same tbh. the correct answer is no cars. i still think evs are better to have around than ice cars, but an oversized murder machine shouldn’t be the primary mode of transport, and it will always need to announce its presence.

road noise along major roads is mostly tire noise anyway, and evs still have tires

…there has been a third?

mostly by having the market run out of money to shovel into the ai companies. which is already happening in parallel to this, it’s just difficult to tell how long it’s gonna take.

afaik the anthropic ipo next week is the next potential trigger point

tbh i have a theory that the ai bubble itself is what’s holding us up. the llm angle has been explored deeply and optimised to ridiculous levels. what we got out of it is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not agi yet. it does have the ability to absorb a lot of skills though, both with deliberate training and with incidental exposure during training, so teaching it new tricks is probably going to be a thing all the way until we reach agi, but imo we’re not getting to agi just by building larger llms.

but the problem is, that’s literally the only thing that’s happening today at any reasonable scale. llms have become the same kind of safe investment slop that reboots and sequels are in media, sure it’s guaranteed to be mediocre (in this case, by being expensive to run and having relatively little advantage over existing stuff) but at least there’s very little chance they will fail outright. real r&d, on the other hand, is inherently risky, but it’s how real progress gets made.

after the crash, hardware will be (relatively) cheap and plentiful, both to own and to rent online, and we’ll see investment sour on llms. that will finally open the door for moving past them and finding the next thing. and if agi will ever be made, that’s how it will be made, not by training ever larger llms just to distil them back to the same scale as before with minor tweaks to how attention works. which is pretty much what has been happening in the past 2-3 years.

which is exactly what happens to real world anarchy too, but there is a particular subset of leftists who like to delude themselves into thinking that that only applies to ancaps

honestly, based. marx was cool af, he had impeccable insights into the problems we would be facing today. adding that authoritarian coward lenin is how you turn a commie into a tankie

the ceo of nvidia had an affair with a chinese spy (not this one, a real one), it’s fairly recent news

honestly, i think it’s an overarching issue with the education system. ai is not the cause, it’s the symptom, people had a million ways of dodging tasks before it too. it’s just easier now than it’s ever been.

if you know anything about indie game design, you know that learning is fun. as in, not that learning is a fun activity, but that learning is literally what fun is. you just need an environment that’s actually conducive to that, and it will be extremely gripping, because you will have created a flow state generator.

but it turns out that doing that, while also ensuring what you’re learning is at all useful (as opposed to, y’know, how to pop heads in counter-strike or something) is difficult enough that most teachers just gave up and decided that learning must suck. which is a problem for many reasons, but i think the biggest one is that if it’s not fun, you’re not actually learning: if it’s boring, it’s because you already know how to do it, and doing it more doesn’t make you do it better, and if it’s frustrating, it’s because you keep failing and all that failing doesn’t teach any skills. practice is important, sure, but good practice lies halfway between these ends, and it’s fun. but a lot of people don’t get there, and they’re told it doesn’t matter if you get there, what matters is if you get through.

i think that’s why all these courses are getting skipped by ai. because a staggering amount of people in education programs, in any kind pretty much, aren’t there to really learn, they are there to get through, by any means. because the whole social contract is that this is a thing that sucks, but if you get through it, you get a piece of paper and that paper will give you a nice life. it’s a nice thought, it’s understandable, human brains are wired to understand tradeoffs intuitively. but it skips the bloody point of why we do all this in the first place.

and yeah, i get why you’re frustrated that uni students don’t know this. but honestly, how would they? no one told them the world they were raised in since the age of 6 is a lie.

unpopular opinion, but i’m glad about this. the dems hate hegseth with passion, if he was almost impeached even in a republican congress, it’s practically guaranteed he will be impeached next time anyone tries. and why would the blue tsunami not try?

the real risk would be replacing him too quickly. senate can block his replacement, that’s gonna be a major point of leverage for the upcoming democrat congress. letting the gop rush his replacement would be a blunder, it would burn up all that leverage for nothing.

those no-shows are a genuinely good strategic move. they block the impeachment for now in a deniable way, because it’s gonna go through anyway, and because you can’t replace him if you don’t impeach him first. (unless trump fires him first, but like, fat chance.) however, an impeachment in february leaves trump begging the dems for his next secdef, while an impeachment now would have him scrambling to get a new guy in before the deadline.

i think the bigger problem with hegseth’s impeachment is he cannot be allowed to be replaced before january. after that, the democrats have a lot of leverage over who takes his place, because they can just say no to anyone trump presents, and acting secretaries of defence have significantly lower credibility than proper ones.

non-yank here, the one saving grace i see with the maga movement is that it’s a cult of personality, and political movements don’t tend to come back once they devolve into cults of personalities. like who’s gonna run it? jd vance, who doesn’t have the charisma to please a couch, let alone to run a country? hegseth, who is hated by his own party more than democrats hate a leftist? rubio, who sees maga more as a problem to solve and manoeuvre around than a movement that defines him? bannon and miller, who are so cartoonishly evil that they had to run things from the shadows even in a country that elected bloody trump?

i sincerely hope you do not have a good answer to this question. if you do, “never” is accurate. if you don’t, we might start trusting you again in like two admins or so. but we would definitely like to see some progress first, and while the blue wave in the midterms halts the decline, the hope for progress is pretty slim so far.

the thing about libertarian principles is that the vast majority of people who claim to believe in them only believe in them one way

they verifiably do, but introverts miss other introverts all the time