jimkleiber

And also has resources to do bigger things. Easier to survive but also easier to thrive and help others thrive.

I think a lot of it has to do with how people get money. Not everyone, but a lot of people get a lot of money through very exchange-oriented ways and continue to be exchange-oriented afterwards.

I've always wondered what would happen if more people got a lot of money through more communal-oriented ways.

Well, plenty of businesses have been built on not being the best but being the most preferred regardless.

Yes but I'd say some people (me) like WhatsApp because of the privacy and end-to-end encryption. Email i assume is less private but still more private than a public post.

Imagine someone puts all the Signal messages someone else sent them through an AI. I dunno. I think problem is most AI doesn't work like Confer.to, also by Signal's founder.

Perhaps Russia might also have one and we could bomb each other up there.

Pros of expansionism can also come with cons.

Well it soothes me to know that the people who actually took us to the moon didn't have such territorial obsessions:

> Some Americans anticipated possible controversy over planting the United States flag on the Moon, since the Outer Space Treaty prohibited territorial claims to any extraterrestrial body. Since it was made clear the United States had no intention of making a territorial claim to the Moon, no serious controversy materialized. Four months after the Apollo 11 landing, the United States Congress passed a bill in November 1969, which was signed into law by President Nixon, stating:

> The flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft ... as part of any mission ... the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States. ... this act is intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly

Plenty of programs from many places can reach orbit, im not really sure what you're talking about. And yes. It still is, unless a sole individual can claim ownership of a global orbit, which i imagine even some of the most capitalist-minded people would find absurd.

So the US owns the moon? Or does Neil Armstrong?

I'm a bit sassy today just kinda tired of certain arguments.

Not everything but way more things than most people want to admit because so many of us have collapsed "political" into meaning "partisan."

Orbit is a global public commons, how is it not a political issue? It can be a political issue AND an engineering marvel, regardless of what other organizations are doing

The challenge is launching things into orbit is politics, aka how humans should organize society.

So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.

I wonder if in the age of AI it's a lot easier to resurrect old software that we miss. Not easy, but a lot easier?

I find myself often trapped (enticed?) by how fast and inexpensive it is to build software nowadays and also to learn new things.

Today, was thinking about 1) what do I actually want to build AND maintain? and 2) what do I want to build and maintain that if I didn't do it, someone else probably wouldn't and I'd be really annoyed that it didn't exist in the world?

I dunno, just two current questions I thought you might find interesting, not sure if it adds anything new to the discourse, may be a challenge throughout different parts of human history :-D

> Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say, is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.

With the discussions of p(doom) in AI development, I wonder if we can learn from, and build upon, what some of the world's leading scientists and intellectuals did during and after the development of the nuclear bomb.

This manifesto led to the development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which "provided background work to the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), the Biological Weapons Convention (1972), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993)," possibly the groundwork to end the Vietnam War, and also the reception of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Joseph Rotblat in 1995 [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugwash_Conferences_on_Science...

They believe the tech is currently powerful and may become super super powerful very soon, and powerful tools can help us and can hurt us. Nuclear fission can provide so much energy to power our society and kill millions of beings.

So, i think they're hopeful for the help and terrified of the harms and are maybe trying to slow down on the amplifier of those effects for now.

Fair point, we don't televise their deaths especially in such a visceral and repeated way and therefore it can feel more distant.

I still think if we showed people dying from covid in the more gruesome way, it may have changed our response to it, just as if we show any human or being dying in a gruesome way.

I wonder if this is a root of the complaints across fields, how AI is ruining the greater picture and process in writing, acting, drawing, filming, coding, and more.

That it makes life more ends and less means.

And the fear was visible and public. We watched planes hit our tallest buildings live on TV and the horrors that ensued. It was publicly visceral in a way that an invisible virus, which has had people struggling in relative privacy and obscurity, hasn't been.

I dont think it existed nearly at the same level, not even close. And honestly, even now, i still think it's a handful of actors doing a lot of it.

Kinda like when women say that men harass them in the bars and a lot of men seem confused because we don't think we harass them, when it can be like 1 guy harassing 20 women in a bar on the same night.

So I think it's quite unevenly distributed.

Yup, if i claim everyone is corrupt, then i can be corrupt. Ironically, if im corrupt, i probably honestly assume everyone else is, or at least superficially assume that, because if i don't, i might think other people are good and i am bad.

I think it's what can happen when we shift more towards an exchange orientation and away from a communal orientation. Or in other words, as we see the world more win-lose and less win-win.

I'm curious how similar/different this is to buying shelf space or aisle placement in physical stores.

Spam + slop = ?

I hope that people will study the emotional impacts of these drugs.

I wonder if that may be the root of a lot of these changes we are seeing and might provide more clues into what might be possible with them.

I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride."

So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.

But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.

And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.

So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.

I wish more people would play the game Monopoly and realize how much it can suck to live in a world full of monopolies.

lol, I actually sang it (or tried to) to open my college commencement speech :-) Brutal for one sober person, probably more fun for a group of non-sober people :-D

I mean I think sometimes it reduces pain. But it can also increase pain? I've definitely stayed up later than I've wanted to, or got into a fight with someone because I paid more attention to the AI coding agent than them, or had it convince me that I had made deep scientific breakthroughs only later to tell me everything was obvious and maybe tautological.

I just think it's a very powerful and complex tool that can cause a huge range of feelings and outcomes.

It seems the author is instead arguing that we should say that AI is a destructive tool and we should not use it.

I was hoping the article would not label it purely good or bad, but 1) highlight that AI is not just a tool but a very powerful tool and 2) and therefore it very much matters how we all use it and how it uses us.

In this framing, we can see the things where it helps and hurts us and society and many levels at various intensities.

The article mostly just seemed to say how bad it was, and I don't think being critical of a new tool means to only see how it harms us but rather to see the potential full range of impacts.

Are CEOs outsourcing too much of their thinking to their employees?

I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work.

I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.