borgdefenser

In the US, Apple has done an all time great job marketing their products.

I don't think there is much more too it. "If I didn't buy Apple it would hurt my career". Obviously, completely absurd but how else can you grow a company to be worth 3.3 trillion selling tech gadgets at a massive premium.

It is easy to convince oneself too that this marketing is factual reality after spending so much money too. I mean that new iphone wasn't an expense, it was a career investment!

I feel exactly the same way about this "I'm using AI as a cognitive amplifier. I'm learning at a much faster rate than I would without AI."

I just don't know how much is actually being replaced though. I think of corporate jobs I have done in that past. I can't think of anything I have ever been paid to do that would be replaced by a language model. It was either something that could have been automated without a language model but was not for various reasons or the output would just be amplified by a language model. In some cases my work would have been enormously amplified and better but not "automated".

For some reason we don't seem to like this idea of a cybernetic relationship with a machine that benefits the human even though that is exactly what we have been doing for at least a 150 years. Maybe it is something in our brains that can't turn off a type of predator/prey model. Then on top of that is the mass appeal of this infantile and collectivist idea that AI will do all the work while we collect our UBI trust fund allowance from artificial daddy.

I can feel this already with my own use of language models.

All the questions I had before language models, I have answered with language models.

That doesn't mean I have no more questions though. Answering those questions opened up 10X more questions I have now.

In general, everyone knows that answering scientific questions leads to new and more questions. It is the exact same process in the economy. There is a collectivist sentiment though in society and the economy that wants to pretend this isn't true. That the economic questions can be "solved", the spoils divided up and we live happily ever after in some kind of equilibrium.

As far as new jobs, they are here now but they surely sound as ridiculous to think about as being a professional youtuber in 2005. Or I think of the person making a geocities website in 1997 vs a front end developer. There is no date that a front end developer emerges from the html code monkey. It is a slow and organic process that is hard to game.

I love data visualization but it very much reminds me of shred guitar playing, something I also use to very much love.

What non-guitar players are complaining about the lack of innovation in shred guitar playing? It is just not something that non-guitar players really care much about. Good shred vs bad shred is all going to sound the same to the non-guitarist anyway.

I notice I have been using the Google AI summary more and more for quick things.

I had subscribed to Perplexity for a month to use their deep research. I think it ran out earlier this week but I am really missing it Saturday morning here.

That thing is awesome. Sonnet 3.7 is more in the middle of this to me. It can help me understand all the things I found from my deep research requests.

I am surprised the hype is not more for Sonnet 3.7 honestly.

Prompting is not a myth. The words of the prompt matter huge.

The problem with this prompt to me is not that it is not in a full sentence but that it isn't exact enough.

Probabilistically, "rust" is not about the programming language but the corrosion of metal. Then arrow.

Give the model basically nothing to work with then complain it doesn't do exactly what you want. Good luck with that.

I always thought the same until I got one.

It is a really good product.

It especially stands out if on a diet and going to eat a lot of chicken breast.

Steak I wouldn't cook in it but it makes great chicken. Especially on a diet that you aren't going to add much else calorie wise with how you cook it.

It is also a problem that the projects are not realistic.

What are you going to rebuild a banking mainframe system from the 1970s at home in your bedroom for fun?

I don't think it matters anyway. A 14yo thinking strategically like this will figure things out soon enough.

Being that young it would probably be best to not listen to what anyone else tells you though. Follow what you think is right and if it doesn't work out, learn from it. The whole idea could be explored and still not be old enough to drive.

No, you just live in a bubble of smart and really driven people.

The vast majority of people's passions are partying, sex, alcohol/drugs, watching sports, gossiping, generally wasting time. Things that mostly

This whole line of thought to me is embarrassingly clueless, naive and basically childish.

It is just mind blowing to me how smart people can't see what a bubble they live in.

I almost suspect, the higher a person's IQ, the more susceptible they are to living in a bubble that basically has nothing to do with the majority of people with an IQ of 100.

I am reading a great book right now.

The Tao of Deception: Unorthodox Warfare in Historic and Modern China by Ralph Sawyer.

I am not sure I would listen to anyone but Ralph Sawyer at this point in English on the subject.

China is not going to invade Taiwan the way the US would invade Hawaii in the same situation.

That is just not how China conducts warfare.

Taiwan is another level with all this. What matters is the PLA views it as reclaiming. They have to win by soft power and not "win" like the US going in and blowing the shit out of Iraq.

Disturb the water and catch a fish.

In that context, something like DeepSeek is a much bigger deal as far as the objectives. 1000X more than this decoy.

For $0.015 a minute it has to be.

The books I am listening to now wouldn't even be $10. Any future price drops then will really make this a no-brainer.

The Elevenlabs pricing to me makes it completely useless for audiobooks that I just want to listen to for my personal enjoyment.

I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.

In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite.

The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would have been a lot of "pro communism" in my responses on anything society related even though I knew absolutely nothing about communism and even less about economics as a whole.

I think this is just the way semi-anon discussions with big age and generation gaps go.

I am always listening to audio books but they are no good anymore after playing with this for 2 minutes.

I am never really in the mood for a different voice. I am going to dial in the voice I want and only going to want to listen with that voice.

This is so awesome. So many audio books have been ruined by the voice actor for me. What sticks out in my head is The Book of Why by Judea Pearl read by Mel Foster. Brutal.

So many books I want as audio books too that no one would bother to record.

I think we know we can't solve the problem so we are just more interested in the optics.

If the soccer mom switches from a gas guzzling SUV to another ridiculous size and weight electric SUV, they have done their part optically.

I feel like I am doing my part by simply not having children. It doesn't matter what you drive, it doesn't even come close to the offset of not having children. Who then can't have grandchildren, grandchildren who can't have great grandchildren, etc.

It would be hard to calculate the difference between me not having children and the person driving an EV with two kids in the back seat. They have done a better job with optics than me but in reality I have probably done 10,000X more over the next 200 years because what they have done is basically nothing.

I think using your last name, counter intuitively makes discussion less civil.

In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.

When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.

The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.

Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.

This is actually the complete opposite of what I want.

I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.

Thank you. That sounds perfectly sensible.

Krita is vastly better if you come to it from photoshop.

I doubt there is anything that couldn't be done in either and it is simply a matter of time spent in the UI and personal preference.

I would think the health care system really needs something like this though to avoid disaster.

The worst thing I have read about nursing is someone online saying the lucky people were the ones who failed out of their nursing program.

It seems like we are in denial with amount of care aging boomers are going to need and I don't think it is job you can just throw money at. I just can't imagine what long term care facilities are going to look like in 10 years.

To me, it is the easiest trade in the world right now. Long NVDA on a market volatility spike. "AI is dead", "the high is in".

It is obvious to me we are going to get to "AGI" in this bull run. Maybe it is complete hype and bullshit marketing but we are going to get to someone releasing a model they claim is AGI. That is really why I don't see what the point is in comparing this to the dotcom. Dotcom was really a bandwidth problem that just needed to get sorted out because my telephone line was basically busy from 1995 to 2001. There wasn't this AGI narrative that once crossed you can price in any valuation you want.

There is a huge bubble and irrational exuberance in quantum computing stocks right now. Those have nothing to do with reality. That looks like dotcom level stupid.

NVDA is not even a bubble, it is just a bull market.

My strangest memory were these videos from China of people just falling over dead in the street in early 2020.

A guy just standing there and then does a face plant on the street.

I really have no idea what that was all about.

I am quite a Nirvana fan but I just think this is totally absurd.

Nirvana's impact on the actual sound of music I would say is really not that much.

It is really Sonic Youth that had a much bigger impact on the 90s sound than anyone. Including taking Nirvana on tour as an opener when they were complete nobodies.

Even punk music barely felt the influence of Nirvana. I think you are confusing sound with MTV marketing.

It is actually curious how much Nirvana and The Beatles are not reflected sound wise in modern music.

Nothing close to say the way Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has influenced modern rap.

Much of this is because there is not much of a recorded music industry before 1950.

Miles Davis Kind of Blue was one of the best selling albums of the 50s. The #1 best seller though of the decade is the Elvis Christmas album.

By the 60s, Sinatra and the Rat pack were considered lame. That was your dad's music. The Beatles are the Beatles because of the size of the baby boomer generation and that someone had to be the stars of the new generation. As great as the Beatles are, the marketing of the Beatles albums was just as great.

We had the perfect size electronic music events in America. After a certain size, a party is not better, it is worse.

By 1996 even MTV had Amp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp_(TV_series)

As a 90s American teen this is completely absurd. It is literally the peak of the music industry as a whole.

The American 90s rave scene was also absolutely amazing. Big enough to have parties every Friday and Saturday but not too big to attract much undesirable people and law enforcement.

I have family that work in trades and this is just not true at all.

They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.

Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.

Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.

No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.

Coffee even more so.

I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.

Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.

If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem.

There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices.

What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.

People in the major cities practically live in their own society in America.

$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.

In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.

I think it just depends how into industrial music a person is/was.

Reznor's genius to me was in taking industrial music and making it catchy, radio friendly and basically pop.

Completely commercial compared to anything I can think of in industrial music from the time on back. Completely filled with confusion and anger though compared to say Whitney Houston from the time.