eli_gottlieb

"More jobs" and "more productivity" are more-or-less opposite goals under capitalism.

Will it ever get done? I wouldn’t hold my breath. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Well except that Mark Cuban is out here proposing the first steps towards the end of capitalism, namely collective worker ownership of the means of production, so I think that rather than quote Mark Fisher all over again, we have to understand why today's capitalist class are suddenly proving rhetorically amenable to certain steps towards socialism.

Tax the land. Legalize housing.

Or just nuke San Francisco from orbit.

In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex.

IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.

"[W]hat earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

Culture my foot! It's a difference of law. American employment is "at-will", meaning they can legally fire you for "any reason or no reason", with the only asterisk being that "any reason" cannot violate civil-rights law (eg: they can't fire you for your race, sex, or age). European and Japanese law penalize laying off an onboarded, long-term, full-time employee who's already passed probation and acquired years of seniority.

Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement

Well yeah. That's what they ran on, and people voted for it.

If I didn't want companies focused on making money to exclusively target the life sciences, I would simply fund literally anything or everything else commensurately with how much money is thrown at the life sciences for the sheer garbage they actually practice and produce. Don't like it?

NSF annual budget (pre-Trump): ~$6-8 billion

NIH annual budget (pre-Trump) ~$50 billion

There it is.

Most of what's impressed me in working with LLMs is just how much "intelligence" you can get out of the agent iteratively refining something it looks back at with each turn, without its ever actually exhibiting human-level intelligence. I've always been an embodied-cognition guy, and it really seems to me like "agent harnesses" are basically task-specific pseudo-embodiments for LLMs.

Matplotlib? Ha! There are loads of academic fields where you still write data analyses by hand, one at a time, in Matlab, without proper version-control or libraries.

Ok so get rid of the investors then.

No, he's arguing that if it's not legal, it's not enforceable by men with nightsticks.

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.

2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.

Society isn't supposed to run on philanthropy.

Don't worry: they'll tell you.

I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.

I mean, to be fair, having your population semi-permanently depleted by two major wars and a fundamental loss of national economic centrality and prestige will help you keep a fixed stock of social housing lasting longer.

Why use a German word for "scapegoat"?

Also, evaluating complicated functions with numerical stability and automatic differentiation is hard.

When I aim to accomplish something, to destroy some institution, I tend to favor the direct way, because it relies on fewer intermediate points of failure than the indirect way.

This is the policy I was always told to exercise about cold emails, both those I receive and those I send. Someone seems to have spent weeks reading your books and papers before emailing to meet with you? Make time for that guy. Someone just asks if you've got time to meet about your work because they'd like to work for you? LOL they didn't check enough to realize you're not a supervisor.

“competition” won’t improve it or control it because there is always a supply side shortage of provision.

Why is there always a supply-side shortage?

the taxes are credited with reducing the residential vacancy rate to 0.49%

Isn't that really, really low and a driver of rent rises?

Yes, collective punishment of the smaller collective who can self-police (cops, no pun intended) rather than the larger collective who can't (citizens and taxpayers at large).

This is going to be horribly embarrassing when it turns out that AI can only outcompete human labor in some roles. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers

They Live was a product of its time. We live in our time, so instead we've got Sorry to Bother You.

Embracing? Get older? This is just how my parents raised me.

Fell For It Again Award

That has nothing to do with Trump's trade policies w.r.t Canada, though.

As the kids say: skill issue!