any way what I am saying? you are not describing the actual condition. you're ascribing what you see as anti-social or negative behaviors you heard about an individual (who has not disclosed any diagnosis) to a complicated illess that requires years of training to formally diagnose

this bloviating about free speech when all anybody is asking you to do is to not be an asshole is so overwrought and childish

I love this line:

>Last year, Lee Zeldin, who runs the EPA, said it was now the agency’s top priority to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” The 56-year-old agency was established in 1970 to protect the environment and public health.

lol, reminds me of those videos where a host will say one thing and then the cameraman pans to reveal the lie

Some select quotes:

>Police departments are telling officers not to mention ALPRs when stopping vehicles and concealing their use of ALPRs to avoid citizens’ public records requests. [...] 404 Media recently revealed that in its usage policy for Flock ALPR cameras, one county in Iowa tells police to keep them a secret when detaining people: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” If writing a report about an incident, police are told to say they used “county resources” in making a stop instead of acknowledging use of ALPRs.

>AT&T built a powerful phone surveillance tool for police, called Hemisphere, in the mid 2000s, and the company required agencies not to use evidence gathered by Hemisphere in court unless there was no other admissible evidence. If evidence obtained through Hemisphere was used, police were required to recreate it through a traditional subpoena, a process they called “parallel construction.” We called it “evidence laundering.”

>In Baltimore a judge concluded that law enforcement had used a standard pen register order to intentionally hide its use of a Stingray from the court in violation of its legal disclosure obligations, leading to a landmark 2015 privacy ruling that cops need a warrant to use the device. [...] Prosecutors have accepted plea deals to hide their use of cell-site simulators and have even dropped cases rather than reveal information about their use of the technology. U.S. Marshalls have driven files hundreds of miles to thwart public records requests.

if it's a political issue then this is just Sam telling people to do one thing while still riding his SVPs and other leads hard on roadmaps, 'boldness', and delivery metrics

which is to say - unlikely for it to materially slow, only a lot of chirping about slowing down to the public with a couple outlier examples of 'slowing down' they can show publicly

because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-disc...

it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is no longer used in official diagnoses. it's a boundary condition grounded in compassion. advocating for using a new word doesn't need some soapbox tantrum about the fatuousness of the modern world a la Ignatius J. Reilly

sure and if layoffs were clinical indicators for mania, we'd probably see a whole lot less of them. unfortunately that's not our world

actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated

as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"

it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones

you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'

Had the same experience on it when it was going by Windsurf. Had to wire up a skill hooked to terminal runs or else it would hang or freeze and never finish literally every single time

I see issues with other harnesses too but not with the regularity I was getting from this. And the one moat they had with the better UI for per-project multi-agent orch disappeared and now is standardized

Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge. The average Chinese citizen also is much more willing to call it a genocide and if there's one thing the Politburo knows to do, it's not to unnecessarily foment unrest by collusion

I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most

For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy

you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'