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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If it seems odd for him to suddenly say that all this AI stuff is bullshit, that’s because he didn’t. He said it hasn’t boosted the world economy on the order of the Industrial revolution - yet. There is so much hype around this, and he’s on the line to deliver actual results. So it’s smart for him to take a little air out of the hype ballon. But the article headline is a total misrepresentation of what he said. He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board. That’s very very different from “no value.”


  • How is that a qualification on anything they said? If our knowledge of protein folding has gone up by multiples, then it has gone up by multiples, regardless of whatever funding shenanigans Trump is pulling or what effects those might eventually have. None of that detracts from the value that has already been delivered, so I don’t see how they are “forgetting” anything. At best, it’s a circumstance that may play in economically but doesn’t say anything about AI’s intrinsic value.



  • I think you’re starting with the position that Naziism is a poisonous nonstarter, and wondering why anyone would attach themselves to that.

    But that’s not where they are starting from. I earnestly believe that some major revisionism is happening. People are taking another look at the Nazis and finding they like what they see.

    Of course, it’s falling into the whole complex of “Nazis aren’t so bad - you were just told that by your woke liberal school propaganda.”

    As liberals cry out about the Nazi shit, Trumpers delight in their pain, further adding to the magnetism of Naziism.

    And of course there is a slice of the Right that have always been literal Nazis, explicitly. And that slice is larger than ever, with looser boundaries than before.

    Basically the divisive politics of the US have finally become big enough to be bigger than our feelings about Naziism. That’s really fucking big. But the political civil war we’re in the middle of is all about tearing down everything that came before as tired, corrupt lies. I guess that is includes simple basics like “Nazis are bad.”

    If you’re still confused and disgusted and horrified, you are in a lot of very good company.


  • Taiwan absolutely found a niche. Its manufacturing capability is what makes it a strategic ally for the US.

    Singapore’s niche is more like several niches from financial services to precision manufacturing and medical research. But it all runs on their skilled workforce. Not “politics.”

    A niche will be based on whatever you have. If you have nothing but cheap labor, that’s not great, but it is something. To sell that labor to wealthy foreign corporations isn’t just getting dominated by them, it’s how China has raised millions out of poverty.

    Being poor and undeveloped is a shitty hand to try to play, but that doesn’t change the game. Use what you have. Find what you’re best at.



  • “Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at and then exchange the goods they produce. This is so that everybody is focused on what works best in their country, everything is done as well and as cheaply as possible. However this makes no guarantee about any one country’s ability, at the end of the day, to stand alone without dependencies on others for vital goods. In fact if anything it works against that.

    I don’t know why Trump talks about globalism as some Democrat thing. It’s his own party that has been driving for free trade since forever.