jayers

Well elite and rich are actually different categories. The guy down in my parents suburban neighborhood who started a carpentry business at 18 and is now 45 years old and a millionaire is in a very different category from someone who went to Harvard Law and became a partner at a massive firm in Manhattan, even if their net worth is similar.

Plenty of normal folks start businesses in various industries and get rich off of it. You can make tens of millions of dollars running a restaurant chain, a trades business, manufacturing, a car repair shop, car dealership etc. But those are not elite jobs.

The core of capitalism is about where ownership of capital (value producing assets) resides, that is, by private individuals.

What private individuals choose to do with their capital, chase infinite growth and profit or sit on it, is up to them. This is as opposed to say, state ownership of capital.

People confuse the stock market with capitalism. You don't need a stock market for capitalism to function. Publicly traded companies in the United States are legally bound to maximize profit (Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co.)

Self help usually doesn't teach you anything that is new. Usually they just repackage the same common sense that you've heard a million times before in a new way. That doesn't mean it is useless though, I have had my own life changed by several self help/business books.

Sometimes you just need someone to tell you common sense in the right way so that you actually listen to it.

How is this, in principle, any different from the DOJ using a subpoena to get customer records from an adult store that was allegedly selling illegal explicit material?

Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.

Journalists by definition cannot be anonymous. That's why its a dangerous job.

Yes, that makes sense. However, unless there's a significant corpus of an author in the training data it won't recognize them. One of the author's that I fed into Claude was a passage from the book Leepike Ridge by ND Wilson. Wilson has written online and in print quite a bit, but Claude couldn't guess the author and guessed that it was a passage from a noir crime novel.

Wilson is a fairly idiosyncratic writer with a distinct style, yet even still Claude couldn't guess correctly from a currently published book.

I suspect that what's going on here (like other's are suggesting in this thread) is that Claude is in some way biased towards certain sets of authors by its training.

I expect next go-around they'll want to pay some big design agency for a custom site; it'll probably be six figures. I don't know how I should approach that discussion. Any ideas?

Keep your ear to the ground and when you start to hear rumblings of this happening, pay a skilled freelancer to update the old website (or just build a new one if its easier) to fit the new marketing director's taste. Solve marketing's problem, save the company a bunch of money, be the hero.

It's funny: publishing work offline in books and magazines is perhaps more anonymous in the age of AI.

I pasted in a number of passages from books on my bookshelf. Predictably, stuff that I read for my English degree in university is largely in the training data and easily identifiable. Stuff from regional authors or is slightly adjacent to the cultural mainstream makes no impression.

Profitable remains to be seen, but it is undoubted that the potential resources in the solar system are (pun intended) astronomically valuable. Getting at them is "just" an engineering problem.

That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.

This isn't even a hard question. The movie theater is open but movies that are rated R are not. In this case, Reddit.com is a movie theater, subreddits are movies. The website might be open, but not every subreddit is. This is in fact how Reddit already operates, age verification is just a joke right now.

I'm incredibly dubious of the conclusions of this researcher. Claude Opus was used to gather and analyze all of the data.

I am not skeptical of any of the research, the sources seem to be cited properly. I am skeptical that this researcher has thought through or verified their conclusions in a systematic and reliable fashion. This part gives it away: "Research period: 2026-03-11 to present." This individual dropped his investigative report two days after beginning research!

Yes, AI is an incredibly good research assistant and can help speed up the tasks of finding sources and indexing sources. The person behind this investigation has not actually done their due diligence to grok and analyze this data on their own, and therefore I can't trust that the AI analysis isn't poisoned by the prompters implicit biases.

Of course not everybody is systematically hurt nor did I claim that. About 11% of porn users are addicts. Porn addiction is real and incredibly difficult. But even when you are not addicted, regular porn usage has negative effects on mental health (lower impulse control, higher rates of depression and anxiety). It stands to reason that this effect would be exaggerated in children and teenagers.

At best, pornography is akin to alcohol and cigarettes. We regulate the ability of minors to access these things for obvious reasons. I see no reason why internet pornography is different.

As someone who was actually hurt by being exposed to pornography as a child (though this was on the wild internet before Discord), I think you're being both histrionic and downplaying the dangers posed to children online.

This is the crux of it. The digital world doesn't produce value except when it eases the production of real goods. Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.

There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.

My blog Christian spirituality and living a good life -> https://geoffayers.substack.com/

Too many calories is the basic explanation for why American's health sucks. Calories available per person has gone up ~32% since the 1960s (we obviously can't measure calories consumed per person, but supply and demand would dictate these excess calories are going somewhere). It is not clear to me that meat specifically is a problem so much as excess consumption leading to obesity, which then causes chronic health problems downstream.

Though of course "meat" is too vague a category to be helpful. Obviously there's a link between beef and heart disease and colorectal cancer. There seems to be no health problems associated with consuming chicken or seafood.

Average home price in the late 60s was 25k so even if it is equivalent to $50k in 2016 dollars, 25k could still get you further than today in some specific areas.

My reaction to your original comment was probably too ornery.

You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.

Your comment left me incredibly annoyed because I think you fully misunderstand the relationship of AI to art.

If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.

Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.

The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.

With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.

I think it is important to make the distinction between "blog post" and other kinds of published writing. It literally does not matter if your blog post has perfectly correct grammar or misspellings (though you should do a one-pass revision for clarity of thought). Blog posts are best for articulating unfinished thoughts. To that end, you are cheating yourself, the writer, if you use AI to help you write a blog post. It is through the act of writing it that you begin to grok with the idea.

But you bet that I'm going to use AI to correct my grammar and spelling for the important proposal I'm about to send. No sense in losing credibility over something that can be corrected algorithmically.

They don't have any political leanings but they do have a philosophical project. If you dig into the site a little you'll find that they're published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (housed at UVA) and IASC exists to promote research into the contradictions of modernity, by examining how culture manifests itself in metaphor, symbol, ideals, principles, institutions, and material objects [1]. I've been a reader of THR for a few years and I'd say generally they publish articles that promote moral realism and humanism. They're sort of metaphysically open-minded.

[1] https://iasculture.org/about/vision