This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
> Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
IIRC, I've heard it said that comedians are not happy people and usually had pretty difficult childhoods where "being funny" was a coping mechanism.
Some of the famous ones like Carlin seemed like they had some mental patterns that favored the line of work. Famously if he wasn’t performing he was thinking of new material virtually every waking minute. Pathological dedication to the craft.
I think it's less about comedy being the outlet to "cope" with what you see, and more about seeing the comedy because you are able to see the world for what it really is.
Most of timeless comedy simply describes the mundane reality of the audience in a way that they realize the absurdity of it.
A lot of comedians, ie standup ones but not only, have had hard lives, suffer from depression, anxieties and so on. The better the ones the more (ie Robin Williams). Making people laugh is their coping, validation and approval mechanism for the world and life.
Such people have different perspectives on life, success and happiness, for better or worse.
Should have specified old used thinkpads. I’ve never bought one new. My daily driver is 10+yo, bought for $200 and upgraded mem, battery, and ssd with another $100.
Yup. My T480 was ~$2500 new on-sale. It has 2 batteries with one removable one, and upgradeable RAM.. features not found on the T490 or T480s.
I subsequently swapped the logic board from the iGPU to the dGPU + max performance CPU model, swapped the top cover for a magnesium one, HDD->SSD, and installed a better WiFi module. Also had to replace the screen once because I suck and broke it.
I got my old G1 X1 Carbon for somewhere between 900 and 1100 from memory. Theres a fair discount in there mind, but its not a discount I could possibly hope to replicate these days.
(I think that was 1600 dollars partner pricing - charity discount - volume discount (hopped on an order for 12 already identical already going through) - tax incentives)
The cheapest Gen 13 Carbon currently available is ~ 2600 in the same currency, and that's already discounted by 9%, and has a shittier OS (Ships with Home edition instead of Pro), I doubt that would get below 2200 even with partner/channel pricing.
If you add "Winflation" that is, Windows 7/8 running perfectly smoothly on the Gen 1 with 8 Gig of memory, the replacement thinkpad being one that runs Windows 11 comfortably would be the $3150 in the same money, for its 32GB memory. Again doubtful it would go below 2700 or so even with channel.
Macbook NEO is funnily enough 900 bucks landed for me, with 8 gig of memory. I am betting the user experience of the thing is as good or if not better than my old carbon.
Carbon X1 was so hot when it was new, can your laptop do this? (folds flat like a gamer chair). I only was able to afford em 10 years later. I have a gen 6 carbon x1 now 4k screen got it for $200. The batteries are what's not great with old laptops, hard to get replacement batteries that aren't fake.
I like having a Linux laptop handy eg. with gparted
Assuming you read my comment, understood exactly what I was outlining, insofar as "26 years ago" is completely irrelevant and you chose to add that nonsequitur, I have located the thinkpad carbon USD launch price and its within cooee of my recollection.
So its still the case that getting a G13 will cost 2-3 times the cost depending on metric for my G1.
But even looking at the data you quoted, the end of the IBM period shows lots of cheap thinkpads. Look at the R40 prices in your own source.
Heck look at these:
765D $6,500 (street! pcmag.com early 97) street $1,999 PC Mag 1 Sep 1998 (-60%) XGA 13.3 first model beyond 12.1"
765L $5459.16 - $6,779.05 street 11/4/97 pcmag.com (765D without cd/modem) street $1,899 PC Mag 1 Sep 1998 (-60%) XGA 13.3
4500 dollar haircut in 12 months?
Thinkpad 500
500 $1,699 IBM PC Direct (PC Mag 31 May 1994), $999 08/24/94
Very Don Norman problem. It is odd that things like this aren't more of a "solved problem." Maybe they are in some places and builders in the US just ignore the best practices.
It's funny how the false choice of American politics (Red vs Blue) also makes it into its consumerist corporatist life. That Anthropic's threadbare "limits" on government usage are seen as a heroic stand is a testament to just how far the goalposts on "ethical" deployment of AI have moved to the (fascist) right. As ever, politics precedes technology. We have Reagan's internet, we will have Trump's AI. God help us.
I'm not sure what the message this comment is trying to convey beyond throwing in the "corporatist" "consumerist" signalling buzzwords followed by calling the right fascists.
I've literally never heard anybody call the Internet "Reagan's internet", the best I can do is the Al Gore quote and who's calling anything Trump's AI?
These are the points I'm making, which I think are fairly one-to-one with my original comment:
- American politics presents a false choice between Democrats and Republicans
- America is both a consumerist and corporatist society
- Anthropic asked for minimal limits on AI usage
- People view Anthropic's stand as heroic, while viewing OpenAI as villainous
- The false choice between Anthropic and OpenAI mirrors the false choice in
American politics.
- People at OpenAI, Anthropic, and elsewhere used to view ethical deployment of
AI as paramount, but those goalposts have shifted as financial and political
incentives changed.
- Specifically, the ethics of AI have become conveniently synonymous with the
current financial and political moment.
- The current political moment is fascist.
- Technology is broadly neutral and it is politics that primarily dictates how
technology is actually used and deployed, and therefore its broad impacts.
- The internet was developed in the neoliberal era, which began with the
election of Ronald Reagan and extended through the Obama presidency.
- The structure and dynamics of the internet over the last 30 years is more
reflective of neoliberal politics than it is of anything inherent in the
technology. Extreme privitization and the refusal to use public institutions
to provision or regulate public goods.
- AI is being developed in a new political era, begun with the first Trump
presidency, and taking more full shape under the second Trump presidency.
- We are likely to find that AI's trajectory is similarly dictated largely by
politics rather than anything inherent to the technology.
- With this political era being fascist and explicitly
neo-imperial/neo-colonial, I fear for the technology's impact on humanity.
I think this is spot on. It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy. I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation, orient our collective capacities towards our collective well-being, and then let people do what they will. Anything short of that seems to be a rather false liberty (and a rather false democracy, while we’re at it).
I think we treat the maximization of liberty (in my mind a primary function of government/society, with reasonable limits) as the same goal for both corporations and people, which ultimately is a side effect of treating corporations like people. But these are entirely oppositional goals: Maximizing personal liberty of actual people requires significant binding restrictions on corporations.
In the US we have this overly simplistic narrative of pro-liberty GOP versus anti-liberty DNC which I think badly needs to be separated into pro _personal_ liberty positions (healthcare, including abortion, quality public education), versus anti _corporate_ liberty (environmental regulation, financial transparency, etc).
> as the same goal for both corporations and people, which ultimately is a side effect of treating corporations like people
This is a huge problem the US needs a deal with - corporations are artificial beings that aren’t sentient and, therefore, cannot participate in politics. We might need to litigate that with an LLM to make language broad enough to set this precedent and further protect the rights of actual sentient beings.
> It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy.
It's the typical pattern.
If you don't have rules attenuating the runaway feedback loop - some people get a little more initially (talent, money, luck, whatever), then it spirals into A LOT more, which gives them influence over everybody else, which is oligarchy, and that eventually turns into a dictatorship.
The only way to avoid it is to have strong institutions and regulations stopping the feedback loop.
We knew it thousands of years ago, nothing changed. We seem to have to learn this lesson independently in every newly-created domain. It's time for tech sector.
> I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation
How do you propose to do it without bans and regulations?
> It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy.
This has been a feature of this kind of language for ages. Remember the arguments used to defang Obamacare, which was an already defanged version of some very basic public healthcare system?
There’s different kinds of libertarians, and there’s certainly one kind that is only interested in the freedom to be an asshole.
Note that this kind of “libertarian” also tends to be fine with attacks on women’s reproductive freedom for example, or fine with small local forms of tyranny like the abusive family or community.
> It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy.
Because the USA confuses liberty and libertarianism.
You can tell this is almost universally the case because even libertarians don't think they need to vote for libertarians to reach libertarian goals. They will get them either way.
windowing: using a transparent nswindow hosting swiftui views for the floating call ui, and nspopover for the menu bar dropdown. we also toggle nsapp.activationpolicy to hide the dock icon when it's just running in the background
networking: livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it’s been rock solid), with firebase cloud functions generating the tokens and firestore handling the signaling and presence state
security: standard firebase auth for user management, and we use the native macos keychain (ksecclassgenericpassword) to securely store credentials so you don't have to login every time
mac apis: lots of avfoundation for camera/mic permissions, nsstatusitem for the menu bar integration, and unusernotificationcenter to make sure you actually see incoming calls
I always find it odd when media (and others) consider consumerism as somehow "helping" the economy. The economy is entirely about the collective activity of humans serving humans. Everything we make or do is really about prioritizing that activity over others. Why would it be advantageous to prioritize barely-distinguishable "new" devices over the myriad other things human labor and capital could be put to?
Their audience is the capital class (the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks). Longer device ownership and service life is fiscally responsible but suboptimal for shareholders.
"Metaphorically, I think about any job given to Claude as having 3 dimensions. There's the breadth of the task (roughly how many lines of code it will touch), the depth of the task (the complexity, the layers of abstraction needed, the decision making involved, etc.), and the time spent working on it. Those three axes define a cube, and the size of the cube is how much entropy I'm shoving into the project."
That's an interesting conceptualization that tracks with my experience using CC. And they were able to get an impressive amount of work done:
"""
The specifics don't matter too much here, but for context, some of what I had it do:
- Research all the available on-device speech-to-text models with permissive licences
- Demo the transcription speed of each one on an android device attached to the PC
- Write a C wrapper for the best one (Moonshine) and build an embeddable dynamic library
- Build this for iOS, Android, Linux, and macOS, and integrate it with my app code using the FFI
- Build a Nim wrapper for the fdk-aac library
- Integrate it with miniaudio, so I can play AAC audio and pipe the audio into Moonshine
