marcuschong

It's hard for me to see much difference between Amodei and Sama. My guess is they're both savvy SV CEOs who will bend their message, alliances and principles pretty far if that's what it takes to get ahead. Musk and Zuck feel like something else entirely, with all the reactionary imagery, populist bullshit and the societal damage around their platforms.

I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.

I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.

That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.

My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.

What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.

I'm regularly afraid of things like that, not only for drinking too much coke but also for not having exactly the healthiest lifestyle overall. I've tried reducing coke a few times with some luck here and there, but eventually got back to it everytime. For now, my annual checkups are good.

My dentist, annual consultation.

I've been drinking loads of coke Zero (up to 3 liters a day, these days it's about 2 liters), and my teeth are fine. I'm 40 and have been drinking it for most of my life, it started when I was about 16, with regular coke back then. Maybe I'm lucky.

Emily Watson about the movie: "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

I really enjoyed reading John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine column when I was just getting started in tech. His contrarian style was a nice change from most tech columnists at the time. He had a grumpy but oddly likable personality, and I even enjoyed No Agenda for a while and his occasional TWiT appearances.

That's why I have such mixed feelings about him. Somewhere along the way, being a contrarian seemed to become an end in itself. He became a Trump fan, and the No Agenda agenda increasingly drifted toward questioning well-established facts, from climate science to questioning the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Real Alex Jones shit.

Something I've been wondering about is whether fake news and these alternative realities people live in will eventually have a material impact on their lives.

In my country, where the political divide is huge, I know people who are very successful professionally and financially, yet believe all sorts of things that seem completely detached from reality. For example, I have a cousin who was convinced that if a certain presidential candidate won, the government would confiscate people's savings. Her solution was to convert a large part of her savings into jewelry.

She's highly educated. She also gets a lot of her information about climate change from a fortune teller on Instagram. I know that sounds made up, but it's not.

What's interesting to me is that, despite all this, their lives seem to go on just fine. Maybe they're a bit more anxious than they need to be, but they don't seem materially worse off because of these beliefs.

It makes me wonder whether we're just in an unusual transition period. As it becomes harder to trust what we see online, and as misinformation gets more convincing, will there eventually be a real advantage to consistently relying on reputable sources.

I don't think my 18-month-old had any problems from watching a little Miss Rachel and Baby Einstein here and there. However, the few times my mother showed her cute animal videos on Instagram, it was a completely different story. She became obsessed with the phone and would fuss and scream whenever my mother put it away. It was pretty incredible. We banned it pretty quickly.

It's curious that the person claiming LLMs will soon skip code entirely and go straight to binary is willing to spend $60bn on Cursor.

At 14:52

I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.

Plus, even if you do prefer the American way (and I could see why), it seems fanatic for people to not recognize the clear benefits of the European model.

Me too. I'm an active father, love my daughter and don't regret our choice. But damn I would never opt to go through this again and can't wait until she's a little older. I see parents having orderly lunches in restaurants with their older children and it just seems like the most beautiful and civilized thing in the world.

The whole experience is too much noise and not enough signal to me.

And now it appears every single time I use incognito mode on my browser, somehow. I hate it profoundly.

Plus doing it to a hundred million followers and controlling the medium that delivers his message.

That's a big problem with very specific manifestations. My startup helps customers handle regulatory compliance, also by forwarding complex questions to a pool of consultants.

We've compared now more than a hundred replies to that of GPT Pro, and the quality is roughly the same. Sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better. Always more detailed. Never unacceptable.

But how to convince our customers that we have the right technology and know how to use it appropriately? We're trying, but it's not easy.

Part of that's accountability. In the event of the LLM producing rubbish, as rare as it may be, who is accountable? There is not a person and her reputation attached to it.

That's what I've been struggling with to give it a go. How to make it useful somehow if I can't really give it access to my stuff.

I don't disagree with the premise, but I still can't think of a SaaS that I'm paying for that I can replace. And I have many subscriptions.

You mentioned Google, which makes it interesting that Sundar was at the infamous inauguration photo op, while neither Satya nor Bill was.

I have two questions about that, with the supposition that Cook is being coerced to do that, somehow:

- Isn't Cook supposed to step down from the role in the next few years? If so, wouldn't that facilitate an accelerated exit to not have to put up with this shit? He might as well have chosen someone who's willing to do that, and slowly fade away.

- Why haven't we seen the same level of craziness coming from Satya and Gates? Are Microsoft's offerings and interests so diversified that the government has less power over it?

Update: grammar

Precisely. That's what I took from the experience as well. If that's so hard and I had no idea about it until now, maybe there are other things that I don't know, and some that I will never learn, and I should tread lightly.

I was incapable of the compassion you're talking about until I had a bad shroom trip and felt some horrible, hard-to-describe anxiety the next morning. It was some of the worst hours of my life until my serotonin system rebalanced itself.

I'm not saying it's the same thing as depression or regular anxiety, but it gave me tremendous perspective on how bad these conditions can be and you just don't have the ability to "shake it off" when things are unbalanced.

Maybe that's how my wife feels when she's off the meds. Shit. Now imagine having a douchebag by your side second-guessing your pain. Never again.

Right. A subterranean fortress in NZ is not part of the perks.