sailfast

If I’m Canada I look for a trade agreement rather than associate membership - no reason to put your eggs in one basket.

As an American, I continue to be sad and tired that our current president is somehow allowed to unilaterally destroy a very successful and thriving trade partner via arbitrary tariffs that have already been ruled illegal and while it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference I’m sorry about it.

Don’t give them any ideas.

I just happen to have an extra Pi and an e-ink display sitting around and I LOVE this idea. Going to try it on my screened in porch - we typically get 10-20 Merlin detections on a decent day so this could be fun!

Not a kid - I wish. My point was that (admittedly some not all) societies if faced with a loss of a major utility and supply chains that were dependent on would start to devolve pretty quickly into chaos.

That to me is the greater threat than annihilation due to autonomous weapons, etc.

Yeah it was just one of many potential reasons I listed as a hypothetical - nothing specific to Oracle.

Depends on how many employees are on visas that depend on them working for Oracle I guess...

It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.

Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?

> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.

Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?

Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."

Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.

This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.

This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.

I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.

Have you ever lived through a power outage longer than 48 hours?

Did you see what it did to people in your neighborhood?

That’s the path.

This is the correct approach. I think we can do both things - try to add some controls while also ensuring it’s not a complete giveaway to entrenched interests and investors.

The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.

Would love to see this tested on some of the newer cybersecurity models so we could actually defend ourselves instead of getting cut off at the knees by silly regular expressions.

Hope this approach gets well tested and sees good results so we have a shot at human governance.

This comes from the before times when Internet Explorer was full of holes and Chrome was a usable browser with regular updates and before Firefox worked with all websites well.

Google has since spent the time making Chrome more locked down and user-hostile from a privacy perspective but the conventional wisdom for years was “just use Chrome” (for good reason) and that inertia continues :/

Ok - but the post I was responding to was suggesting we do the opposite and provide the intelligence to the people so I’m not sure how your reply rebuts my suggestions.

It’s a fair point. Definitely depends on the how. I was figuring that adding $500B to a hot part of the economy while the rest of the economy shrinks might nudge a bit toward inflationary tendency, but at this point it’s hard to say what tenets of economics actually hold since the entire concept of “rational actors” went into the dustbin :)

If they’re effectively guaranteeing $500B in loans that adds close to $500B to M1, basically, that banks were not otherwise providing or loaning - at least that was my calculation.

It would also follow that by increasing the money supply significantly they’re also contributing to inflation a great deal correct? (Given the rest of the economy is not growing at near the same rate as the AI industry)

Can we build level IV AI containment labs?

That last part was never important. Trading partners very rarely go to war. There just isn’t much in it for either party. Close cooperation and dependency is actually quite important here - liberal democracy or no.

Not sure you can judge a PBC under those same umbrella as a for profit company, and voting rights make a big difference in terms of responsibility. There are a number of ways to govern companies that can reduce the amount of cynicism and “shareholder value” issues - you just don’t see it very often.

Sorry boss but this ain’t it.

I don’t think the answer to nuclear proliferation is to let everybody have all the nukes they want.

You’re framing this like it’s 1917, or 1945. But it is not - and likely has very little to do with capital at all.

Any “revolution” here (assuming there is some truth in the doomerism which I believe there is given the state of AI) will really look more like an extinction or a genocide, regardless of who holds the keys.

Somebody has probably already asked this, but even if “democratic countries” do this - rogue actors will still destroy the internet right? Is it a matter of resources at this point that we believe China and others are not capable of harnessing to get to the next level?

I just don’t see how you control this other than the mad mad MAD approach that ended up happening with nuclear weapons. In this case though, human hands won’t even be on the trigger.

I hear you, and I've been in similar places.

I don't know you, but I would encourage you talk to a professional about these thoughts as soon as possible. This isn't a judgment, not trying to cut you out - it's just been helpful to me personally. Therapy is really just one more person to hear you, commiserate, and help process life being as hard as it is.

You're telling me the DA would press charges without the actual harmed party wanting to press charges? I suppose it's possible but kinda hard without an actual plaintiff.

They already have a multi 100 billion dollar slush fund from Congress. If they’re doing it for the money then things have really gotten out of hand with internal DHS budgets.

The author goes through this in great detail with some humility in the FAQ.

It’s rich, yes. And the author acknowledges that. Still a cool build!

Do you think their new owners will want to engage in an extended legal battle with a large customer?

My assumption was that engineers were building an AI system to do this, not that they only made PRs from tickets - but I could be wrong.

My assumption was that a settlement would be part of the “cost of doing business in the USA” so they’d pay up to keep importing their products legally rather than lose the market - but you know what they say about assumptions…

We use a SaaS provider for our HOA and it works well, but there is a monthly / annual cost for that. That said, people still insist on posting to Facebook but the group can easily turn to poison and sniping which is super awesome for being neighborly…