jakke

And I kind of nodded politely, because this is someone who was protesting Vietnam back in the day and might just be out of touch with modern protest culture? But then I got information about an upcoming protest in Seattle, and it's about the typical unfocused litany of grievances that all get protested at once, and it really is kind of remarkable how nothing about wars or militarization or any other foreign policy ended up on that very long list. I think partially what's going on here is that there's an increasing sense that the big-tent left-wing coalition needs to coddle pro-war military veterans, and partially what's going on is that protest organizers see themselves as future Democratic operatives and don't want to rock the boat on both parties' favourite pastime, and partially that it's become easy to blame the external enemy committing atrocities (the Israeli government) rather than the US government that bankrolls it and sends it marching orders and also kills civilians indiscriminately itself. It feels like "stop bombing Iran" would show up on the protest plans, especially after the US military bombed that school and killed all those kids, but nothing about Iran (or Palestine, or Cuba, or anywhere else outside the US) made the cut. Anyway, didn't expect to be so in line with the irritable septuagenarian on Kids These Days having misplaced priorities, but here we are.

Look how good this brave noble wolf is

Platner keeps doubling down and trying to white-knuckle through this even though at this point there's really no trajectory towards him winning an election in Maine. Maybe he's holding out for some kind of think tank appointment or something and so he imagines he has some incentive to wait until the party is desperate? At this point though staying in the race and in the news is absolutely going to cost the party an extremely winnable seat.

From the investor calls I've listened to (and I highly recommend that everyone listen to Big Tech investor calls) a big part of what's going on is that the average tech executive sees the future editorial voice of their platform as a helpful friend who's scrolling through all these pictures and videos with you and is recommending you buy things along the way. Like, the idea is that you and a chatty pal are browsing the Internet together, and that chatty pal is actually a puppet with an advertisement algorithm inside of it, but as much as possible you should feel like it's someone you're chatting with as opposed to the Web 2.0 ideal of social media as a platform that lets people post things and gives other people tools to share or react to those posts, and so you should basically never see buttons and should always be reading (or hearing!) a friendly voice whenever you're in the app. And I'm very skeptical that users will ever learn to love this new mode of interaction, because it adds yet another layer of mediation on the already heavily mediated social media interactions, but I'm certain that it's absolutely terrible for security in a way that can't be mitigated.

Math and programming easier, concentration uninterrupted, zero meaningful lessons learned about the impact of sleep on overall quality of life. I've just unintentionally overloaded the past week with DMing D&D games and performing in improv shows and hosting friends from out of town and organizing picnics and going to music festivals in the park and having long niche kink sessions until I'm fully just losing consciousness without meaning to at the end of the day, because that way I'm reliably going to sleep at 12:30 or 1 and then waking up at 8. This past week has been so full of time with friends and progress on projects and general feelings of life fulfillment, but at the end of the week I'm going to visit my parents and experiencing three days of their heartbreak with how I've turned out, and that's going to tank my mood for the next few weeks, so currently feeling like I'm flying towards a brick wall.

Are enough employees on the upper side of that wall, over the entire global economy, to make the current LLM-as-a-service industry long-run profitable? Absolutely not. Too many companies are competing to build the same thing, the capital costs are very high, and the utility is limited to a thin sliver of very specialized applications. Is there any scale at which this industry does make sense, providing specialized coding tools to a subset of engineers plus a misinformation toy for executives? Maybe, but it's impossible to see how that justifies orienting the entire tech industry and a big chunk of financial markets around this one service.

Yeah even the ultra-Orthodox living in a complete bubble can see what's going on better than centrist Israeli politicians. I realize that what's happened is that October 7 completely warped Israeli politics in exactly the same way that September 11 did US politics, and everything since then has followed the same playbook of enforced patriotism and revenge destruction of every city in Afghanistan and then a completely unrelated war in Iraq that killed even more civilians, but two and a half years in any anti-war political movements are still relegated to the activist fringe. At any rate, the next elections in Israel are unlikely to produce a functional government largely due to these exact Haredi protesters and their demands, which isn't going to make it any easier to stop the military killing machine.

I think there's room for at least one or two reliably profitable companies somewhere in there, and those companies will become industry standards, and universities will scramble to reorient their coursework so that graduates have the correct proficiencies in LLM interaction for the labour market. All of this will consume only a tiny fraction of the planned data centre buildout, and most of that capacity will get cancelled and never built, and a bunch of stocks with massively overinflated values are going to crash, and that's probably going to trigger a stock market correction. Most of the losses of this adjustment from "AI will do everything and we will live as immortal trillionaire god-kings" to "LLMs are a useful tool for automating menial software engineering tasks" are ultimately going to be borne by giant tech companies though, and the tech giants could each endure a $100 billion writeoff and be basically fine, so I think the impact on the overall economy will be minimal.

So glad the Dems cleared the field for a rich white guy with a vaguely counterculture veneer and absolutely zero past scrutiny for any of his decisions. Maine has plenty of competent Democrats with more charisma and more interesting backstories and more previous time in the media spotlight (the state house Speaker is charismatic and good at talking about policy! the mayor of Lewiston has been really vocal about ICE in a convincing way! I have never been to Maine and know very little about it but there is probably another example who isn't quite as visible in the national media!) but the party brass made the decision they were going with the prep school graduate former military contractor who bought a seafood business to re-establish a presence in Maine, and they all played the game correctly and bowed out, and now it turns out that Nazi tattoo guy is also cringey extramarital sexting guy, and once again it looks pretty much impossible for the Democrats to take back the Senate. All of this could have come out in the primaries, but the party machine is so afraid of primaries that they want to carefully handpick successors, and it's so hard for people living in a wealthy well-connected DC bubble not to pick wealthy well-connected people who spent many years living in DC as the natural safe choice, and this guy is turning out to be such a shitty candidate he might as well have been grown in a lab to get Collins re-elected.

The subsequent parts of the report are going to get more into the cost drivers and how much of this is housing or childcare or transportation or what. And I think that's a really helpful antidote to the dead-end liberal progressive fantasy of "we will just send everyone $1000 a month and the market will handle the rest" because that would drive up costs, it would not deliver assistance to the people who need it most, and it would unavoidably take away funding from public goods that really only the government can provide. Some of the solution needs to come from government subsidy or direct provision on the supply side, and it's worth understanding where this would be the most helpful.

Like at its core the idea is just "I'm a cis person looking for a relationship with a cis person on the other side of the gender binary, and I'd like to get married and have children with them on a short timescale, but I don't want all the baggage that comes from heterosexuality, and I would like both of us to have a lightly counterculture and possibly also androgynous vibe". And I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that, and it makes sense to develop terminology and descriptors for people who feel this way, because there are a lot of them. But unfortunately none of our identities or goals or values are still embedded in a broader social context, and so you end up having to nod very understandingly through conversations about how the AFAB partner can't out-earn the AMAB partner in a relationship or else their parents won't approve lest you be accused of being a bad gatekeeping close-minded homosexual.

If this update is happening for every property in New York, that's going to be great news for the city budget and a pretty sizeable new tax bill for a lot of very rich people whose properties have been undervalued by millions of dollars for many years now. If this update is happening just for these second homes, that's a very funny split with absolutely zero justification. I can't find any other news online about this and I can't spend more than five minutes digging through the state budget to try to find it today, but I'm really curious as to what's happening here.