wpietri
Joined 19 years ago
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59,404
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14,462
Member since
Aug 28
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 days ago
AGI has been prominent in pop culture since at least 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is a place in our heads for it. And really I think that's just the modern version of anthropomorphic spirits: angels, devils, gods, etc. It gives AGI a feeling of inevitablility.
Of course, things like jetpacks and flying cars also have had that feeling. As well as Stephenson's metaverse.
Comment · 2 days ago
There are a surprising number of people who think the only fair game is "heads I win, tails you lose".
Comment · 2 days ago
Agreed. And I'd add that some managers/execs think abuse is fun, or at least necessary. They're always looking to pick up a new stick to beat people with. Their peers and superiors frequently mistake it for competence and toughness.
Comment · 3 days ago
It's still useful for the portion of the audience that doesn't realize the depth of the fraud.
Comment · 25 days ago
That analysis seems pretty confused to me. Freedom without accountability for harm to others is nonsensical.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
Comment · 25 days ago
Yes, that's part of what I'm saying. The notion is absurd. The main point of a car for most people is inescapably social.
People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.
Comment · 25 days ago
It's only required on public roads. You can drive on your own property all you like without plates.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
Comment · 1 month ago
You said that people could do a thing. I'm asking why they would.
Academic fraud is done to boost the reputation of the academic. There isn't a lot of point in academic fraud with one paper on each of 50 fake names.
Comment · 1 month ago
What's the motivation to do that? Academic fraud is about building up a name.
Comment · 1 month ago
Chicago is pretty great, bub. This year I opened a pinball museum here, so I can testify that it's a fine place to run a business. Some friends just came from the Bay Area for a week and had a lovely time. If only for your mental health, you should step out of your media bubble now and again
Comment · 1 month ago
Pretty well, honestly. Somebody with both technical knowledge and familiarity with a particular subculture can get access to entertainment videos with some work. But they've managed to keep piracy economically negligible. Basically everybody uses streaming services, 90% of US households pay for at least 1, and the average household pays for 4. [1]
Brand was wrong. Information doesn't want to be free, just cheap.
[1] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/how-much-us-households-spen...
Comment · 1 month ago
The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.
In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.
I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).
Comment · 1 month ago
I don't understand why that matters. We can't act in 1970. We can act today. So we should be looking at biggest current problems and the highest-ROI fixes.
Comment · 1 month ago
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
Comment · 1 month ago
That, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.
Per Penny Arcade [1], anonymous accounts being jerks get less leeway from me than people being respectful and/or standing behind their words.
All comments here are my own. I do not speak for my employer.
[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19