jmeister

“ TL;DR: For a journalist, IMHO, think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and a fact-checker. It's job is to do grunt work and help you turn in cleaner copy”

Flock helped catch the Boston/Brown shooter.

Cosma Shalizi has a great article on these themes, arrives at similar conclusions https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...

You can’t have the former without the latter unfortunately. Freaks make the world go round. Nice guys merely shuffle after them.

You might find this interesting:

Metaobject Protocols for Julia https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/16759/pdf/OASI...

Community Notes?

This is too insignificant for a “take”. It doesn’t change anything substantial for me or most existing Twitter users.

fireworks

Usually this is too vacuous of a criterion for comments on any other topic on HN. For some reason any post on Twitter has pages and pages of “yikes” “derp”, people gossiping about “Elon” like he’s their wayward cousin. Pathetic.

Example? Who are these people forced to use Twitter?

Have you considered looking away?

Have you considered looking away?

For example, if you’re looking at static inequality, Europe appears to be more egalitarian than the United States—their wealth is more evenly distributed across the population. But Taleb uses some statistics of dynamic inequality that propose America may be fairer than Europe. In Europe, more than a third of the five hundred wealthiest people inherited their wealth from family dynasties that have lasted for centuries. Compare this to the US, where 90% of the wealthiest five hundred people entered that list less than thirty years ago.

Here’s another statistic on dynamic equality in America: 10% of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners, and more than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in the top 10% of income earners. Since what we’re trying to do is allow the market to reward those who contribute to society, greater turnover among the rich in the United States is a sign of fairness.

https://www.shortform.com/blog/types-of-inequality/

https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...

The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the masses, giving them exactly what they want.

Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.

"On the startup bailout. It is claimed that the startups who put all their cash in SVB will now be forced to close, so get going with the bailout now. It is not startups who lose money, it is their venture capital investors, and it is they who benefit from the bailout.

Let us presume they don't suffer sunk cost fallacy. You have a great company, worth investing $10 million. The company loses $5 million of your cash before they had a chance to spend it. That loss obviously has nothing to do with the company's prospects. What do you do? Obviously, pony up another $5 million and get it going again. And tell them to put their cash in a real bank this time."

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2023/03/silicon-valley-ba...

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University, thinks crypto is inherently susceptible to boom-and-boost cycles and manipulation by insiders, and thinks it should be banned.

I don’t know or care much for crypto, but man does it bring out Ayn Rand villains you thought only existed in books.

Message from the PM: https://twitter.com/rishisunak/status/1668174629695832064

That’s the point I think: these west coast companies are moving/hiring elsewhere

I now believe the future will be far more irresponsible and stupid than I once did.

I am increasingly worried that human success and failure are ruled by taste — the demand side, in economic terms.

If there are fewer beautiful and charming residential post-World War II neighborhoods, it is because most people do not want to live in them. If there are fewer movies today with the dramatic impact and compositional rigor of “Citizen Kane,” it is because people do not very much want to see them. It is not that it is too difficult or expensive to make another “Citizen Kane.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-03/are-th...

Raises the question: what’s happening in the courts below?

Admittedly, it does seem slightly ludicrous to forget about one’s immortal soul and instead busy oneself, as Faust does, with the pro­ject of reclaiming land from the sea.

We should acknowledge that there are many perils with the scientific and technological trajectory on which we find ourselves. But we should never forget that the alternatives to technological acceleration are far from ethically or politically neutral.

Technology means doing more with less. In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/against-edenism

Yes this is from Peter Thiel. Yes it is not very persuasive. But it is worth thinking what the alternatives are and if they can be any better.

From Dec ‘22: “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more relentless free advertising of competitors. No traditional publisher allows this and neither will Twitter.”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320

This is probably brinksmanship to get Substack to pay more to twitter.

Twitter spaces live right now: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1jMJgLdenVjxL

There was no gate-keeping. Yann LeCun was doing neural networks in the late 80s.

+1

Twitter and Square wouldn’t have existed without Dorsey. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Prominent libertarians who opposed intervention:

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2023/03/silicon-valley-ba...

https://twitter.com/CliffordAsness/status/163512097142539468...

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/16350699533753425...

Have you read Turchin? He defines the term rigorously to refer to a particular social-economic class

Useless maybe, but still new and constructive. The laptop class he derides is mostly nihilistic and destructive. At the absolute worst he facilitated the transfer of funds from wealthy investors to crypto programmers?

(2018)

If you are a rich VC, how about just building twenty houses?

There is no dearth of people wanting to build houses. They just cannot get permissions.