techpineapple

Yes, tech giants should only bow to domestic pressures in encryption.

A theory that I have is that AI Chatbots are so impressive - the core ability to have a sophisticated conversation with an entity about any topic - that people are bad at understanding its limitations. If prior to LLMs, Siri was like 10,000 points of ability and LLMs may be like a million points of ability, because it’s such a big leap, it’s impossible for humans to intuitively understand if AGI requires 10 million points of ability or 10 trillion.

The further Cracker Barreling of America. Remove all decoration, all tradition, all history.

I do feel like there are some ideas growing on the right that I could find appealing; many of the ideas listed here could come out of Bernie Sanders mouth, and I’m open to rational conversations on issues like immigration. I remember watching a relatively right wing podcast recently and the economist said “I’m right wing on income but support a tax on wealth” and I think that summarizes my pinnacle concern in the modern economy. It’s interesting to read this like a few years after citizens united and then Trump installing a judiciary that seems to support more policies that entrench wealth and not less. (Not to mention putting a direct line to Silicon Valley billionaires in his Oval Office)

Both the incredibly nihilistic tone, and the inconsistent policies of the Trump administration make it nearly impossible, and as mentioned, the old school right of lowering taxes on billionaires and Christian Nationalism still seem to be the ones holding the most power.

This was interesting, because I guess I would have thought that the problem was that social media was cannibalizing the audience for theater comedies, and it seems like maybe the answer is more complicated.

I think the cracker barrel fiasco this week is really sort of an example of this endemic modernity that there are some fucked up incentives fucking everything up, and we have really poor language (It was wokeness!) to describe it. It really shows that there are sort of two definitions to capitalism. The colloquial definition that I think most people defend, anyone can make stuff and anyone can buy it and markets are an efficient way to connect buyers to sellers. If you make something people like you should get rich and if you don't you should fail and your company should die, and no matter how liberal and social justice-y I feel, I generally speaking support this pattern existing in society.

...and the more structured definition that involves the specific macroeconomic factors that impact the incentives people have. Like, there are people who want to make comedies and people who want to consume comedies, but the incentives aren't there for executives to green light them. The wall street / stock market dominates the consumer market. We're actually losing that colloquial definition of capitalism. And that creates a pretty fucked world.

"Cracker Barrelling" the government as they say.

How did we get here? How is this not wall to wall on the news? Why isn’t the religious right more upset about this? Why isn’t Mark already in front of Congress? This is bananas.

Do you regularly use chatGPT as a voice assistant?

Like, I kind of wonder what else I might want SIRI to do that isn’t hard. I would like it to occasionally summarize facts like who was the president of France in 1975, and I might use it for that, but I wonder… does Apple make any money if they add that feature? Do they _want_ people using Siri? Yes, it is actually a valuable feature for me to be able to get directions while driving or play a song while cooking. Everything else has a weird cost-benefit ratio to Apple I imagine. The things that make you think the iPhone is substantively more valuable because Siri can do them are hard.

It probably comes down to the fact that Apple likes to make money, and OpenAI isn’t quite as concerned.

If you want me to take you seriously, you have to realize that no serious finance expert says “stocks”, it’s “stonks”.

Interesting Google-Gemini-2.5-pro seems to bias towards artists early in the alphabet and artists who’s names are alliterations.

And yeah, grok-3 seem reasonable if not boring and grok-4 is bananas.

moonshotai-kimi-vl-thinking seems to like longer names with & in them.

But what’s interesting is that the results show very shallow thinking. Either the model is trained on top ten lists somewhere, or the model is optimized for something about text of the name, it doesn’t seem like any have any kind of sophisticated understanding of what “music” is.

How do they reject DEI? I would be skeptical of any school so deep in the culture war it was one of the two ways you could describe them. Focus on academics.

Also how do they reject inclusion? Do they teachers tell the kids “you don’t belong here” as they pass them in the hallways?

For equity they must make the tests harder for some kids than for others. Intentionally hand out different grades for the same results.

This is the dumbest advice I’ve ever read, and ironically, probably in and of itself makes those degrees more valuable.

> Good news is: This is the worst this technology will ever be. I am still very much positive about all of it.

Ye of little imagination.

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

Privatize it. If I want the road in front of my house fixed, I'll pay for it, I can get a pool membership, gym membership, or other amenities ad-hoc. Fuck the HoA.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

WTF happened to meritocracy? Did the Trump admin go woke?

I imagine tuning this to remain fun would be a real challenge.

“ if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment.”

Crazy is true, but that would somewhat follow most tech advancements right?

“ Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population in the United States — both lawful and unlawful residents — declined by nearly 1.5 million. In June, the country was home to 51.9 million immigrants, down from 53.3 million six months earlier.”

Is this something you can really reasonably study? The response rate for illegal immigrants must have tanked right? I know there are techniques for this but they must be disrupted by like major environmental and legal changes. I would doubt you would get it right on your first attempt.

Do most border crossings happen during the day? Also - does black painted metal get significantly hotter than raw metal? Couldn’t the black paint act as an insulator and actually hold and release the heat itself?

Also does it heat to a higher level or just speed up the rate of heating?

This needs to be way better sourced. I'd say it's 50/50 good points but 50/50 is basically useless. Lots of "exponential growth, power law dynamics (some that are specifically not true, METR growth is still growing, but slowing down / not at the predicted rate) and some of the math dynamics are why this is such a big bubble. If everyone thinks they HAVE to invest because it could have 10x improvements, then the industry is growing much faster than the value it provides. And based on the rates of investment if that slows down at all, pop

Something I wonder about the percent of code - I remember like 5-10 years ago there was a series of articles about Google generating a lot of their code programmatically, I wonder if they just adapted their code gen to AI.

I bet Google has a lot of tools to say convert a library from one language to another or generate a library based on an API spec. The 30% of code these LLMs are supposedly writing is probably in this camp, not net novel new features.

While there’s no reasonable way to disagree with the sentiment, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can “think and decompose problems” who isn’t also widely read, and knows a lot of things.

Forcing kids to sit and memorize facts isn’t suddenly going to make them a better thinker, but much of my process of being a better thinker is something akin to sitting around and memorizing facts. (With a healthy dose of interacting substantively and curiously with said facts)

“ In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?”

People probably said the same thing about “what if someone doesn’t want to carry a phone with them everywhere”. If it’s useful enough the culture will change (which, I unequivocally think they won’t be, but I digress)

Statistically, yes, emotionally? No. Like there are hands at poker it is logical to go all in on, that one would probably not go all in on if your life was at stake. You can theoretically always rebuild a bank roll.

But because it’s all numbers, books have been written about poker to help people intuitively understand what the odds mean, and how to play the odds over a game/career. Have similar books been written about medicine?

I actually disagree with you, yes, the numbers are the same, but the game theory is completely different.

Is there like a standardized risk scale for understanding odds in medicine? I mean, I probably have a 1 in a million chance of dying every month I choose to drive regularly, but if I were to argue with an anti-vaxxer, or try to determine my own risk tolerance, has someone developed a standardized way of understanding risk/odds? At what level do you say "This is a risky vaccine"?

Sam Altman says it all the time. If Sam Altman "doesn't have any real power" than the phrase doesn't mean anything.

I don't think that Silicon Valley's / NY Tech's primary concern about Mamdani is rent control. You think NY Tech CEO's are pro rent control for a reason Silicon Valley CEO's aren't?

It's a funny ideology that's like "We're going to end scarcity and implement UBI, but also, be scared of socialism."

90% if workers use chatbots but 95% of AI efforts are failing?