kokanee

So now both halves of the name "OpenAI" are deprecated

TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.

I have a theory that the prevalence of gambling, trading, and investing is a natural response to wealth inequality and automation. Wealth has always correlated with risk (e.g. business ownership) but as the prospects for wealth diminish, the amount of risk people are willing (forced?) to take on grows.

An optimistic view could be that in a future where AI drives most of GDP and UBI covers basic needs, well-regulated betting marketplaces could provide an opportunity for people to get ahead (or at least do something) for example by developing algorithms and AIs that do rigorous backtesting and apply institutional-grade risk management strategies.

The pessimistic view is that these marketplaces are just another cause of wealth inequality, they will always extract more wealth than they generate, and there is no place for them in a balanced, healthy economy.

Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird

I thought this was going to be a guide to surviving by rabbit farming.

Yeah I was thinking something similar -- overall it's easy to conflate government, society, community, and lifestyle (urban, rural, off-grid). There are also different reasons people live off-grid; it can be primarily a financial decision. It can also be an extremely engaged social decision, in the sense that some people want to be part of a society that is less oriented around resource extraction, commercialization, industrialization, etc -- and they are becoming the change they want to see. In any case, solipsistic isn't the right word.

The whole point of this product from Cloudflare is to let LLMs "top up" their corpus of knowledge with up-to-the-minute search results after they have been trained on the contents of the entire Internet. The idea that courts would enforce intellectual property rights on little upstarts trying to make LLM wrappers without enforcing any TOS affecting the massive training scrapers is ridiculous. Probably true, but logically unjustifiable.

I'm a bit frustrated by what seems to be a widespread strong negative reaction to anti-AI fonts. The accessibility problem is real, but I feel like that's a reason to push the investigation deeper for solutions to that problem, not a reason to abandon the effort entirely. The largest intellectual property infringement in the history of the universe is actively unfolding, and it's resulting in an existentially threatening transfer of wealth and power. That's a problem worth exploring every solution for, and solving it may entail some serious sacrifices.

Yeah let's not forget that in those brief few days when Sam Altman was fired, Satya Nadella swooped in and hired him. Despite the failure of that move, Microsoft has invested $13 billion directly into OpenAI, and has spent $100 billion on the partnership. No sympathy from me watching their software crumble as a result.

Does everyone want AI?

Yeah I think the "how can you prove text was handwritten" question is a subset of the larger "how can you prove that a computer is being driven by a human" problem that all of the work around captcha, attestations, biometrics, and government-id auth has been aimed at. The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that any signal that a human can provide to a computer (keystroke, camera frame, mouse click, etc) is inherently only parsable by code because a sensor has translated the analog signal into a digital one. That same requirement also ensures that the input can be digitally spoofed or automated. There's a similar problem on the output side: how can an analog user trust a digital certificate? What's stopping me from copying the certificate HTML or taking a screenshot and using it to trick people into thinking my AI content is handwritten?

I don't have any suggestions. I worry that the only strong solutions require a lot of power to be given to a centralized authority.

I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

Am I the only person who buys things on mobile websites? I feel like most apps are just websites rendered in webviews with a bunch of background tracking added, and websites create a bit of a firewall between my OS/filesystem and the application.

Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.

How do they handle this in Brazil? Is there a standard for which portion of a name shows up on credit cards and ID cards and such?

Just a vote since I'm seeing a lot of anti-timer sentiment: I like the timer because it creates a conclusive way for the game to end, and causes me to spend a lot less time on the game, I imagine. But I also think it makes sense to have a non-timer mode. It would also be cool to have like 3 shuffles that you are allowed to use. As an exit to the non-timer mode, I think it would be fine to have an "I give up " button.

I see -- the statement "Link your existing social accounts to prove you're not a bot" is intended to mean that after you have verified your identity by scanning your passport, you can prove you're not a bot on your BlueSky account. The phrasing is misleading, and the home page seems to omit the most important part: you have to scan your passport.

I'm curious about how this works, but it doesn't look like I can find out without creating an account. I see that it says "Link your existing social accounts to prove you're not a bot." How does having social media accounts prove I'm not a bot?

So many of these conversations come back to the problem of privatized gains and socialized losses.

Most things that create value have externalities. I kill the moss on my roof, then it rains and the chemicals go into the stream, then you try to go fishing and get skunked. I exerted my freedom as a private property owner and got the benefits; you paid for the drawbacks. We're all pulling from the same pile of resources, and the Earth doesn't care where your picket fence is.

Data centers incur expensive externalities and you're asking the general public to bear those costs -- or "pay those taxes," if that resonates more. I suppose NIMBYism is part of it, but we're not talking about ugly condos here, we're talking about towns running out of electricity: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-....

Yes, and also the presence of a window fan on that side is a big deal because the selection is based on scent. In my experience dogs appear to "like" a scent based on how strong it is, not necessarily how it is "flavored" (for examples, dogs can behave as if they love the smell of poop or skunk spray, but it's actually the powerful sensory information that they're reacting to, not a culinary desire). It seems possible to me that the dog is choosing whichever scent is more powerful.

I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.

I'm surely not the only American reading this and being flabbergasted at the wildly low consumer prices mentioned. I had to double-check the post date to see if this was from 1990 or something.

As much as I hate the idea of enabling the desperate masses to gamble like this, LLMs are very aligned tools for sentiment analysis, which can be the foundation of a trading strategy. I think it's extremely irresponsible to use them for execution, though.

I would take this advice a bit further even -- I don't think savings alone is the key, because inflation and de-dollarization are exponentially eroding purchasing power. The key is ownership of income-producing assets. In late-stage capitalism, the vast majority of people who work in exchange for wages will be members of the debt class; workers who manage to escape debt will still be living on a knife's edge where you can be laid off at any moment regardless of how well your company is doing. The only people living with stability will be those whose lives are paid for by the assets they own, rather than by the hours they sell.

We need to figure out how to effectively organize boycotts, and find a way to actually incentivize participation.

I'm spitballing here, but what if we created a browser extension that gives users the option to block various monopolistic/oligarchic tech platforms. If the browser navigates to a blocked platform, we show a "consider these alternatives" page instead. Competitors to the monopolies could offer incentives (raffles, discounts, etc) in exchange for promotion on the recommended alternatives list, creating an incentive to participate in a boycott.

Example: a user opts into an Amazon boycott, but later clicks an affiliate link that leads them to a book listing on amazon.com. The browser extension intercepts this and displays a list of other places to shop for that book. Barnes and Noble offers a 10% discount for people who boycott Amazon, so they're the top recommended alternative, and the user gets the book for a discount.

This is the kind of thinking that has resulted in an economy where losses are socialized and gains are privatized. There is strategic business value in managing your company in a way that doesn't contribute to the collapse of the middle class.

I hate that I agree with you. But there's a difference between whether AI is as powerful as some say, and whether it's good for humanity. A cursory review of human history shows that some revolutionary technologies make life as a human better (fire, writing, medicine) and others make it worse (weapons, drugs, processed foods). While we adapt to the commoditization of our skills, we should also be questioning whether the technologies being rolled out right now are going to do more harm than good, and we should be organizing around causes that optimize for quality of life as a human. If we don't push for that, then the only thing we're optimizing for is wealth consolidation.

My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.

The disincentive to provide a durable product is unfortunate. Ideally businesses pair high-ticket one-time sales with low-cost recurring sales of related products and services.