pryce

It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years.

the history of how people have conceived of causality between human intelligence and human hands (and in which direction dependency may lie) is quite interesting. "It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals." —Anaxagoras, circa 450 BCE.

I think you should look into NCCAM funding[1], how much that was, and how many useful treatments came out of it, before speculating that 'funding for the research to be undertaken' is the issue stalling clinical acceptance of complementary/alternative treatments like homeopathy. I do believe the amount was about 2 billion US dollars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Complement...

An affable personal relationship with Jeffery Epstein?

Homeopathic medicine is a discredited theoretical explanation for a phenomenon that empirical testing shows does not exist. For 'homeopathy' to be right, it would need the to become 'right' twice - first: new data would need to begin existing, and then second: the homeopathic mechanisms would need to become the most plausible explanation for that data

You ought to read my comment carefully. Singal (not Signal) and Soh are "major figures in transphobia", and Molyneux is a pro-fascism campaigner. The former two (Singal, Soh) are advocates of "gender essentialism", and the latter travels internationally campaigning for the "race essentialism" and policies based on that. As you're aware of both of (Singal,Soh)'s first names already, is it a fair guess that you're already familiar with some of their transphobic work? Perhaps then, that is a good place to start. As just one example, Soh is actually so committed to gender essentialism that it's led her to advocate the approach that: your assigned male at birth teenager who tells you that they're trans and requests to transition is actually gay in my opinion so being affirming to them about that is homophobic ( from her article in reactionary online journal "Quillette").

Soh will of course try to dress that horrific construction from her article up in professional-sounding language, but our duty is in fact to address the thrust of her argument, not whether she attempts to frame it in polite language. You might also recognize Soh from her work in the atrocious Matt Walsh "documentary" that pretends to be about women but is entirely about invalidating trans people.

To make this more clear: Soh's need to provide an explanation for femininity in a person who is assigned male at birth while denying the validity of trans people is only necessary for a person operating from a bioessentialist lens. The need in Soh is so strong that it leads her to make totally unfounded and ridiculous claims in that article, and it also drove her promotion of the discredited (and retracted!) pseudoscientific 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria)' invented by Lisa Littman.

One of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics,

and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities.

The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism

What are the major historical examples where protecting employees from a "hostile workplace" is important? Racism? Misogyny? Homophobia? Do protection from these things look expendable to you?

I'm sure either of us could quickly find a bunch of people who would like to one or several of those acceptable again, yet us finding that such people exist would not tell us a damned thing about whether dismantling those protections is a good idea. Or supposing it does, then one might even make the case that those people existing is an excellent reason for having such a law in the first place.

100% agree. The James Damore flag was immediately taken up by major figures in transphobia (like Singal, Soh, etc) and pro-fascism campaigners (like Molyneux), both of which are political programs are absolutely incompatible with maintaining a non-hostile workplace environment for employees. (and not incidentally, both of which a premised on discredited bioessentialist pseudoscience)

I find it is a deeply cynical move, to be asked to place the James Damore "was it employer overreach-or-not?" episode in similar proportion to critiquing a company's actions regarding issues such as mass surveillance and/or assisting war efforts, especially when the accusations about those broader issues are tied to complicity in the 2020s resurgence in fascist politics. It is so cynical that I can't believe it isn't intentional.

would you allow that it was bad enough to be fairly labeled garbage in 2011, yet could you still concede it has degraded significantly further since then? Or are you arguing that not only was it bad in 2011, but you are contending it hasn't (also) become worse?

I feel like we are going to relive the hyperloop-decline with the specs of proposed orbital datacentres. But the hyperloop was in one regard a success, in that it built temporary hype. Maybe it was even named after that.

> Because technology caught up with them..... a good CPU is good enough for a very long time

This is an excellent point but surely it lampshades that the exact opposite case is true for RAM. How many of apple's laptops become unusable when we know they would be fine for years more with the single addition of increasing the ram? Aside from those ruined by physical damage, it feels to me that this is the way the majority of those devices end their productive life years earlier than they would with a single change.

My opinion regarding RAM is meant to in no way dispute your excellent points about CPU soldering.

This should be a 5 alarm fire. It reminds me of nothing more than organized crime rackets that targeted control of union retirement funds

you're right about psychoanalysis being a stretch, but the article seems to be about the odd popularity among Gen Z, not the younger Gen Alpha. Youngest GenZ is 14yrs old; with a lot of this labubu trend, we're talking teens and upwards, which doesn't often seem to be the case with earlier "crazes" pursuing "cuteness"

I understand some startup deciding to take a punt on "this will all work out financially if our new product demonstrably boosts productivity of large sectors of the economy by a breathtaking factor that's incredibly rarely ever happened before in history: 2x. Sometimes a plucky group of people take a risk, it pays off. If it doesn't work, the company fails.

What I do not understand is: large sectors of the economy all simultaneously taking this punt, with the necessary productivity boost, as you say, far more like: 2x, 5x, 10x

> i'm quite amazed they got any VC money at all.

probably VC bit at the 'agentic' part. Using that word makes some folk lose their minds, and they may then find themselves investing in a whole range of things that they otherwise wouldn't.

I have a strong suspicion the rationale for how they select providers on will turn out to be kickbacks and self-dealing.

If my definition of 'value' was something that was totally contingent on both post-industrial society and an ultracapitalist approach to production, and it made me deduce that human being's lives over thousands of years or in other societies were worth "nothing", I think I would interpret this as a 'reductio-ad-absurdum'. That is, by deducing an absurd conclusion from the premise, that makes a strong argument that my definition of 'value' must be so narrow as to be effectively broken. I would respond by looking for a different, more wide definition of value, among the various ones that have been proposed.

This makes it sound as though doing business with Palantir is akin to doing business with Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman etc. This ignores important, qualitatively different ways that Palantir is worse: eg intentional white supremacist goals from Karp (Oswald Mosley fan) and Thiel (dismantling of multiculturalism), as well as Palantir's role in the surge of surveillance capitalism that treats US citizens as the opponent, rather than the more classic statist-aligned goals of US Govt/US Capital whose contempt for human life and human rights was pointed externally - so, while harmful, was still esstentially compatible with democratic principles.

Thank you, I remember reading this background as well.

There is no 'unedited' version of Anne's diary, as Anne herself intentionally edited and re-edited her work during her time in the Annex. A remarkable young woman. What was published to readers are various versions that have additionally been further somewhat edited by others and in places censored, with the trend being towards gradually less censorship over time.

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

We've already been here in the 1980s.

The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.

> Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

The incentives of different parties / actors are different. 'Everyone' necessarily comprises an extremely broad category, and we should only invoke that category with care.

I could claim "Everyone" wants banks to be secure - and you would be correct to reject that claim. Note that if the actual sense of the term in that sentence is really "almost everyone, but definitely not everyone", then threat landscape is entirely different.

> Besides that, who is going to read this long-ass document?

Plenty of people will encounter snippets of this document and/or summaries of it in the process of interacting with Claude's AI models, and encountering it through that experience rather than as a static reference document will likely amplify its intended effect on consumer perceptions. In a way, the answer to your second question answers your first question.

It is not that the document isn't used to train the models, of course it is. Instead the objection is whether the actions of the "AI Safety" crew amount to "expedient marketing strategies" or whether it's instead a "genuine attempt to produce a tool constrained by ethical values and capable of balancing them". The latter would presumably involve extremely detailed work with human experts trained in ethical reasoning, and the result would be documents grappling with emotionally charged and divisive moral issues, and much less concerned with to convincing readers that Claude has "emotions" and is a "moral patient".

If instead of looking at it as an attempt to enshrine a viable, internally consistent ethical framework, we choose to look at it as a marketing document, seeming inconsistencies suddenly become immediately explicable:

1. "thou shalt not destroy the world" communicates that the product is powerful and thus desirable.

2. "do not generate CSAM" indicates a response to the widespread public notoriety around AI and CSAM generation, and an indication that observers of this document should feel reassured with the choice of this particular AI company rather than another.

From the wiki: currently supported devices does not appear to support the recent Kobo eReaders

A wall street journal opinion columnist - Shrier- with zero medical training wrote a book to create a moral panic in the public about trans teens, based on the discredited ideas from Lisa Littman's ROGD "research", where in this case the word "research" actually means: reports from parents recruited from well-known anti-trans websites.

Increasing social acceptibility and awareness is not mysterious to people who understand that many perceptions about gender are constructions that occur in social contexts.

Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.

Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.

I have no interest in your JAQing off[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions

To claim there are not really any other candidates for a skew (in that direction or the other) you would have to (like Shrier herself) go out of your way to not bother to talk to trans people, or their doctors, or their families, or sociologists, or talk to any of the people who spend their lives researching gender, what it means, how it affects us, what assumptions we make, whether those ideas stack up when confronted with empirical research, etc etc. I'm not really interested in discussing further with a 30 minute old account.

> Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a surveillance database"

No, instead she is likely to avoid talking in abstractions and instead talk about personal experiences of getting stalked online by multiple people she has had to show her details to in the past, who may include storekeeps, police, university staff, etc, etc. Eva Galperin is an excellent source on the way many of our procedures are designed in ways that do not at all account for the potential of stalking and harassment, though her focus is on how this continues to unfold in the technology space.

moral panics are useful for creating authoritarian states. If a moral panic is not presently available, in 2025 it may be easier it's ever been before to cultivate one.