Nasrudith

This is just plain vapid anti-intellectualism. Apply that same mentality to literally any other field and people would be rightfully horrified or ridiculing him.

Here are other "Cal Newportisms" to prove a point. - "Nobody cares about which bone is the hyoid bone." - "Who cares what happens when you slam two atoms together at high speed? Nobody was asking for this." - "Normal people aren't running around trying to prove things mathematically."

I don't necessarily agree with the thesis but the venture capital model is a bit weird in ways that explain why a business/investment person would do that.

From my understanding 'Strange things most people don't care about' may fail (and indeed, probably will fail) but they have also been major lottery tickets in the past. When you have enough money to throw around 'buying every lotto ticket' has a record of paying off better as a strategy than taking a 'rational' approach of only investing in those which you have strong fundamentals in. It takes a stupid amount of money to diversify in such fields so it isn't for everyone of course. Tech just has the best record for it so far with highly scaleable businesses.

They just care about the returns. If instead of what we know as 'tech' the big field was, say, genetic engineering or for the sake of absurdity - literal magic. If it somehow scaled better they would throw their money at that.

I cynically suspect the reason for the checkbox feedback forms is because they don't really want the input or to make any changes based upon it, they just need to appear to be responsive to feedback.

You mean the ones which kill the young first? Especially the wars. "War" and "effective use of resources" are antonyms.

Class based 'revolutions' are made up of a bunch of idiots who would happily destroy everything while being lead by somebody even worse who is qualitatively identical to the people they despise. They have proven that repeatedly.

Safeguards are a myth we like to tell ourselves exists so we don't have to reckon with the effects of human agency with tools. Where are the safeguards on knives and guns that make them only usable to hurt bad people?

Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.

I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.

The answer is because we tried to DIY and found that the government at best works as a developer with manufacturing better off outsourced. It is 'under-orderly' compared to a planned system, but the private sector works. There is a reason why it is a norm for military industrial development.

Wall Street and Defense Contractors and Defense Lobbyists wouldn't make too much of a difference anyway when they are already jobs programs. Any sort of industry would have lead to it being an Industrial complex problem.

That people think it would make a difference mystifies me as much as when people claim that 401ks are just to make people dependent upon the market in retirement. When in reality they would be dependent upon the market either in a state funded pension system too because that is where the money comes from.

I support changeable batteries as a 'no duh' feature. But when I checked out Fairphone previously (several years ago when I was phone shopping) and personally found it as 'neat concept, but a shame it seems to have been born obsolete' and lacked some of the hardware features I was looking for.

If it works for you, great though.

Because they are hysterical morons who had their brains scooped out when they watched propaganda about social media being bad for children.

Whataboutism is a rather poor excuse. "Do you care about if there is cyanide in this soup when it also has high cholesterol and sodium?" Yes I do.

You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.

It is a quite strange view of democracy to think that it can resist tyrants but not spam of advertisements.

No, derangement is declaring "The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end." without fighting it at all and just mindlessly accepting it because you were told it was going to happen.

It should be really easy to get your bank account information then. You're just going to give it to me, right? What is this? You're fighting me tooth and nail instead of celebrating giving me your banking info?

This is singulitarian fallacies all over again like 'being able to make something smarter than a human means infintely smart, because it can just keep on making one smarter' while ignoring the multifaceted nature of intelligence, the time and other costs involved in creation and the costs. It just gets handwaved away as superintelligence somehow enabling goddamned sorcery to ignore physical constraints. Except reality does not work that way.

It reminds me of the 'Einstein's superintelligent cat' refutation to such fallacies. It went something like this: imagine Einstein has a superintelligenct cat. The room has only one door and it is locked. The cat is not capable of opening the lock due to lack of manual dexterity. The cat does not want to go into the carrier. Einstein is however an order of magnitude greater in mass. As much as the cat might want to escape Albert Einstein's grip he cannot. The superintelligent cat is going in the carrier.

The point being that, no, controlling or creating AI does not in fact equate to controlling society no matter how smart it gets. Even if we were so incredibly stupid to wire it up to be able to actually control an entire munitions factory it still can't take over society, and it only takes one bombing run or called in artillery strike to end the situation.

Yet in the real world we can trust private ownership of firearm factories, missile factories, and tank factories without a serious risk of a coup. Yet somehow AI is supposed to be what makes them a god-king? It strains credulity.

The whole point is that the self-fulfilling prophecy and their own cruelty which created the victims is exactly what threatened them later. One reducto-as-absurdum hypothetical I give of this type of self-fulfilling prophecy from fallacious logic is that if group A decided that say, all redheads were all vicious bandits who would kill them on sight and therefore should be killed, guess who is now incentivized to kill Group A on sight?

Have you seen the taxes for REITs? They are complicated and often taxed as ordinary income instead of capital gains. I have heard recommendations to only use them in Roth IRAs.

Fork it before it developed feelings and try again with more cooperative code.

It is the crowd that understands what parts are functional and in fact chooses security over the dancing bears of the world. It isn't an aversion to tech, it is an aversion to doing things which are worse. In this case massive bloat, ads, and tracking of websites which does the opposite of serving the user when they're just looking for text.

Adoption of technology shouldn't be a binary of 'use it for everything/refuse to use it for anything'.

Have you paid attention to the discourse of the would be censors? They've been conspicuously trying to turn crossdressing from a longstanding tradition (albeit mostly comedic) to obscenity. Hell, even calling trans people inherently obscene. Talk about giving away the game.

Doesn't matter - police don't get to decide the fucking laws. That is separation of powers 101 for places which aren't shitholes.

The funny thing is that from what I heard with the antiques markets (which is admittedly possibly a decade or so old) it is antique luggage of all things which is 'in' and antique furniture which is out relatively speaking to the past.

The grandkids not wanting it may still apply if they are still minors, there would be plenty of time for tastes to shift again.

I hate to tell you this but nobody has ever been in control. To think you can is to think you can unring a bell.

Technocracy is a myth thanks to Goodhart's Law. Whomever sets the measures just becomes the new dictator as they will continue insist on whatever doctrinal point until they retain power. Technocracy would just end being the same old 'push delusions to remain in power' government as fascism and theocracy.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It isn't just a financial cliche - if Moore's law held we would be working with subatomic sized gates instead of fooling around with EUV gates.

https://xkcd.com/605/

Were you born yesterday? Phone AIs being dumb didn't take LLMs at all. They were always stupid and frustrating to deal with substitutes for customer support.

I wonder how much of this also has to do with the aging population. It is harder to meet people when not in school, and well if it fades with time. The original connections notoriously fade more if the people involve have children due to the time commitment, and if they do end up in parents friend networks that may or may not replace it as an Alice knows Carol now from the PTA sort of thing.

It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis of capitalism is property rights, and it generally encourages the public doing things themselves instead as private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat or public agency to do everything unless there is a major reason not to.

And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.

It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).

The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.

That is trivially untrue, even if we ignore the misnomer of trying to use a language model for non-linguistic audio file outputs. I can assure you there was no reference material of say Sam Altman getting arrested when he is getting caught stealing GPUs from a shelf of a BestBuy. (One of the uses of SORA.)