In the back of my mind I’m thinking about how my retirement contributions are probably headed into oblivion. The likelihood of The Economy™ not taking its final shit before I’m at retirement age seems to be decreasing rapidly. At some point the people who liquidated their retirement accounts will turn out to be the smart ones.
Excellent read, thanks! Relevant as hell. I just experienced some awe at Marxist analysis: 150 year old philosophy applied to the age of AI and explaining why tech bros toil at dreary ass shit.
I despair seeing my most talented tech colleagues in the west on LinkedIn taking jobs at crypto, fintech, ai slop shops. I have the vague sense that nerds yearn to solve real, important problems, but in the west the money and jobs seem only to materialize for bullshit endeavors.
Meanwhile, in China…
I’m amazed a reasonable china take appears in the NYT, even more amazed that the comments are mostly not racist/ignorant.
The AI American pipe dream will fail if for no other reason that the u.s. doesn’t have, and can’t add, sufficient power generation capacity. With that in mind, stuff like this, to me, illustrates that the people in charge are ideologues–theyre not working toward coherent material outcomes.
Good for you! I tried speaking Chinese with the staff at a restaurant in chinatown and the sweet old Chinese lady laughed at me for being bad at it, but in an amused and friendly way. Gave me confidence that ppl will probably be gracious when I attempt to use language with them.
You likely mean getting the federal reserve under control. The Treasury is already under executive control and is intended to be so.
I’m excited about this. Ive been using aider + deepseek for a few weeks and while it’s definitely powerful, it’s basically a one-shot chat bot that runs in your terminal and can do a few basic shell things. In other words, it’s missing iteration. I also tried dagger, which is cool and powerful but doesn’t seem well suited to coding agent implementation bc it only operates on ephemeral containers.
Hell yeah
This is an excellent article. Thinking about the gains china is making in automated manufacturing makes it seem like factorio is gonna be a reality.
Imo it’s probably not a good idea for another single entity to hold a copy of IA’s corpus. IA already operates on a shoestring but it still is expensive and labor intensive to operate, which requires an endowment or constant source of funding, both of which come with political entanglements. I just don’t think one org can be indefinite custodians of something so valuable.
A distributed technical solution may eventually be developed which enabled regular people to participate in storing and maintaining the corpus. I think IPFS was supposed to be this kind of solution but seems like the tech isn’t capable or mature enough (Anna’s archive abandoned IPFS for technical reasons and that’s a far smaller corpus). BTW IA has engagement with the dweb community and are interested in finding distributed solutions for storage of IA’s corpus.
Does this invalidate all his analysis? I’m sure it’s helpful to have that context, but it’s possible to be informed by people whose ideological program doesn’t perfectly align with our own.
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years from people like mearscheimer, Alexander mercouris, Jeff Sachs, even Andrew Nepolitano, all of whom have varying levels of bad positions.
Liberals analyze the world on vibes, which tends to mean they need complete ideological alignment with their information sources, which is obviously limiting. But having a philosophical framework orienting our analysis frees us from that limitation because it allows us to read widely, including sources with major problems, without risk of falling for their bad takes.
Plastic recycling is a scam that exists to green wash usage of plastics. Apparently it’s even worse than that, actually, bc the presence of sufficient unrecyclable plastic in bins of commingled recycling causes all of it to get landfilled.
Shit drives me insane. Oh God, those tetra pack containers claim to be recyclable, but actually there’s just one recycling facility for them, and it’s in Mexico, so if by the grace of God your municipality actually opts in to recycling this one specific type of packaging, it all gets hauled across the border.
Rugrats holds up, I swear. It’s super creative and funny. One of my favorite parts is that the babies, being babies, don’t understand what a lot of words mean, misuse them, and mispronounce them. Really cute and hilarious.
Pepe reposted an article to his tgram channel with some comments:
That article’s analysis is that the British elite hate Russia because the Putin government displaced Rothchild-aligned Jewish oligarchs who took control of post-soviet Russia, and that “the Rothchilds are as British as 5 o’clock tea”. Laughable tripe if you ask me. So in addition to being sensational, he seems to also some combination of an uncritical dupe, an actual moron, or a reactionary.
Edit: link: https://www.unz.com/ishamir/why-do-brits-hate-russians/
Also I don’t mean to say pepe should be dismissed out of hand. He travels a lot and seems to talk to lots of ppl and so surfaces interesting stuff from time to time.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with managers or management. Such a function is required if larger and larger teams are to work together effectively. Coordination, strategy, and planning are all valuable and sometimes cannot be effectively undertaken by individual contributors.
Probably plenty of managers are petty hitlers, etc. and plenty of managerial roles are set up to pit manager against worker by setting managers up as slave drivers, but it doesn’t have to be this way imo.