paimapi

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'

it probably has something to do with the fact that a full 2% of their GDP comes from US military aid alone: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts

oh? I didn't know China and Russia had such solid relationships with Israel. my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?

yes, one of the most successful psy-ops of all time: https://thecradle.co/articles/gotta-scan-em-all-how-pokemon-...

I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)

also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that

you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average

also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-...

>In particular, a 10% increase in productivity is associated with a 0.7% increase in mean pay.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397

>We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage

unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse

it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress

that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars

blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too

it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint

in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works

in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation

a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings

some interesting tidbits from the longer report:

>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.

[...]

>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.

I think an honest answer would be to account for software bloat over time. I'm one of those luddites who likes to keep a phone for a minimum of five years. in order to accomplish this, I select phones that have higher-than-average in-class RAM so that things I care the most about (snappy feeling, app loadtimes) stay good for longer

especially for Apple, I imagine if I were buying a phone knowing they historically throttle processors on older models, I'd try to at least control the one aspect that wouldn't make sense to throttle

> To be fair unions also produce garbage;

would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)

the MBA logic based on a very biased and small sample size from a very select timeframe in the 1980s is that advertising during a recession leads to higher payouts when the economy recovers: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...

there's also a lot of language about preying on people's insecurities by selling them an artificial sense of agency which is a fun reminder of how manipulative marketers are

and when you look up what spending while having a manic episode looks like, does it resemble a layoff? or is it substantively different?