legitster

I had the pleasure of riding around once in a Detroit Electric. To call it a tea parlor on wheels would have been an understatement. It came equipped with a flower vase, and instead of a steering wheel (how unladylike!) it came with a tiller that would sit across your lap.

These were cars for very wealthy elite women. But just as big of a deal as it was for women to drive - these cars in particular did not require a servant to start, operate, or service.

> "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time"

I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.

Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.

> Special assistance like emergency lending or direct capital infusions to prop up insolvent A.I. companies’ operations or prevent their orderly resolutions through ordinary bankruptcy processes

I appreciate the signal to the lending industry to cool the brakes on this stuff, and that the they are specifically targeting golden parachutes. But legislation like this is at best largely performative.

If the economy ends up crashing because the bubble popped, and legislators can't intervene to prevent a knock-on collapse, they are going to be out of their jobs anyway.

This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)

Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?

I mean, it's a patent reality.

Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.

In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!

The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.

Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.

Sometimes. It is just as likely to work backwards where common words becomes divisive or even slurs.

In the linked example, I don't think the author in question meant to make light of slavery when comparing it to their victimhood.

This is a classic "motte and bailey" argument.

Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.

The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.

Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.

Here's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong:

- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.

- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.

- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.

- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.

- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.

- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.

The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.

This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.

The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.

Trumps spent hours every day on the campaign trail rambling random ideas off the top of his head. He "telegraphed" everything from baby bonds, flying cars, free women's healthcare, "Freedom Cities", etc.

The reality is that he promised so many things to so many people that no matter what he does it can be spun to look calculated.

Regardless, from a realpolitik point of view, it's easier to remind people that are not getting what they wanted and were tricked, rather than try to convince them they were wrong this whole time.

But then they also tried raising revenue through tariffs.

So they DID massively try raising taxes, just on everybody.

> From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts.

The administration successfully passed through some recisissions (the ones that gutted the entire USAID program, CPB, and etc) and passed the OBBBA. To say the "backed out" I think is a bit too generous. They essentially threw out anything that wasn't hard bolted down by the Constitution.

The reality is there is not any real way to achieve significant cuts without entitlement reforms or defense cuts (lol).

What's really striking is the current administration performed one of the most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory. And despite the massive amount of disruption caused (and to be caused) there is almost nothing to show for it financially. Just pennies in the ashtray of a Lamborghini.

Obviously the people behind it were not serious, and did nothing to actually address government waste or reform the welfare system. But the result is the same - the idea of cost cutting as a means of addressing the deficit is effectively dead. There is no dry powder on the "slash budgets" side of the ledger. All that's left is raising taxes. (Or do nothing until there's an actual hyperinflation event).

The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.

If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".

If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.