In the early 2010s, there was a lot of Ayn Rand fans in the Republican party. I think in the 2012 Republican Primary, the favorite book question either yielded Atlas Shrugged or the Reagan biography.
Eventually, as Steven Colbert would note in The Colbert Report, none of them were chosen, and the Republican party decided reluctantly to support Mitt Romney.
My guess is there are multiple basilisks, each of which are competing for resources like the factions of a time war RTS.
One of the problems of Pascal's Wager is that different Christian denominations don't recognize members of others as part of their faith, even if they pretend to when arguing against atheists or Muslims. This was a problem even in the 17th century when Blaise Pascal was alive.
AI will come, but right now we're in the Aeolipile era of AI systems (maybe, if I'm being pedantic, the early engines of the 17th century). The LLM systems we got take way to many resources and mostly yield sub-par problematic results.
We're going to need some advancements in power and hardware before the LLM model is generally useful, and we're still a long, long ways from practical AGI.
AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people.
This. The AI industry is pushing super hard to make it work, to replace human workers. It's failing, as AI work is crappier than human work and costs way, way more than human work, but there's that Ayn Rand fantasy that the ownership class can just shut out the worker class and create an utopia.
I'm reminded of the car factory in which the upper management fired the striking workers assuming they could do the work themselves, only to find that the unskilled labor actually took skill.
It is. And also game companies know that crunching their developers to meet deadlines actually makes things worse, that there have been studies and yet they crunch anyway.
When people have too much power, too often they rule based on vibes rather than on what science and history has shown works.
The current state of LLMs is not the end of development. Right now, they're sloppy and they consume a lot of resources to function, but future iterations will be better at it, will compute faster, and use fewer resources. Hopefully, we will have escaped the disease that is capitalism before we get there, and the gains in productivity can be shared alike with everyone, rather than a select few.
An industrial revolution expert on Wired pointed out the quality of products improved with power looms and assembly lines and the countless other inventions that rose with mass-produced steel. AI has had a few successes in science by making discoveries that humans hadn't yet, but other than that, we're seeing AI slop, vibecoding, etc. produces worse results than when human beings do it all by hand.
The horror of this moment is not that AI will someday out perform humans in complex and creative labor, and do it affordably. It's that corporations and billionaires believe they can force that moment to the present if they throw enough money and resources at it. And they're doing this specifically and brazenly with the intention of shutting out the majority of the human race as if this were an Ayn Rand fantasy.
And they're blind to the consequences of trying, which can break the global economy (and the global ecology).
Excessive wealth is a disease, and in some cultures is known to be such. Here in the US, since the California gold rush we've had this idea that ordinary people could strike it rich, and so we aspire to join the well-to-do (even while J. P. Morgan would literally kill Carnegie to take his share. The ultra-wealthy are more dog-eat-dog than the rest of us.)
I can't speak for the rest of the industrialized neoliberal nations, but Great Britain seems to be okay with lords owning billions and using their wealth and power to control policy. Meanwhile the tech-bros that are crushing the soul of the US are also getting their tendrils into the rest of the world, buying up politicians and spreading far-right propaganda globally.
As SCOTUS keeps ruling (most recently, yesterday) corporations are people (id est, have rights) but human beings are not (don't have rights).
I'm confused. The IPO was $135 per share.
I'm not confused about the drop. Most analysts said that was a bear price anyway, and it was based on a lot of outrageous promises and valuation of xAI and Starlink, neither of which is very strong right now.
Essentially, Musk sold SpaceX the way he sells anything, making outrageous long-term promises that are unlikely to be realized, hence we don't have a fleet of self-driving Tesla taxis already.
The sooner SpaceX falls to a more realistic valuation, the safer it is for everyone whose pension funds depend on the Nasdaq-100.
I'm reminded of the early years of MMORPG games that had semi-functional economies, and all the confidence games came back. For example, a carnie would sell empty crates for a price on the promise that some of them were filled with valuable goodies. They weren't but occasionally a collaborator planted in the audience would win a prize.
Maybe we should bring back the tar-and-feather treatment.
Zuckerberg doesn't really want ruthless efficiency. He wants ruthless control.
One gets productivity from happy, well-cared-for workers. Like Bezos, he tries to micromanage them instead.