tessierashpool

first, if somebody tries to cheat you, and you walk away, that's just not what losing looks like. that's the right move.

second, no, it's not good. it opens with clickbait, pivots to some other topic, so the first question is "what is it really about?"

they don't tell you what it's really about. they make you read the whole article to find out.

even if you're willing to accept people acting in bad faith, you still need to be able to assess if the article's worth reading. the only signal on that topic is the disrespect they showed to your normal process for doing so.

it would have been easy to fix with "here's what the article is about, and why the hyperbole almost works:" followed by a sentence which did that job.

they don't do that. instead they introduce a character without explaining who he is, so you have to click a link to find out (but again, no signal as to whether or not you should care). then you get a whole bunch of intricate code specifics, again without any signal about why you should care.

it's a very consistent theme. you're not going to get a good article out of an experience where you have to click external links and go several paragraphs deep just before learning "it's probably still going to be about enums" and "these people have no respect for either my time or the general principle that writing should be clear."

The author used an LLM. The first paragraph has two em dashes (turned into hyphens) and a typical overlong list. The second paragraph has an em dash the human author turned into a semicolon, and the third has one he turned into a colon. The fourth paragraph does the colon substitution several times.

The fifth paragraph is so obviously machine-generated I don't understand why people are even discussing this blog post at all:

This is the other cost - invisible to many, sometimes including the ones who handle the toil work. Every team has toil, and it is almost never prioritized. But you already knew this one, so I won’t spend more words to say that toil is an important signal that there is work waiting to be discovered.

If all you want to do is post prompt outputs on your blog, I think a) you should be honest about it and b) you have an obligation to write very interesting prompts.

Might even be more useful to just share those.

one is marketing.

the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.

they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.

There's even (disputed) allegations that Bush Sr funneled money and weapons to bin Laden in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If true, the big 2006 enemy was a 1986 ally.

That's a question any lawmaker has already had to ask about technology all the time.

I'm not saying they came up with great answers, but there's nothing qualitatively new about that.

The stochastic factor doesn't change the fact that companies have to be accountable for the harms their software causes. That's just basic liability law.

definitely a request to fulfill.

they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?

I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck

edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing

also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.

the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.

this conflation is extremely unhelpful

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.

first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.

second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.

third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.