Arubis

9 ms·

151.
by Arubis 6mo ago
My strong suspicion is that the current POTUS will leave the White House in a box. My hope is that this precedes the next election cycle.
152.
by Arubis 6mo ago
Another good lesson could potentially be that going to war as a sideshow to distract from a news cycle that threatened people in power is not the best choice for the world at large.
153.
by Arubis 6mo ago
Ceding? Any legal control the EU has over tech has been slowly drawn out of the US’s grasp. It was just that the US dominance over legal control of all these networked interconnections wasn’t so actively and visibly utilized until more rece
154.
by Arubis 6mo ago
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
155.
by Arubis 6mo ago
I invite you to expand on your blanket statement. I posit that the ultra-wealthy are necessarily and unavoidably transformed by the lived experience of having that level of wealth: virtually any logistical inconvenience you and I currently
156.
by Arubis 6mo ago
Marc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective. Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering
157.
by Arubis 6mo ago
Venkat Rao noticed this and turned it into a rather excellent essay: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules > The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the str
158.
by Arubis 6mo ago
Reading (and even more so, using the tools to produce) a bunch of LLM-output writing also affects one’s writing style. Ever sat down and blown through 3-4 books by a favorite author, then written something and found yourself using similar s
159.
by Arubis 7mo ago
There's way too much depth in this (wonderful, cautiously hopeful) series to pack into a movie, or even a trilogy.
160.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Good. Now let's start preparing for the next one.
161.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.
162.
by Arubis 7mo ago
We are green on opsec!
163.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Now let's add an externally-controlled backdoor to everything else, too, and that'll work out great.
164.
by Arubis 7mo ago
[flagged]
165.
by Arubis 7mo ago
It does _now_, since the deliverable capabilities and pricing changed well after the ink on the contracts was dry. The F35 program was picked over by experts and denounced internally, but went forward as a purchase anyway.
166.
by Arubis 7mo ago
I mean, they also bought the F-35.
167.
by Arubis 7mo ago
This is a little tangential, but that's fascinating phrasing -- has me trying to imagine what involuntary journalism looks like.
168.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Certainly that's not how the Europeans started out interacting with north America's natural resource. Mostly they treated it like the US does oil deposits now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Policy
169.
by Arubis 7mo ago
We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.
170.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ ( https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/ ) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses. Yes
171.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Yes, though usually setting up asymmetric expectations requires a power imbalance, so might instead be a PM or someone with influence but not technical acuity creating that initial kLoC.
172.
by Arubis 7mo ago
It's way too early to tell. Safe to say that it's different. But it might be better than some of our current async comms. If I spend time and thought and research around an idea and a corpus of information and dump that all into a
173.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Venkat Rao's "Sloptraptions" essays ( https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/s/sloptraptions ) are the version of this that isn't pithy. ( https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/to
174.
by Arubis 7mo ago
I actually think there’s almost an acceptable workflow here of using LLMs as part of the medium of communication. I’m pretty much fine with someone sending me 500 lines of slop with the stated expectation that I’ll dump it into an LLM on my
175.
by Arubis 7mo ago
They're not. That's executive fiat. The actual name of the department changes if Congress says it does.
176.
by Arubis 7mo ago
This is wrong and rhymes with all the sabre-rattling towards news orgs from the white house over the last couple days. It will also make the US armed forces _actively worse_ at their jobs. It won't even take very long. If you can'
177.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Just generally, a good piece of context to keep in mind whenever you see electronic surveillance, backdoor, or anonymity-piercing legislation or legal efforts, _particularly_ when they're framed as protecting minors, is that Jeffrey Ep
178.
by Arubis 7mo ago
Goons don't scale well. Wide-scale intimidation does.
179.
by Arubis 7mo ago
It is perhaps crucial to note that Venkat Rao, the author, himself found an escape from the system under study here; he’s been consulting or otherwise feral for about 15 years.
180.
by Arubis 7mo ago
We had bad intelligence before we had AI. This is just shunting blame and responsibility away from individual humans (who can theoretically be held accountable) to a nebulous concept.

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