landryraccoon

The business case reason Russia would have a central orchestrator in a Russian data center is that they want centralized control. They are unlikely to delegate control of the information sphere to another, or allow a huge random mass of uncoordinated individuals just “post positive stuff about Russia”.

Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.

This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.

> Don't fool yourself into thinking that we as technologists are not creating a mind.

I'm not sure exactly why but the phrase "don't fool yourself" sets off paranoid alarm bells when I'm reading something.

It's usually immediately followed by a confident assertion without firm evidence. It feels very much like someone wants me to change my beliefs without presenting a rational argument why I should change, and without giving me any new facts so I feel more well informed.

This post doesn't seem to be a counterexample.

Do you hate joy? People like things. I’m more suspicious of someone who judges people for liking things.

Seems fine to me. If people like it why be a curmudgeon about it?

The old company made a mistake by not rebuilding, there was demand for ice cream at that location and somebody met that demand. Now people can eat ice cream under an old timey sign like they want to, good for them.

That’s already backfiring because high housing costs drive down the birth rate.

If the next generation is smaller than the previous generation, housing prices will collapse.

We're talking about gaming here.

What other goal is there than maximizing your subjective enjoyment of the game?

Sure if you're a professional streamer, your feels are maybe less important than engagement metrics but if you're just a casual?

Dude just play what feels good. It's literally the best and only metric.

China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.

Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.

Teenagers and people in their 20 don’t need these drugs anyway, and they’re the ones who should be most concerned about long term effects.

But people in their 50s and older? What long term effect is going to show up before they die? At age 70 or 80 long term effects are basically completely irrelevant.

> The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown.

That fact alone doesn't demonstrate nuance. It's possible that 5% of the population was innocent and treated as scapegoats, or chosen randomly, or that anyone high profile regardless of guilt was chosen to die.

Unless there's data on who was actually innocent or guilty, the mere fact that extermination was selective doesn't mean it was in any way accurate.

If one civilization is taking revenge on another I don’t think they would show that much nuance.

For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?

I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.

This blog post feels really fishy to me.

It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.

For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.

For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.

What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?

I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing.

Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.

This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.

Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.

Are you counting rent as a subscription fee?

If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.

If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.

Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.

The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.

The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.

It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.

Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.

It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.

TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.