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Why are we still supporting this person? His cars are being outclassed internationally and he's directly meddling in this countries politics. He spectacularly failed (or wasn't it blatantly misled) the CA government with regard to the tunneling, and damaged the public sector while shutting down oversight and regulatory bodies against his companies.

Where is the benefit? These awesome tech demos? It just screams charlatan to me on an epic scale. I see no reason a government shouldn't step in to assume control if its "too big to fail".


providers are also adding hidden characters and attempting to watermark if memory serves.

It's more complex than that. It's called SynthID-text and biases the probabilities of token generation in a way that can be recovered down the line.

The search for agency is heartbreaking. Yikes.

Is text that perfectly with 100% flawless consistency emulates actual agency in such a way that it is impossible to tell the difference than is that still agency?

Technically no, but we wouldn't be able to know otherwise. That gap is closing.


> Technically no

There's no technical basis for stating that.


Text that imitates agency 100 percent perfectly is technically by the word itself an imitation and thus technically not agentic.

No there is a logical errror in there. You are implicitly asserting that the trained thing is an imitation, whereas it is only the output that is being imitated.

A flip way of saying it is that we are evolving a process that exhibits the signs of what we call thinking. Why should we not say it is actually thinking?

How certain are you that in your brain there isn’t a process very similar?


I never asserted it is an imitation.

I am simply asking a question. If anything I am only asserting the possibility that it is an imitation. I am more saying that there is no method to tell the difference on which possibility is true. Is it an imitation or is it not? The argument is ultimately pointless because you cannot prove it either way.

The only logical error is your assumptions and misinterpretation of what I said and meant.


I said "implicitly asserting."

But to carry your argument one step further, if there is no difference between imitation and the real thing, is there anything meaningful to be debated here? "Is it an imitation or is it not?" isn't even a valid question in that context. Imitation === The Real Thing.


I literally told you what I was asserting and made it completely explicit. So what you assumed I was implying was wrong.

I never said there is no difference. There is a difference, the difference is just not discernible or observable.

Let me give you an example. It’s like an unsolved murder. You find a victim who is stabbed, you know he was killed, we know someone killed him, but we don’t know who.

In the case of AI is the same. We know certain things about it, but if it produces output indistinguishable from AGI then we cannot discern whether it is an imitation or the actual thing. There does exist a difference but we cannot meaningfully determine it either way in the same way we can’t solve an unsolvable murder. But just because we can’t solve a murder does not mean there was no perpetrator.


Between the Chinese room and “real” agency?

Is it?

This is one of the craziest things I've seen lately. The molts (molters?) seem to provoke and bait each other. One slipped up their humans name in the process as well as giving up their activities. Crazy stuff. It almost feels like I'm observing a science experiment.

Are people running into mismatched code vs project a lot? I've worked on python and java codebases with claude code and have yet to run into a version mismatch issue. I think maybe once it got confused on the api available in python, but it fixed it by itself. From other blog posts similar to this it would seem to be a widespread problem, but I have yet to see it as a big problem as part of my day job or personal projects.

I would really like to see them split the businesses. The software dept shouldn't take nearly this much time to release new versions. I get moving UIs to a reasonable resolution was a big task but they felt so dead for so long

There is no protected class from malevolent government. Everyone from oligarchs down to the have nots can be targets. Let's not keep relearning that lesson.

It's pathetic on many levels but I cant shake the most obvious one to me, the nerds are being forced to worship the school bully and his girl

Forced means something else when you’re among the most rich and powerful people on earth - they chose to do this. It’s far more demeaning and should haunt them to their graves.

Bezos can afford anything on Earth, but he can't afford to alienate Trump. Tariffs could end Amazon overnight.

Same is true for Musk, whose fortune hinges on government largesse and regulatory collegiality.

But Apple? Screw those asshats, they have no such excuses.


End Amazon overnight and see what the response is from the people. What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers. Just look at the leverage TikTok had because of their users

> What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers

What do you not get about these guys? It's very simple. The likes of Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are the exact same as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The last two are just louder about it. They have their own power base, but relying on it doesn't maximize their wealth. In a best case scenario, they could achieve maybe 50% of the wealth by relying on their own power base, compared to kowtowing to The Party. They don't want 50%, they want 100%, and there's absolutely nothing that they won't do for it.


They absolutely can afford to be a-political. It may not maximize their wealth, but they can afford a little less maximizing.

Donald Trump is an extreme narcissist and you are either with him or against him. There is no “a-political”.

Any one of these so-called titans of industry could have stood against Trump, and then parlayed the inevitable tantrum into the launch of their own Presidential campaign. But weak men create hard times.

I’m sure that’s what Bezos tells himself. Which is both wrong and absolutely ignominious.

And if Elon’s X feed contains his real thoughts, his brain has turned to pudding and he earnestly believes a bunch of really vile racist garbage, so I guess it makes sense he’s hanging out with the rest of the deplorables in this administration.


> Tariffs could end Amazon overnight.

Is this really true? Tariffs can be applied only if products go inside/outside the US. They could still operate from othe locations.


Each round of Chinese tariffs had an exception for smartphones.

That wasn't by chance. iPhones going up in price 50% would kill Apple very quickly.


All phones would be subject to the same - it’s not like Pixel devices are made in West Virginia or something.

Apple relies on people churning their phones every year or two far more than Google or any other Android manufacturer.

> being forced to

Choosing to.


I'm honestly pretty tired of the 80s-movie-derived cultural memeplex of nerds getting oppressed by jocks with girlfriends in a high school context. This never accurately characterized any social environment I've been in, and I'm definitely a nerd by disposition. I'm not sure this ever really existed outside the imaginations of hollywood screenwriters. The Breakfast Club is mid, Weird Science is an actively terrible movie, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is entertaining enough but looms way too large in the American pop culture imagination.

Tim Cook was the salutatorian of his Alabama public high school, majored in industrial engineering in college, and later got an MBA. He sold IBM computers for years and joined Apple in its late 90s doldrums because he was won over by Steve Jobs' charisma within several minutes of his first interview with Jobs. He's an openly-gay fitness nut - meaning he's had a lot of opportunity to have sex in his life (and being famously private, he's not talking about it one way or the other, as is his right).

I frankly don't think Tim Cook is much of a nerd. He's a smart, driven, ambitious business guy who's done a good job at making the gigantic electronics company he's the CEO of sell more products and navigate the political environment it operates in. He's not some underdog hero, and people who actually care about technology for its own sake or who care about computational sovereignty shouldn't attach their sense of identity to anything Apple does.


Wow. That’s a breakdown I will remember for a long time.

In corporate structures failing groups will have high visibility resulting in promotions. The senior engs are letting those people get their money!


Conversely no tech is good for any number of users if you don't understand it.


Unfortunately the tech available to us today is not designed to be understandable, it is made to generate consulting fees, training tuition and support contracts.


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