jknoepfler

The irony being that the pieces of Western culture one might reasonable feel smug about (government of checks and balances, democracy, high standard of care for the worst off, careful jurisprudence with presumption of innocence, scientific freedom and literacy, free public education, etc.) are precisely the foundations that MAGA and their ilk despise and work so hard to undermine.

Like if you're going to get patriotic about post-enlightenment values and institutions, that's one thing... if you're going to just act like a bigoted, might-makes-right, my-country-right-or-wrong, personality-worshiping, science-denying, uneducated xenophobic dipshit, then you don't have much to be proud of.

Why would that matter? The drug company will price their product to maximize profit in whatever regulatory regime they're selling in. (I have no idea).

note that this would be extremely bad for the poorer country that is currently able to purchase medicine, and would probably results in net worse health outcomes globally.

the free market is just not the correct way to set drug prices, and never has been.

See! Consumer safe. (/s)

I don't think it's rational to believe that big pharma is giving charity to Mexico. It's $100 a vial in Mexico because that's the optimal price to sell it in Mexico to maximize profit, not because it's subsidized by unregulated price-gouging in the United States.

Tom Cruise famously does his own stunts, one of which involved driving a motorcycle off a cliff. That does not mean it is advisable or repeatable to drive your motorcycle off a cliff.

You committed your own fallacy of applying a sloppy heuristic to understanding the person you were responding to without bothering to check if it applies. Spectacular. The comical levels of arrogance that infect over-hyped tech marketing boondoggles (one area among many in which GenAI is clearly similar to self-driving cars) is one of the reasons nobody trusts the hype anymore.

The breathless astroturf articles, the brain-dead talking head conversations, the endless flood of obvious misinformation about industry uptake, the nauseating LinkedIn puff-pieces about PREPARING YOUR ENTERPRISE OR ELSE... it's a hostile information economy at best, and its being driven by the same people who brought you bullshit like self-driving, crypto and the Metaverse... for the exact same reasons (to get rich).

There's no epistemic credibility left in the tech industry in general. Maybe the Dario's or whoevers of the world believed what they were talking about at one point, but I don't believe a single word I read from Anthropic or OpenAI for the same reason I don't believe anything I read from Russian state media. I know it's being produced for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.

As someone who interacts with the technology on a daily basis at a non-trivial level... I'm not seeing anything that would cure my skepticism about GenAI. The information economy surrounding it is broken. The fundamentals don't line up. The hype about "nearby capabilities" is identical to the hype of generations after generations of hype in the AI space (dating at least back to Turing). It smells like a bad bet.

A healthy measure of my personal skepticism comes from the fact that GenAI represents the convergence of so many historically negative (and frankly idiotic) influences.

- AI hype-mongers. We've dealt with these for decades in academia and industry, through countless boom/bust cycles. Yes, there's progress, but reality is boring and selective.

- Tech Bros. NFTs? The MeTaVeRsE? The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX have proven repeatedly to be dishonest grifters chasing all and only money. They're like the tobacco industry of laughably dishonest at this point (and consistently wrong).

- Singularity grifters. The Kurzweil cultists flooding the ranks of lesswrong feel suddenly emboldened. They've been issuing batshit proclamations and navel gazing about AI alignment to anyone who will pay attention to them (and write them a check) for decades. It's no more connected to reality now than it was then.

- The LinkedIn hivemind. If you aren't transforming your organization to meet the new GenAI future, your company is BEHIND and you are FAILING AS A LEADER. Be the one firing white collar workers, not the one being fired. Make sure you look good on paper with bullshit performative AI initiatives or your ass is dust. Oh, no ROI? No problem. Read my book on NAVIGATING THE ENTERPRISE AI TRANSFORMATION. It's skin-deep and filled with empty platitudes and clip art, but it will make you look like a big brave tech leader, just like Steve Jobs or Dario.

- Investors. Yes, we're in a bubble. Yes, we've been in a bubble before. Yes, it's going to pop. Yes, that's going to be bad. Really bad, probably. Remember the financial crisis? Investors don't. And this time, there won't be a deep-pocketed government to bail anyone out, because debt is already sky-high and we're still recovering from COVID.

So while I get there's something there, and I'm keeping abreast of it and extracting the best and leaving the worst, it is an exhaustingly negative experience. My guard is up and I have absolutely run out of patience for bullshit. It's not funny or smart or interesting. It's not even fun to complain about. The forces in the mix are awful and I don't want anything to do with them.

If a craftsman injures themselves or a co-worker with a faulty tool, the tool manufacturer is very often liable for damages. I struggle to see GenAI any differently.

Please take 5 seconds to fact check yourself with a very quick query against your information source of choice.

Over ~95 degrees, a fan blowing on a human acts as a convection oven, increasing body temperature while dehydrating the body.

This is greatly exacerbated in extreme heat.

CDC guidance is to avoid using a fan in extreme heat conditions unless it is combined with a cooling source and careful hydration. Once again, not exactly an option in a Texas prison.

Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.

Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.

There is a absolutely no nuance to this.

72% of job postings on company career sites are closed within 90 days. Pretty sweet.

Hard disagree about "more intelligent". They are playing a financial game using a combination of leverage and reptilian ruthlessness to EBITDA hack.

They buy one (or more) companies, often with only the slimmest understanding of what those companies do, slash opex by gutting the company with layoffs (yay EBITDA), maybe staple a few such companies together with leveraged buy-outs, then resell the whole bundle for more than they paid.

From experience, they don't give a single crap whether the resulting mess still functions. They care about selling the company for more than they bought it for. That prospect is only tenuously and at best accidentally related to whether the company still functions.

The private equity companies I've had to deal with were full of braindead MBA spreadsheet monkeys and used car salesmen. Their chief differentiator was that they worked 80 hours a week and were enthusiastic about laying people off without much deliberation.

Thinking private equity is "more intelligent" than business owners is like thinking house flippers are "more intelligent" than home owners. No. They know how to rip out carpet and replace it with laminate on the cheap. They know how to cut corners and hide it. They know buyers will over value a fresh veneer of paint. They don't give a shit about the long-term health or value of the house. They are not better stewards of houses. They specialize in short-term profit maximization and that is literally it.

They have suffered from abuse because of unregulated police. They have not suffered because of police simpliciter.

Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.

Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.

A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.

And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.

The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.