Would bet that you’re a crypto fan.

I can’t figure out why BlueSky never comes out of invite-only. It would absolutely crush Twitter in this moment when there is so much demand for a direct replacement.

I have a vague memory that apartheid South Africa hooked them up with the bomb.

Prediction: The world will return to something that looks like feudalism, with increased clamping on birth rates until a few rich holders remain with their human retinues solely there to entertain and flatter them. Otherwise, AI and robotics will cosset them.

Once production is automated there is little need for workers, and once knowledge work is automated there is no need for a professional and technocratic class. Consumers have nothing to spend, so they are effectively a drag on the economy of wealth.

That world then looks a lot like the time before the merchant class developed. Everything of any quality is made for the wealthy, and everyone else exists solely at the pleasure of their masters.

That was very helpful, thanks!

Only problem I have left is getting NGINX Reverse Proxy Manager set up, so that I can offer Overseerr webpage. The Let’s Encrypt cert generator keeps throwing an internal error at the last step. Something is preventing LE from reaching my server, and I’m too clueless to solve at this point.

It was fascinating to watch the rideshare companies convince their San Francisco drivers to actively support and evangelize the bill in California that ruined their ability to get benefits and employment protections, then turn around and extract so much value away from those drivers in the period since that most of those drivers, who tended to be American-born and have relatively nice cars, have been replaced by recent immigrants driving fleet-owned older cars. I would also not be shocked to learn that the latter are being cheated by whoever signs them up and helps them navigate Lyft and Uber’s processes.

The intellectual and professional desert of center-lib media is fascinating: The same rotating cast of five MSNBC guests who are on every day, all day, are now primary fodder for print stories trying to get in on wishcasting monetization, like this Guardian piece. Newsweek and HuffPost literally report MSNBC show opinions now, like they’re news.

There are hundreds of qualified law professors and law firm partners with either deep legal theory or direct practice experience relevant to the Trump cases, but good luck hearing from them. Instead, we get Vance, Litman, Katyal, McQuade, and Weissman, all day every day, and now also in print.

This desert isn’t good for us. The MSNBC wishcasting monetization model left Americans poorly prepared for the Mueller outcome. The guy was canonized as a genius Marine Superman who would undoubtedly smite Trump; other professional voices weren’t invited on.

I have a vague memory of a $10B cash shipment going missing in Afghanistan.

Historically, American millionaires had a much higher rate of prior bankruptcies than the general population. A good way to squelch entrepreneurship is to make failure so onerous that it’s not worth the risk.

Yuri Gagarin was rumored to be drunk when he took the famous flight.

I’m older than dirt and have seen lots o’ presidential elections. Polls this far out, for the general election, are utterly meaningless.

I was reading several months ago that there was a time in the mid ‘90s that there were a few gay clubs in Russia that were relatively unmolested by the cops, as long as the local “roof” was paid off.

There used to be a business joke you’d hear in the ‘60s, often attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”

The joke highlights the dilemma many businesses face in evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising spend. It’s remained relevant in the advertising and marketing industries, reflecting the challenges in measuring the impact of advertising efforts.

Too bad the product is execrable today.

This sounds very knowledgeable. If the reporting is to be believed, why do you think the OpenAI folks might be so impressed by the Q* model’s skills in simple arithmetic?

I know jack shit, but actual mastery of first principles would seem a massive leap in LLM development. A shift from talented bullshitter to deductive extrapolator does sound worthy of notice/concern.

I hate to admit this, but I’ve started using Reddit again. It pains me, but there is stuff I just can’t get here.

I like your take. Altman is a Valley hustler, albeit a talented one who ran YC. But, he’s not technologist or a theorist, and I suspect he’s not that interested in attempting to de-risk AGI anymore, particularly now that he’s experienced the market hype. The staff who want to be billionaires clotted to him; the staff who are committed to the original ethical vision stuck with Ilya.

I had a teacher in high school, many decades ago, who had owned an orange juice processor. He explained that the generic store brand got the start and end of production runs; name brand got the middle.

I hate that we’re so petro-bigoted.