CoerciveUtopian's Blog

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

“you came back!”✨🫶

Like what do you mean every single year the Harkers, the suitor squad and Van Helsing are forced to relive the worst year of their life

Sure they win in the end but over and over they are forced to loose the people they love, be striped of their personhood and fight what must have seemed like an impossible battle.

And nobody is even aware of this time loop except us and we just feed into this narrative. “Oh my friend Jonathan has just sent me another letter let’s hope this goes better than last year ;)”

And from a literary analysis standpoint this whole change is inane because it frames the book in an entirely new light. There is a meta layer of horror being applied to the book that was never possible before.

they’re everywhere now, they don’t even look different anymore, how are we supposed to tell, they’re blending in, they’re infiltrating, they used to stay in their own streets, at least that was honest

we can’t lend money, that’s usury, that’s forbidden, let them do it, it’s our money anyway, they’re just holding it for us, why are they so good at it, why are all bankers jews, it’s suspicious how successful they are at the only thing we allowed them to do

they must convert, that’s the only way to belong, take our names, our faith, our god (what do you mean our god was jewish), our customs, become like us or else, those new christians aren’t real christians, they’re secretly practicing, their blood is still jewish you can't change blood, they’re hiding something, we need an inquisition to see what’s in their hearts

entertainment isn’t serious work, it isn’t respectable, it isn’t properly christian, it’s nonsense, let them make their silly films, why are they controlling what we watch, why is every agent jewish, i don't like them but they make me good money so what the hell, i don't understand that funny language with the shtick and the plotz, walt disney was right

they’re poor, they crowd the cities, they’re a burden, and they’re rich, they run the banks, they’re sickly and weak and parasitic, they’re powerful and dangerous, don't mix with any of them

they’re not loyal to anyone but themselves, they’re not patriotic, they’re not doing their share, they want to what? serve in the army? can we trust them, whose side are they really on

she can't be she's blonde, he can't be he's black, they're privileged whites, they're not white, every people has the right to self-determine their identity but theirs is fake, they’re impostors, they’re khazars, so what if they're atheists they're still jewish, they're godless people, they're too religious

we cannot let them publish, they cannot print, they cannot study in our universities, their books are dangerous, what is this language, we must burn their texts, they want what, emancipation, fine they should teach they’re cheap labour, why are they teaching our children, why are they in the sciences, why are they winning all the prizes, they’re uncultured, why do they own so much art, we must confiscate it, it’s our art not theirs, felix mendelssohn? pissarro? really? emma lazarus? Oh, kafka?? You don’t say, he doesn’t read like a jew 

they’re the ones really behind socialism, behind marxism, marx was a jew by the way did you know that, he hated jews he knew what’s right, they want a world without bloodlines because their bloodline is rotten, they want a world where it’s ok to be a jew, where being born different doesn’t mark you forever, they’re behind the revolution, they’re dismantling society, they’re enemies of the state, they’re destroying tradition, they’re taking control of our government

expel them (keep their money, though), purify the kingdom, sanctify the soil, they're vermin, let them scatter, they’re nomadic, they don’t belong anywhere, what is with The Wandering Jew and their Fiddlers on the Roof and their super-heroes, nobody wants them, there must be a reason nobody wants them, they had it coming didn’t they, i heard they make their strange bread from children’s blood, why are they coming here, what do they expect, charity, where's all that money they had, they made them leave it behind when the expelled them, good, they probably stole it anyway

fine, they can stay, but it will cost them, temporary permits, refugee certificates, protection for a fee, they’re useful, they have cousins in america, they have family friends in paris, maybe they can hook me up, no i don’t know any, i met one at work once, we don’t have many of (((them))) here, it’s not that kind of place 

no, this isn’t a good time, close the gates, we’re good christians of course but they’re not, what even are they with their weird little hats, why are they praying like that, give us your tired, your poor, your huddles masses, we must accept refugees, a society that doesn't is a sick society, except for the jews, we don't want more jews, revoke the charters, we're over-crowded

we’re better than them, they think we owe them something because of the holocaust, it's been decades get over it, they’re obligated to be better than all of us, what do you mean they think they’re better than us, what is this word “goyim”, what did you call me, they should go back where they came from, i don't know where, whatever, it's not my problem, i'm only asking questions man, i just notice these things

(anne frank!!)