BrenBarn

16 ms·

331.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
The LA Times had an article about this too: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-18/mark-zuc... It includes this gem: > According to a study last year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, th
332.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
We're getting closer to a world where every company is an ad company, period. It seems like there are more and more ads touting a dwindling number of actual products.
333.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I don't think there's anything specific about AI that means we need "laws for agents". What we need are laws that prevent entities from becoming as powerful as many of the ones we have now.
334.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
Fundamentally, almost all "innovation" in browser and JS development for the last 20 years has been about giving new powers to website authors, not to the people actually using the browser. The idea of telling website authors &qu
335.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
It's a nice idea. The problem is that it's impossible. It's like saying "write sentences, not words" or "use a tool, not a knife or a hammer or a lever". A protocol is an abstract concept that can'
336.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I'm not a big JS fan, but to be fair this article seems more like "bloated JS frameworks have poor performance". And like, yeah. But you can use JS without using a bloated framework. It's funny though that the article
337.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I think that is the crucial question. Often we lump together malice with "reckless disregard". The intention to cause harm is very close to the intention to do something that you know or should know is likely to cause harm, and
338.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
Sure I can, we've got free speech. :-)
339.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I think regardless of the technical issues, our sociopolitical selection pressures favor people who are willing to be as unscrupulous as possible in increasing their own wealth and power. Whatever happens with ML or AI or anything else is
340.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
The thing is that that same argument can be used to justify just about anything. If the scum of the earth is in power, they will ignore whatever rights you thought you had put into the constitution anyway. We are seeing that now. And I a
341.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in vario
342.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
But that's not what he said! He distinctly said "AI", so you were probably playing capitalism, and he cheated!
343.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
344.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
It is really great to see a post from the Matrix Foundation that forthrightly acknowledges it is not ready for mainstream adoption and shows awareness of its limitations. I hope this is a good omen for the future of Matrix.
345.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
I mean one possibility is to ban triple net leases.
346.
by BrenBarn 8mo ago
We would never have any guarantee of that no matter what they said.
347.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
The thing is that buying a hamburger while knowing you can afford to buy a billion more of them is not the same as buying a hamburger knowing you can't afford another one.
348.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
Taxing the most "successful" players and burdening them with regulations is exactly what is needed (provided those most successful players are large enough in size and few enough in number). There is room for more nuance in regul
349.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
It's way more than just pushing timelines back. The person took $400k from people without knowing anything about how to provide what those people had already paid for.
350.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
The article starts by saying that the person took $400k of orders without knowing how to make the product he had just sold, nor any experience that would help him do so. What?
351.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
That's true to a certain extent, but I think a significant reason for Trump's success is precisely that the government is so unresponsive that many people were willing to suffer an extremely painful self-inflicted wound just to br
352.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
But neither congress nor the presidency is an accurate representation of the will of the people, and that is one of the flaws with the American political system.
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by BrenBarn 9mo ago
The flaw is that they are able to make such a choice.
354.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.
355.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of c
356.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
A thousand times yes.
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by BrenBarn 9mo ago
If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.
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by BrenBarn 9mo ago
This is a nice explication of the sequence of events, but I think it's too lenient on the bad actors who've led us to where we are now. It says that "each step could be defended". Yes, but many of them can be defended
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by BrenBarn 9mo ago
No, but maybe he did.
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by BrenBarn 9mo ago
The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.

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