SaucyWrong

Thanks, this is an interesting story that I hadn’t read about, and I will do so.

I agree with you that this is not a problem that can be solved with money, and that it is the voluntary surrender of control that might bring a solution. Though as you say, that surrender is elusive amongst the elite. Maybe it could be enshrined contractually or through corporate bylaws, but who knows?

I agree, but I wonder what is the threat model for the CEO saying, “shut up, I’m your employer. Let this person through.”

I’m not sure somebody with an infatuation and ultimate authority over you is something a security person can work into the threat model.

I’m so tired of this refrain. I long for the times where hardware was abundant and attainable for the consumer.

We have a very individualistic attitude, except when it comes to our own failure, where we are too quick to pass blame to someone else.

Just reading now, but sure, I’ll risk the downvotes.

I agree that the American societal zeitgeist has certainly not evolved to a point where we acknowledge luck as a major factor in personal success.

Personal success is attributed to the talent and persistence of the individual.

Personal failures are attributed to character flaws of the individual.

In the US we lionize billionaires because we believe if we are smart enough and work hard enough we could become one. We spare no thought for the role of luck in the rise of a billionaire.

But if we work hard and don’t become a billionaire, best believe it’s somebody else’s fault.

I was surprised to learn this just now.

Me too, I have a 15 year old Panasonic 60” that I’m still daily driving until the proverbial wheels fall off. I’m not looking forward to tv shopping in the smart-garbage-infested marketplace of today…

Not the parent, but sorry, for me, no. And this is a perspective that I don’t think I will ever understand.

This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.

There were so many more repeats of this sort of expression that at one point, I spoke aloud to myself, “we get it dude, you like girls.”

This is the horniest article about general dentistry I’ve read…ever?

Is fiber optic cable actually a high-volume-demand component in all of this? All your other semiconductor picks seem good though.

I can’t short anything due to this. I know something smells but I can never predict when the system will fall apart. And especially recently, the markets seem way too “vibes based” as if even normal securities are all meme stocks now.

> but the consumer is quite healthy this time around

This is one of the more out of touch things I’ve read today. I’m not sure from where you’re sourcing your economic data.

Maybe you’re saying this financial collapse won’t be as bad as 2008? I’d agree with you, that one was singularly dangerous and required large scale government intervention to guarantee that the global financial infrastructure didn’t bust. But this bubble will hurt very badly at a time where the consumer is not as strong as you think.

That’s true, but before you try to shift the blame onto the homeowners, remember that these mortgages were intentionally issued to extremely risky borrowers, and then that risk was intentionally obfuscated when the loans were collateralized. The fault cannot be laid entirely on the borrowers, which is what I sense you’re trying to do here.

Investors bought a lie packaged by the financial institutions. They shouldn’t have believed in the first place because the risk was junk-level but not sold as such.

There is no distinction at this point. If you know your blogs always get picked up by HN, and they do know this, then you know your blog is a de facto and gratis marketing channel and will use it as such.

I’m a software engineer and not a mathematician, and, yeah I read this article and immediately recognized the same pattern from my field. Even in this comment thread is somebody making the “AI is a tool, get over it,” argument. I feel sadness for the mathematicians because I already know the misery that’s coming for their field.

Software engineering has always felt somewhat broken and dysfunctional to me even 20 years ago when I started. And LLM economics have turned into something downright hostile to its practitioners. I don’t have a similar intuition about the field of mathematics. Possibly they are in a better state to have a healthy disagreement about the use of this technology.

The author of this blog isn’t the person this happened to FWIW, this blog appears to be a collection of horror stories from around social media.

Ah yes, my favorite hacker news retort: one is entitled to a prediction if and only if one is prepared to take a huge financial stake in that prediction.

This take has been trotted out so many times, e.g. “How many puts have you bought if you’re so certain?”

Software changes before my eyes constantly via normal releases so I don’t really care if I’m part of an experiment or not.

That’s software though—I see your point for something like content. I’m already used to seeing the title or thumbnail of a YouTube video change as the result of an experiment “winning” but the content itself…that would very jarring.

In my state (Massachusetts), the number of people who call in to the state’s gambling problem hotline doubled after online sports books became legalized. That is, by definition, a negative effect on the public good. The net number of people seeking help for gambling problems increased by 100%.

The user is nothing but a mark to Meta. If you use anything they make, they have you. Someday I hope more people realize this.

I’d love to see a similar three strikes enforcement of bogus claims. N strikes and the copyright immediately enters the public domain. Pick your battles very carefully.

Seems intuitively difficult to implement changes to the law to get this, but I can dream.

I personally don’t think we had a problem at all taking things like Rails and making extremely valuable software with them.

Like, no sort of problem that requires going all-in on tokens to solve. No problem at all, really.

But people think I’m crazy to say that.

So I think it’s a shame that DHH went in so hard on agentic engineering. They didn’t need to do it, they already were printing money.

I already know such a program, his name was Josh and he was my roommate in college.

EDIT: kidding, this looks like fun.

Bravo, the sarcasm went right over my head :)

Yeah again, you’re confusing wealth accumulation for progress.

I dismissed EA a long time ago as a way for already-wealthy people to continue accumulating wealth at any cost while avoiding paying as many taxes as possible in service of a deferred payout to rebuff problems that are intellectually possible but entirely hypothetical.

I’ll cop to not having facts to back up the perception of its software, but its status as an illegal monopoly is cemented by its successful prosecution by the DOJ.

But Facebook is extremely successful. Some crypto companies are very successful. I don’t hold any of these up as exemplars of the progress of humanity.

EDIT: My response to the GP, whose claim was that the only reason for the haters is that in each case they wanted the business to fail because they weren’t part of it, should been, no, actually there were at the time other and valid reasons detractors of those companies thought the way they did, and the same is true this time.

Microsoft is a monopolist that makes some of the most hated products on earth.

Facebook has been shown to derange young minds and has been a nonstop firehose of disinformation into global public discourse.

Crypto moved an insane amount of wealth from the poor to the rich through and uncountable number of scams and empty promises.

These? These are what you call progress? Yes, the created wealth for a few individuals, but progress? No, my friend.

A parent of your comment cited a ProPublica study that references real tax return data that showed billionaires paying an effective tax rate in the single digits. If their accumulated wealth were regarded as regular income, they should be paying 37% on most of the gains. Look it up yourself.

If you look at “net” like you want to, sure, they pay far more in tax dollars than pretty much anybody, but they are able to legally dodge paying tax on most of their wealth accumulation because if the way the IRS treats unrealized capital gains.