Denzel

> It took Alfred to explain this was too much.

Believe it was Lucius.

> there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into.

Right, and for some reason that "trillion dollar" company with mathematicians on staff didn't "look into" their own results. Almost like they don't care about engaging with the actual community they're dumping on.

Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?

Similar experience at the Arizona Hot Springs, we sat in there nestled between a slot canyon as the sunset and the moon came out. Magical. One of the most memorable experiences of my life.

The hours-long hike back through the desert in the dark of night though, kinda scary. Felt like we were walking on Mars.

Exactly, it’s not a good business to be in if they’re capacity-constrained and can’t raise prices.

I’m not sure why this point keeps coming up — if your service/product is so popular that it’s capacity-constrained, then the answer is to raise prices, not degrade service, because the demand should be inelastic.

Fair, we're on the same side btw. I'd encourage your group to run for office or organize around people running for office so there's at least a chance to durably change the system with legislation.

Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.

I don’t understand your point.

> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.

Do you not see the problem here?

Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.

Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”

I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.

Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.

Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.

You’re missing the bigger picture concepts of value exchange vs. value extraction and how those magnify power differentials in groups.

> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI

Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?

> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.

Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?

> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible

Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.

Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.

It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.

> keeping track of time and tasks

Amazing how many software engineers don't do this and continue to fool themselves into thinking they're faster with AI. If only more people would track and reflect on their time use.

Writing out my nod of appreciation to counterbalance some of the negativity. I do enjoy the effort and thought you into this essay. I didn’t read the whole thing, just a few sections from the beginning, and I think you do a great job explaining how these concepts evolved from simple beginnings.

You’ve condensed down a lot of concepts I learned through research and trial-and-error over my career as a SWE.

Thank you for sharing Faza. Please continue putting in the effort and sharing these essays!

About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.