Fricken

We've known about climate change for more than a century, but we're pigs, we don't care.

Netflix execs have expressed envy over HBO's uncanny ability to make money off decades old IP. HBO still makes money off decades old IP because much of their decades old IP is made to the highest standards in television.

Netflix's spreadsheet method of developing shows was a defacto attempt at trying make AI generated content before actual generative AI was available. We can all see clearly see how following that path leads to soulless and forgettable products.

Cantarians and near-centarians like Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger: They did't stop puttering around. If we're optimizing for lifespan the rule is simply to keep moving.

My Grandpa was a railroad engineer, he retired a strong, healthy man at 65, sat down on the lazy boy and wasted away, he died at 74. My Grandpa's younger brother was a farmer, he had no retirement plan, he worked that farm until he was 88.

Same as the startup world.

A studied showed that elderly asians have better health outcomes that their western counterparts in part due to their practice of sitting on the floor. The added exertion of standing up from the floor rather than a chair makes a material difference in their health.

New drugs enhance. If you can get your hands on a chemical that invokes an altered state no previous artist has experienced then you're in undiscovered country.

Ken Kesey was a guinea pig in the CIA's early experiments with LSD. He went on to be amongst LSDs earliest recreational users, and that led to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", which is a strikingly original and lucid novel.

Reid Hoffman isn't relevant. Don't attack the person, attack the substance of their argument. How is xAI not a total shitshow? This is the question you need to be able to answer.

Last week Yann LeCun called xAI a "failure"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...

If ignored, it would imply that the sense you're referring to is not a common one.

"Pay us and we won't fuck your shit up" is the history of civilization

Also it takes lies, cheating, and a propensity for murdering women and children, which are the coolest aspects of surplus value creation.

No, Elon didn't put in a trillion dollars worth of work.

Not much has changed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9ls4mV51Yk

I've been having fun playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016).

In it the player controls a team of stealthy assassins in real time who coordinate to infiltrate heavily guarded Shogunate fortresses. The characters and voice acting are quite well done.

The gameplay is very tricky and fickle but I guess it's fun because yesterday I downloaded the expansion with a bunch of new level to sneak around in.

Drivers mostly hate on other drivers, but they make time to hate other road users as well.

The first summer after COVID I was bitten by 3 different dogs in 3 separate incidents. I went 48 years without ever getting bitten by a dog until that one season.

"Karpathy was either BSing for money, or he actually believed the hype. Either way it was a bad look."

That's from top comment in this thread. I'm not sure how you got the impression I was defending him.

Karpathy didn't leave in protest because he was the guy hired to replace the protesters. His job was to be a credible technical authority on ML backstopping the sales pitch that Full Self-driving could be achieved on Tesla's hardware.

The original Autopilot team had some great talent. Elon fired them and then sued them because they wouldn't shut up about Lidar. Elon couldn't say "Every new Tesla is FSD ready" if every new Tesla needed Lidar for that to be true, that was the constraint.

The Woz was on TV in an interview saying he bought 2 Model 3s, one for himself and one he could put to work after the robotaxi update. Regular everyday suckers too were taking on crippling debt to buy Teslas because their cars were gonna pay for themselves after the magical update.

With a cursory glance at Tesla's hardware the rest of the self driving car industry quickly surmised that it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy, and that's before sensor modalities entered the equation. Karpathy was either BSing for money, or he actually believed the hype. Either way it was a bad look.

Charlie Stross here on HN 2 days ago:

"I'm not a fan of actually-existing late-stage capitalism, frankly.

What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism.

(You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649

(Charlie wrote the book on our emerging ai dystopia, prophetically, decades ago)

No amount of wealth will protect you from your own mortality, so clearly that's not what wealth is for.

I would say that poverty is a relative concept, and because technology tends to increase the gap between the wealthiest and poorest persons it ultimately has the effect of creating more poverty. Today You and a million of your closest friends together aren't even worth as much as the single wealthiest dude, that's how broke you all are. Nobody was so broke that they were worth less than a millionth of a person 10k years ago.

Another way to think about it: Technology has increased the number of people. There was a human population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago, and the breeding population was reduced to only a few thousand people. So all the world's assets were divided between them. Now all the world's assets are divided between 8 billion people, which means less wealth per person, and more poverty.

As a technologist here's what's especially impoverishing: You don't get to be the guy who came up with the lightbulb or the mass produced automobile, or the theory of relativity. Ford, Edison and Einstein took that from you. They took it from everybody. We have a lot of forgetting to do before before any human being alive can carry with them as much potential as pre-Edison humanity had, and we're lesser for it.

And of course, Artificial light and gasoline powered locomotion have done nothing to alleviate suffering and death, these are dominant and inescapable components of being alive, as true for modern humans as it was for the neolithic ones. All glory is fleeting.

Your reply is completely ancillary to the point of my comment and the one above it.

Yeah, but does having twice the polygons make the game twice as fun? It does not. The Switch is only behind on metrics that don't matter.

I'm with you, but The Switch2 has so far mostly been dropping remakes of classic games, and games already released years ago on other platforms.

All glory is fleeting. Death is the great equalizer.

It was only 2018 when Apple first attained a $1T Market cap.

I remember in 2014 when Silicon Valley had over 100 startups valued at $1B or more. We called them "unicorns". Uber was the first decacorn. I guess that would make Anthropic a kilocorn.

The history of civilization is warlords showing up and saying "Give me 2 bags of wheat from each crop and I won't kill you. Not only that, once I own you, I will fight to make sure the other ensure the other guy can't steal you from me, and that you remain productive."

So long as the warlord can make good on that agreement, you have political order. Over time many abstractions emerge, but backing it all up is the big stick. Now, I'm with you, from a moral standpoint it's all abhorrent. As an anarchist I view civilization to be a hack on the human condition, and I see all states as fundamentally authoritarian.

So it's all just game theory to me. China blocked the Manus acquisition as a matter of national interest. The US also ignores international law on matters on national interest at its own convenience.

If a law is unenforceable is it really a law? Anybody can declare a law. It is only meaningful if it can be enforced.

There are regions of Mexico where cartels hold the monopoly on violence, and the longer they maintain that control the more legitimate they become.

The government sits above you because it makes you do things under the threat of violence. Why do you stop at the stop sign? because the government reserves the right to hurt you if you don't.

The government's legitimacy comes from it's stick being bigger than yours. It's not sacred, it's not magic. It's a bigger stick. Your value judgement would have weight if your stick was bigger. The guy with the bigger stick decides what you (or Jack Ma) is worthy of.