marcuschong

It's hard for me to see much difference between Amodei and Sama. My guess is they're both savvy SV CEOs who will bend their message, alliances and principles pretty far if that's what it takes to get ahead. Musk and Zuck feel like something else entirely, with all the reactionary imagery, populist bullshit and the societal damage around their platforms.

I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.

I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.

That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.

My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.

What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.

I'm regularly afraid of things like that, not only for drinking too much coke but also for not having exactly the healthiest lifestyle overall. I've tried reducing coke a few times with some luck here and there, but eventually got back to it everytime. For now, my annual checkups are good.

My dentist, annual consultation.

I've been drinking loads of coke Zero (up to 3 liters a day, these days it's about 2 liters), and my teeth are fine. I'm 40 and have been drinking it for most of my life, it started when I was about 16, with regular coke back then. Maybe I'm lucky.

Emily Watson about the movie: "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

I really enjoyed reading John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine column when I was just getting started in tech. His contrarian style was a nice change from most tech columnists at the time. He had a grumpy but oddly likable personality, and I even enjoyed No Agenda for a while and his occasional TWiT appearances.

That's why I have such mixed feelings about him. Somewhere along the way, being a contrarian seemed to become an end in itself. He became a Trump fan, and the No Agenda agenda increasingly drifted toward questioning well-established facts, from climate science to questioning the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Real Alex Jones shit.

Something I've been wondering about is whether fake news and these alternative realities people live in will eventually have a material impact on their lives.

In my country, where the political divide is huge, I know people who are very successful professionally and financially, yet believe all sorts of things that seem completely detached from reality. For example, I have a cousin who was convinced that if a certain presidential candidate won, the government would confiscate people's savings. Her solution was to convert a large part of her savings into jewelry.

She's highly educated. She also gets a lot of her information about climate change from a fortune teller on Instagram. I know that sounds made up, but it's not.

What's interesting to me is that, despite all this, their lives seem to go on just fine. Maybe they're a bit more anxious than they need to be, but they don't seem materially worse off because of these beliefs.

It makes me wonder whether we're just in an unusual transition period. As it becomes harder to trust what we see online, and as misinformation gets more convincing, will there eventually be a real advantage to consistently relying on reputable sources.

I don't think my 18-month-old had any problems from watching a little Miss Rachel and Baby Einstein here and there. However, the few times my mother showed her cute animal videos on Instagram, it was a completely different story. She became obsessed with the phone and would fuss and scream whenever my mother put it away. It was pretty incredible. We banned it pretty quickly.

It's curious that the person claiming LLMs will soon skip code entirely and go straight to binary is willing to spend $60bn on Cursor.

At 14:52