pibaker

Do you think they are household names in major Chinese labs?

I don't have any insight into the Chinese AI ecosystem. But just from how they act on the English speaking internet, I don't see the influence of these Bay Area visionaries.

If you have a kid who ask you for a toy and you give him, and then he throws a tantrum and smashes the toy on the floor, you don't just pretend nothing happened and buy him the same toy again.

Why? Because what you are teaching him is he can throw as many tantrums he wants and face no consequences. It gets worse if you have other kids — if he can throw a tantrum and get away with it, why not me too?

He can have that toy again, but not before he learns the lesson and knows his place.

Not communism, just cold hard game theory. Sorry your feelings got hurt.

It's crazy how much deference is given to farmers compared to every other occupation.

If the garbage men started dumping the contents of garbage bags in public places I bet they will not be given a free pass.

> As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.

I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?

It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.

No disagreement. It is very unfortunate that our policymakers seem to like the spectacle hurting the average person who happened to have been born in the wrong country more than going after the ones actually holding power.

For human rights violations at home and sponsorship of extremism aboard.

I also believe many of our current "allies" in the region should face similar sanctions in case you are wondering.

Sanctions on Iran are justified. But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.

Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.

Big empty words are probably cheaper to produce than concise, information rich text of the same length.

Off topic, but I have always wondered if the real advantage of an AI therapist is it has little power over you and will not snitch you to the authorities if you say something "wrong." People walk on eggshells when talking to human therapists because they know if they say something about hurting themselves or others, they can end up in a mental institution, losing their jobs, the custody of their children, their home, everything. AI companies seem to just not care enough to monitor the chats for these kind of things. For better or worse.

If you are gonna snark anyway then why ask for real human reply at all? Let's make out in the muddy, sloppy style, shall we?

There should be a law mandating government agencies to not limit their electronic communications to private third party platforms.

If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.

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

I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.

Thinking everyone who disagrees with him is a part of a coordinated campaign is just classic gangstalking delusion.

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

Sorry but I don't understand this line of reasoning. You worry about a smart TV going online without your permission and yet you trust it enough to keep it around your home and keep it online???

I don't mean to be rude but it sounds like you just don't want to confront the rest of your household about taking the TV offline and are coming up with excuses to tell yourself this is actually fine.

I am generally very skeptical of AI doomsday scenarios but one thing I am worried about is some wannabe dictator telling an AI to do something that would be difficult for a human military to do.

You can't order an army of humans to kill every protestor in their way because eventually they run into their friends and families. An AI aligned with the commander will not object. And just like that, technology removes yet another point of friction that has kept human society somewhat in check.

What had he produced in the years prior to AI getting good enough for coding? All I know is he was on Zuckerberg's sinking metaverse boat for years, and then nothing else.

Maybe it's him, maybe it's his employer. I don't know. I am skeptical of AI's impact on work myself but I just don't think AI is the only thing to blame here.

> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause

Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing the next version of the AI that will kill us all.

Many Americans seem to think other nations are NPCs in a video game that only exist to make the main character — the US of A — feel good. They conveniently forget that other nations have their own national interests that are often at odds with ours.

This line of thinking might have worked in 1950 or 1990 when the US had the leverage over others, but we don't live in that world anymore. And it's up to us to get used to the new world instead of making bad decisions based on the one we grew up in.

It's East Bay, you know which bay. The cultism is in the water.

One day I will say fuck it and run for president with my sole policy being fire and brimstone upon San Francisco and its vicinity.

"I can afford ferrari. I just don't want to pay the price."

I don't know how global consistency is actually useful, but I can easily think of ways it is less convenient.

For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?

These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.

This is your opponent's lawyer speaking. Don't let business decorum and scary legal words scare you. Keep posting through it like a real thought leader!

LLMs are incredible tools if you are knowledgeable enough about what you want to spell out exactly what you want it to implement for you. The long tail of Wordpress users are, in my experience, not knowledgeable enough to come up with their own solution.

There is nothing more stigmatizing and dehumanizing than the idea that there is a class of human condition that is taboo to describe in words.

Both have sped up front end development at the cost of making half of the internet look the same.

Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?

I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not like that. You are free to read his posts from the WP Engine lawsuit, including his post on hacker news, or his prior posts from some tumblr moderation drama. To me, the consistency and degree of his actions crosses the boundary of "bad day at work" and lands firmly in the "crazy guy in the park screaming at squirrels" territory. In fact, I'd argue that if he doesn't have tech wealth and was instead working a more traditional white collar job he might have already ended up just like that.

I wonder if GP would change his mind if he had witnessed Matt posting through the lawsuit in this very own website.

Yep. What Stallman and his friends call "free software" would not exist if not for the copyright system. The company legal team who tell you to not touch any GPL code would love to see the licensing enforcement mechanism be abolished.

Is drunk driving safe if you happen to not crash the last time you did it?

What's the point of having a photo like that?

Is spending time with your friends not enough in 2026? Do we must provide photographic evidence of all the fun you have been having or it did not happen?