pclowes

They are throwing numbers out like “10%”.

If they are serious and believed then yes, prepare for the possibility of very extreme reactions at a global and potentially nuclear scale.

World Wars flattened cities all over the world for much less.

We can’t talk about AI being the end of the species and not expect the most extreme reactions in global History.

Or maybe we just put some nerds who cant control their agents and keep running their mouths in jail?

While that is extreme, if there is a high p(doom) it is also reasonable.

We can absolutely do things to control AI and fine or imprison those who can’t control theirs. This is not some inevitable outcome.

We could vaporize these companies tomorrow if we wanted.

I would be honestly intrigued but wary of just the usual Elon bad/good so all things he does bad/good narratives.

If we are on the brink of Kessler Syndrome in LEO I would expect market pricing to reflect that.

Neuralink: to see the impact of increased independence and autonomy of a paraplegic one day after the operation

SpaceX: to quite literally approach the final frontier. Currently launches 80-90% of all orbital mass. Starlink is saving lives constantly.

Tesla: to kickstart the EV revolution and reduce fossil fuel dependence

Boring Company: to radically decrease tunneling costs applicable to all sorts of critical urban problems from transportation to utilities etc

This is such cope.

You can never tell his degree of confidence in his answer. For low-level things he is pretty good but for critical high-level things it is more ambiguous.

You work around this by checking Bob’s work. Having formal verification steps to check what he says.

Now let’s say you meet Bob’s twin brother Bill. Who talks and sounds just like Bob. He makes fairly grand high-level statements that you can neither test nor verify.

How much do you intuitively distrust him?

I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.

I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.

Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.

And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.

Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.

General thought here is the entire economy is all in on a bet that that would never be enforced and I am willing to bet we would rather change the law than destroy the economy…

Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?

Like the bad actors can make E2E apps and side load or have their own store. Now with LLMs, this is increasingly trivial.

You cannot stop pedophiles and terrorists from using math.

They might as well try to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem.

This just makes your average law of abiding citizen more vulnerable and the surveillance state more powerful.

The state of population level mental health seems to be declining in most measurable categories.

Every age thinks they know how they work, and then every subsequent age laughs at the previous age’s rudimentary understanding.

We gave a Nobel prize to the psychiatrist for inventing a method to remove the frontal lobes of a brain through the nose in 1949. Lobotomies were performed through the 70s.

We are likely doing similar if not subtler but worse things today (just one more pill bro). We still have no idea what we are doing when it comes to the brain.

Would love to be educated here, but it seems like there are just not that many moving pieces per airport (<10,000) and all of them are tagged with transponders, etc. And a human in the loop with respect to coordination might be the biggest source of risk.

This all seems like queuing theory and collision avoidance, which are very well done by computers.

It’s also a fun social thing especially with young kids.

Companies need to be taught that if they enshittify they die.

I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”

The studies are not geared for a sample size of one there is only one you.

Just… Try it.

You can just do things. They don’t have to be rational, the best things rarely are.

Jack: Twitter, Square (Block), Bluesky/ATProto, bitchat (interesting), buzz (we will see). He just always fumbles the 1 to N (See Vine as an example)

Other Twitter Guy: Medium

Zuck: PHP dev, gets a hit, reads innovators dilemma... buys instagram. Everything else sucks.

However, I have been in plenty of low income high trust areas. In some ways, those were even more high trust.

Economics play a role, but there is a moral and cultural fabric that gets built through repeated interactions overtime. Unfortunately, that fabric is very susceptible to damage.

Eg: there are plenty of towns where you wouldn’t have to lock your car or even your bike, but it only takes a couple thefts for the entire culture to change…

Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.

Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.

However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.

Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

Free society is more important than marginally safer streets.

Not maintaining existing public transportation and making it dirty, difficult or dangerous to use is what prevents the construction of more. Voters vote against throwing more money into what seems like a lost cause or at least something they wouldn’t use if they had any other option. In the US any class besides the lowest classes typically does so they avoid public transportation and use cars and so it gets worse.

The transportation must be somewhat appealing to the middle class in order for it to be scalable and sustainable from a tax-policy perspective.

I am very pro public transportation! Would love it if ours and the rider behavior on it was held to the same standard as Amsterdam.

The US does over incarcerate on average. There is clearly a problem there! The solution is not abdicating prosecution and the rule of law to make up for it in “progressive” cities.

Taking the Iryna Zarutska case as an extreme example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the killer should have been on that train. He should have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed a long time ago.

It is not progressive or empathetic to allow predators to with severe mental or drug issues with long histories of violence to repeatedly prey on a specific community regardless of the national incarceration rate.

Having people who come across as crazy or violent on public transportation makes the average citizen vote for the very policies that produce over incarceration (or defund public transportation) because they look around and their lived experience is that there are not enough police or bad people in jail and that the taxpayer dollars are wasted on public transportation because it becomes a cesspool of crime and drug use.

If you want to lower incarceration and you want people to use public transportation, it must be clean and orderly and socially sustainable.

In fact, most cities can operate just fine without barrier-esque fare gates. However, when you are trying to pull a city out of a societal doom loop, you need to do what you can when you can.

I think it would blow your mind if you knew the types of crimes a criminal can commit and be released.

- open drug use (literally smoking crack on the bus) - screaming threat of violence to everyone one around - purposefully urinating or defecating on the seats. - literally lighting things on fire - deliberately smashing glass at bus stops (somehow very endemic in SF)

I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”

Some graffiti I think is quite artistic and a sincere cultural contribution, but most on the sides of buses are more of the bathroom stall variety.

The maintenance cost graph is very eye-opening.