stephen_cagle

Ignoring whether this is a good business, I feel like this is a pretty terrible way to judge a book. If it took off it would result in everyone just starting their book with a real hook, which only works for a small number of genres and only if nothing else needs to be setup before "hooking" (simple "nothing is unfamiliar" stories).

I've read plenty of books on recommendation that I think are great, but they were not the kind of books that could start with a hook I think.

But, the counterargument to this is if it helps people start books, then who cares if it is an effective strategy or not.

Wait, is this correct? Firefox moved from 5% to 12% in one month? That seems unlikely...

And that worked for maybe, what... half a decade? But eventually the Illuminators all transitioned to being Arcane Scribes, the cost of spells plummeted due to increased supply, and in the end only Wizards who had invested in Arcane Sanctums had anything to show for it 50 years later.

Real Estate, it always boils down to real estate.

Is anyone seeing this?

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Warning Suspected Phishing This website has been reported for potential phishing.

Phishing is when a site attempts to steal sensitive information by falsely presenting as a safe source.

Cloudflare Ray ID: <retracted_because_what_is_this> • Your IP: • Performance & security by Cloudflare

```

Who "reports" this? And why does cloudfare take them down? How does this even work?

Awesome, that sounds fun. I'll do as you suggest.

And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.

Context: So I have 3 friends that I have been playing video games with for over 30 years weekly. So we would be playing half (as a team) of a 4v4. Now, we are never going to be competitive, we are basically playing to socialize.

Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.

Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.

Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?

Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!

I'm only partially convinced. I just can't see how you could really know if a company is using a hidden metric (or some sort of proxy for that metric so that they are not technically in violation) for figuring out what to promote. Short of having constants audits, how would you ever really know?

But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?

Also, if you have expectations that future inflation may be high, the leverage of borrowing can make sense as a hedge against your cash equivalent holdings in that scenario.

Do you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?

I feel like this is kind of like the gambler's risk of "going bust" but applied backwards?

Feels like it would be better to spend just enough so that you have the capacity to scale up IFF LLM's end up being a big deal. You spent less than your rivals (who were competing for a supremacy that never came), but you have saved more "dry powder" to compete against them for the more likely future. The only future you exclude with this strategy is the "LLM Supremacy" future, which you only had a 1/(number_of_players) chance of winning anyway. :]

I think the real reason for the spending is that the scent of LLMs in the air causes stock values to go up. And even if everyone knows it does not make sense, they still want "NUMBER GO UP", and so they will spend more money to excite the amateur and professional investor class.

Neat article.

I think it is interesting (though I only partially agree) that microwave meals require standardization to scale. Let's say that was true, why couldn't a modern microwave have a small camera and a set of heuristics for how to cook just about anything by turning the gun on and off at particular points when it recognizes a food? Maybe without intelligence, a microwave does need standardization; but we can put intelligence (ideally offline) in just about anything these days?

I wonder if with sufficient control if a microwave could ever brown? I wonder if it could reliably bake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tg3-93jKvc - Chicken Good!

Just to be clear, I'm visualizing the usage of world models that can consistently render visual and interactive renderings of a specified world. I think interacting with them will be markedly different than interacting with many text based LLMs (though I don't know, I have never had direct access to one).

I don't think these will create "artist" in any sense, but I do think it will lower the barrier dramatically for people creating games. Most people will interact with it like Lieutenant Barclay interacting with the holodeck, doing little more than wish fulfillment. But I think a few people will be able to interact with it in ways that create art.

In no way am I implying that the net net of AI will be good for humanity as a whole (I think that is too big a question), but I do think the power of World Models will probably result in a far more people being able to say "I have created a game".

I honestly don't have anything useful to say about what LLMs are doing to many human fields. I can understand how frustrating it must feel to see LLMs demonstrate superhuman "skill" (I don't really think they are skilled) at orders of magnitude less cost than a good artist. It isn't just that they don't seem to innovate (only permute), it is that they will literally take even the tiniest bit of creativity and novelty and immediately fine tune and create derivative works on any idea at scale. I can see how that might really demotivate any desire to push the boundaries of art for any human being.

Agreed, these aren't even games currently. I am just saying that world models will lower the barrier to entry to making games. Which might mean that 1 in 1000 of the lower-barrier-to-entry-people might someday makes a great game. So more great games in aggregate, but more bad games on average.

I feel like a circular saw is a creator tool, while a microwave is mostly a finishing tool.

I take raw material and make something out of it with a circular saw, largely unrestrained by anything other than cost, skill, and material.

With a microwave, I make things hot so I can eat them.

Aside: Also, I wonder why that is? Why do we regard the microwave as "degenerate" compared to the oven? Why is baking seen as a calling while microwaving is, well, not? Is it the ease of the microwave makes the effort less impressive? Maybe it is that you can't achieve certain effects like browning? Is it because of it's 1970's association with "radiation" and tv dinners? Is it just cultural inertia?

I read this a while ago (https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2012-08-18-accelerando...) and I remember enjoying it a little less with every section. With that said:

This is a book of ideas!

Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.

I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.

Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.

Yeah, I hear you. And it is historically true.

But why can't we just say "2% over a billion, 1% over a million; 50% if you choose to move your assets out of the country". It does not seem that unreasonable to insist that you keep your monies in the country that lead to your wealth?

I feel like I am saying regressive in the sense that it effects the poor more than the rich, full stop.

Being neutral relative to a sales tax is a confusing starting point. I consider a sales tax to be a truly bad tax, as it disproportionately effects the poor.

Hmm, I'd never thought about the fact that a VAT tax requires two sides of a party in order to defraud. That is kind of neat and a beneficial property of VAT taxes I had never considered.

I suspect these models will be like old Gutenberg's printing press. A rapid rise in the amount of content; most of it not that great. However the sheer volume will result in even more high quality content actually being created in aggregate.

Put another way, the average game quality will go down, but the actual rate of "Great" games will go up.

I've multiple times done a minor dive into why a VAT tax is seen as a reasonable tax? It... seems as regressive as a sales tax with even more layers of intervention? I've always eventually lost interest in trying to make sense of it, but they sure seem popular in Europe so there must be something to them?

My current belief is that there should really just be a wealth tax on assets (Federal) and a land value tax on land (States); nothing else.

I disagree with calling this bad faith. For instance:

* I can agive you one quarter of amazing profits, if you let me dismantle and sell all the assets of a company.

* I can give you a few years of incredible food production, if you let me strip a rainforest and plant commercial crops.

* I can give you incredibly cheap energy, if you let me mine non renewing fossil fuels from the earth.

The context of why something is possible matters. In this case, because a very large and comprehensive test suite was seen as a necessity to specify a successful project (managed by humans). I do not believe a LLM coded project could ever have made such a test suite. In this case, the LLM is consuming the result of expensive human labor (the test suite) to make what ultimately is a minor variation to it (the implementation language).

You've almost buffer overrun Goodhart's Law into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy . :]

I believe private equity ownership represents this in an aggressive form. The 2 and 20 percent takes that PE usually mandates as part of their purchase agreement means that they are highly highly incentivized to maximize short term "wins" over long term survival.

I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/meta/salaries/software-engi...

I fee like if you are an L4+ at Meta, you are doing fine even on a single salary. Let's say you loose 40% to state and federal and 20% to housing (renting), you still have 120k+ for the rest. This is plenty for most people in the world.

You are right that times are hard, but these are hardly trying times for people with this much compensation.

I'm blown away by the idea of not using Chris Tucker for Ruby Rhod. It is like imagining anyone but Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. They are basically perfect castings.

Last month I "panic bought" a $999 Macbook Mini (32G) so I could run small models, Image Generation, and Voice synthesis on it. I don't think I regret it yet, despite the fact that you can get a 16G for $599, which is honestly a much more efficient price per Gig.

I think it is interesting that, at least thus far, Apple has chosen not to raise the price of their comps despite presumably the price of RAM going up multiples.

Tipping point for me: It will be a pretty kickass media server for at least a decade.

Writing (unassisted) is probably the first step towards your own independent thoughts.

I'm reminded of that scene in "Ghost in the Shell" where some guy ask the Major why he is on the team (full of cyborgs) and she responds something along the line of "Because you are basically un-enhanced (maybe without a ghost?) and are likely to respond differently then the rest of us; Overspecialization is death."

I think a diversity of opinion is important for society. I'm worried that LLM's are going to group-think us into thinking the same way, believing the same things, reacting the same way.

I wonder if future children will need to be taught how to purposely have their own opinions; being so used to always asking others before even considering things on their own? The LLM will likely reach a better conclusion than you would on your own, but there is value in diverging from the consensus and thinking your own thoughts.

https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-...

I think the most interesting idea here is the idea of people purposely keeping secrets in order to maintain advantages.

Beliefs: At this time, I do not actually believe that LLM's can innovate in any real way. I'm not even clear if they can abstract. I think the most creative thing they can do is act as digital "nudgers" on combinatorial deterministic problems; illustrated by their performance on very specific geometry and chemistry problems.

Anyway, my point is that I think they may still need human beings to actually provide novel solutions to problems. To handle the unexpected. To simplify. LLM's can execute once they have been trained, but they cannot train themselves.

In the past, the saying in silicon valley was often "ideas are cheap". And there was some truth to that. Execution was far more difficult then the idea itself. Execution was so much more difficult than "pure thought" that you could often publicize the algorithmic/process/whatever that you had and still offer a product/service/consultancy that made use of it. The execution was the valuable thing.

But LLM's execute at a cost that is fractional of human cost and multiples of human development speed. The idea hasn't increased in value, but the execution cost has decreased markedly. In this world, protecting the idea is far more valuable than it is in the previous world. You can't keep your competitors away by out executing them, but you can keep them away if you have some advantage that they do not understand.

And, I agree, that is quite worrisome. If people don't share knowledge then knowledge disseminate much more slowly as everyone has to independently learn things on their own. That is a frightening future.

Does anyone have a breakdown from the case itself about what particular features of these social media apps makes them threshold into the "addictive" classification?

- Infinite Scrolling?

- Play Next Video Automatically?

- Shorts?

- Matching to your peer group?

- Variable Reward?

- Social Reciprocity?

- Notifications?

- Gamification (Streaks)?

Was the case won on the argument that it is the aggregate of these things (and many more I am sure)? The power imbalance between the user and the company? Was it some particular subset of them that they rest their argument on? I'm just genuinely curious how you can win a very challenging case like this without inadvertently lassoing so many other industries that your arguments seem ludicrous?

Dark thoughts... Imagine a future where most human beings are just overseered by an LLM and we are just wearing AR work glasses. Barely aware of what (physical) work we are doing as we overlay our hands within the projections of our AR glasses. Every task is decomposed into a set of small physical steps, you don't even think about what you are trying to actually accomplish, just follow the steps one at a time. I wonder if an entire fast food restaurant could be run in this fashion? No managers, no shift supervisors, just a skeleton crew doing one step of a task at a time.