I see all of the CEOs lined up at the inauguration kissing the ring, buying up the commons that the DoD and Bell Labs built with taxpayer dollars into oligarchic empires straight out of Russia circa 92-94.
And at the apex of the Altman Era you have the swindler in chief peddling the absurdity that we weren't deep into the LLM asymptote a fucking year ago with implications ranging from wild infringements on the power of states to enforce their regulations in conflict with "AI Innovation..." /cuts to Amodei/ ..."to stay competitive with China!"
This is a fucking disaster for everyone but a small clique of Battery-frequenting bottom feeders who a better generation would have put in prison for crimes innumerable.
But it works for a few people. Those people are building bunkers though, and its not to keep out rogue AI.
Litmus test: when you hear soundbites like "in the last N years alone, the world used more energy/emitted more CO2 / did more whatever than it did in all recorded history", are you shocked? Surprised? If so, you failed to understand what exponential growth means. I mean, I assume you do understand this, but most people don't.
> implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN
If it were, I wouldn't have written my comment in the first place. I see the HN commentariat, on average, to be still enamored with sigmoids, treating the s-curve nature of growth in real world as some profound insight that invalidates the entire concept of exponential growth.
> Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.
For one, it worked (and still does), so there's that. But secondly, this is not just about capitalism and wars. It's everywhere. COVID-19 was actually a nice demonstration. Yes, infections ultimately followed a sigmoid, as they were expected to, but the first part of the sigmoid is exponential, it was also the part that mattered at the beginning, and which most people across all social and economical strata failed to grasp.
Also thanks for the Naggum quote. I do consider myself a moral being and I am proud to be firmly in the S-expression camp.