First, I want to ask about these price-tracking websites, do they update in real-time? Do they get their information from confidential data or public data? Do they alert to changes and, in the case of say, applying for an apartment, time the application submission at exactly the right time? Do they collaborate with each other? See, I just learned about algorithmic price fixing and how companies in nearly every industry, every facet of life, give their algorithms access to vast amounts of data, both public and private, and these algorithms share their data with each other, allowing companies to indirectly collude and fix prices without human intervention. What can we common folk do against that?

I’m just saying, you’re mentioning search engines, and the author says

You had Google and a spreadsheet if you were organized.

So, how can I, with my spreadsheets and my search engine, possibly stand up to Big AI? David and Goliath was a nice fable, but now Goliath is back, and has friends, and laws protecting them, and all David has, is a sling and a single rock.

What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power.

Corporate algorithms gave them that power, or at least have been helping them to maintain it for decades. The article uses the very real example of RealPage, whose YieldStar software was helping landlords manage over 3 million rental properties in the US by 2022. Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped. Landlords are still coordinating rent prices across the vast majority of rental properties, and all the common folk has to help is, like the article says, “Zillow and a prayer”.

Yeah, idk, I’m pretty sure the author meant “SAP”, but then why SQL?

Wow. Don’t even know enough to elaborate, so you just use 2-word sentences like some asshole.

Is it, though? Consider that many organizations both private and public have been using algorithms since the 1990s, long before anyone knew what an algorithm was. They had entire departments dedicated to running optimization algorithms. Amazon has algorithms deciding what products to show you, what prices to charge, and how to route packages. Airlines have algorithms that adjust ticket prices hundreds of times a day based on data you didn’t even know existed, and health insurance companies have actuarial models that process millions of data points to decide your rates. And what have you got? A web browser with multiple tabs open, a spreadsheet program, and Google Search. Seems like a rather one-sided fight, no?

What’s funny is this guy has 25 years of experience as a software developer. But three months was all it took to make it worthless. He also said it was harder than if he’d just wrote the code himself. Claude would make a mistake, he would correct it. Claude would make the same mistake again, having learned nothing, and he’d fix it again. Constant firefighting, he called it.

The top comment on the article points that out.

It’s an example of a far older phenomenon: Once you automate something, the corresponding skill set and experience atrophy. It’s a problem that predates LLMs by quite a bit. If the only experience gained is with the automated system, the skills are never acquired. I’ll have to find it but there’s a story about a modern fighter jet pilot not being able to handle a WWII era Lancaster bomber. They don’t know how to do the stuff that modern warplanes do automatically.

What’s interesting is what he found out. From the article:

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

I don’t know if you know this, but if the US falls, the whole world falls with it. There will be no turning back, no one will be spared. Who knows, maybe evolution will start over with another species, and they’ll do the same shit, over and over again until the sun burns out.

Because it comes down to the Presidential pardon powers. They can defy a blatantly illegal order, be dishonorably discharged, lose their pensions, healthcare benefits, pay, etc. or, they can follow a blatantly illegal order, and receive a pardon for it later.

I ask you, which one would you pick?

This. I don’t think Miller knows just how much his own side doesn’t like him. He does have people over him with more power who keep him around because he’s useful, and they protect him because he’s useful, but once he’s outlived his usefulness, they’ll wash their hands of him.

There are approx 45,000 denominations of Christianity

Well, obviously that’s where the US Dept of Faith comes in and starts whittling that number down a little, by their denomination declaring the other 44,999 to be heretical. And because they’re with the government, they’ve got authority to stamp out heresy, violently, if need be. As for how it’s funded? Well, since we got rid of the IRS, taxes aren’t collected, but tithes are mandatory!

Oh, it’s not that they think those things are bad, just that they want to be the arbiters of who deserves those things. They’re not against social programs, they just want to put their churches in charge of them so they can police behavior.

I’m enjoying it. It feels like the game that Obsidian wanted the first one to be, but couldn’t quite get there, for whatever reason.

True, but they had been riding a wave of Pan-Germanism prior to the Nazis. Germany had many diverse regions that didn’t see each other as equals prior to the Weimar Republic.

But could Germany have ever turned back from fascism on its own, without any help whatsoever? Let’s say the entire continent just let the Nazis have their way and let Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss play out their experimental new form of government out to its horrible logical conclusion. Could Germany ever come back from that? Could the world?

Is that what we said to you when it happened to you?

No, we’re about as far from OK as a country can get. The world needs to unite against us and muster the largest liberation force ever seen. And I mean the entire world literally every nation that can send warriors, send them. Germans, you have been where we are. You know, all too well, where this road leads. You could not turn yourselves back from it, and so you needed the help of 4 allied world powers. Now, one of those world powers is trudging down that same road you walked almost a century ago. And, I don’t think we will be able to turn ourselves back, just as you could not.

One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.

So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.

Initially, wasn’t Occupy a protest about the post-recession bank bailouts? Then the production team for Good Morning America put a self-proclaimed representative of Occupy, a “female-presenting person” named Ketchup, in the studio to ask them questions about it, and they had no media coaching whatsoever.