Meanwhile, economist Yanis Varoufakis:

Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism

It’s a common misconception that governments need to collect tax money so that they can finance public works.

In reality, any government that issues its own currency can technically spend as much as it wants to, whether it has the tax base to balance it out or not.

The only reasons to tax are to limit inflation, balance the wealth distribution, and maintain an incentive for people to actually care about your currency.

Descenders

Idk why. Well, I do know why: I grew up in an era where Flash games started to do physics-based gameplay, and something about that just made them endlessly replayable and easy to do while focusing on something else like a lecture or whatever.

So many games these days demand your full attention. And that’s great, when you have time for it. But if I just have 45 minutes to derp around while I catch up with friends on Discord, I can’t dive into an epic boss fight that I was prepping for a month ago.

And then the 0.1% goes “Hey you should hate that guy cuz his family had the kind of wealth we accumulate in five seconds instead of five milliseconds”

The Grim Beaker

I can’t afford Covid Pro, so I have to watch ads

how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?

Huh? What do you mean?

As long as your primary goal was to make money, not to kill people, then killing people is fine.

If you kill someone for a reason other than optimizing your business model, that’s a crime.

Humanity just had to switch the controller to the other port.

Black lines matter

^/s

vigilance

Vigilance is like, not drinking the water that comes out of a nuclear reactor.

What we’re talking about here is letting everyone run their own reactor and dump the waste into the street.

You don’t gain vigilance, you lose all habitable public space.

On the one hand, it’s depressing because people seem to care more about fitting in than being rational.

But on the other hand, it’s reassuring that we’re so eager to solve things collaboratively that we’re willing to set aside our own personal opinions.

Our relentless obsession with social connection will either be the thing that kills us or the thing that saves us. And I honestly have NO idea which.

I recall there was a story from Predictably Irrational where the experimenters were trying to figure out how to get participants to avoid double-dipping tortilla chips.

Along with a control condition, they tried setting up a sign that said “NO DOUBLE DIPPING”, and I think they also tried paying people or getting them to promise not to double dip, stuff like that.

The thing they found most successful was to set up two bowls of dip: One labeled “For double-dipping”, and one “Not for double-dipping”.

They supposed that once they had to do a physical action where they sorted themselves according to “what kind of person they are”, they wanted all of their visible actions to be consistent with that.

Situation: Have 10 days to finish a 3-day task

Problem: Can only work on stuff that’s due tomorrow

Solution: Wait until 1-day-left to finish a 3-day task

Outcome: Work that’s impressive for being done in 1 day, but terrible for being done in 10 days

Come over

Coming soon: in-app purchases for your surgery.

“Looks like you’ve run out of SleepyBucks! Reload your balance now!”

I can understand that take, but to me the more relevant comparison is the fossil fuel boom.

Like the advent of more powerful creative tools (camera, printing press, etc.), fossil fuels allowed us to do what we were already doing but faster.

Unlike a camera, though… Coal, oil, and gen AI all have to pull raw material from somewhere in order to operate, and produce undesired byproducts as a result of their operation.

In the early days of fossil fuel, it must been impossible to even conceive the thought that there might be limits to how much we could safely extract raw materials or dump hazardous residual crud.

From one person’s perspective, the world seems so impossibly large. But it turns out, there are limits, and we were already well on our way to exceeding them by the time we realized our predicament.

I think we’re sprinting towards discovering similar constraints for our information systems.

It won’t be exactly the same, and much like climate change I don’t think there will be a specific minute of a specific day where everything turns to shit.

But I think there are instructive similarities:

• The most harmful kinds of gen AI, as with fossil fuels, will have the highest ROI.
• There will be safe, responsible ways to use it, but it will be difficult to regulate from the top down and full of perverse incentives to cheat from the bottom up.
• It will probably continue to accelerate even as the problems become more noticeable and disruptive.
• It will be next to impossible to undo the damage at a significant scale.

Edit: Yeah, I’m also not too sympathetic to the death of copyright. It’s long overdue. The original conception of copyright was botched from the start – more about capital and censorship than about anything for the good of all humanity. But still, there are two good things that I see about copyright that I worry about losing in a “post-plagiarism future”:

1. Accurate attribution

I like knowing where an idea came from, whether it’s an artistic concept or formal information. It’s nice to know where I should go to continue the conversation and see more thoughts that came from a similar source.

2. Faithful replication

I think it’s important that ideas keep their same general shape when they’re copied around, at least when the copier isn’t deliberately intending to modify them. Things like satire can easily be mistaken for earnest content if you tilt your head 5 degrees to the side. I don’t want the discrete bits and bobs of that kind of content to get sucked up and recycled to make arguments for the very thing the original author was arguing against.

Edit 2: I remembered there’s a Google Tech Talk from ages ago, where the speaker argues copyright is unnecessary to preserve these two attributes in the digital age, because search engines are so reliable that you’ll never be confused about the origin of a work, and computers only make exact copies of things so there’s no risk of degrading a work over time. I think those arguments have not aged well, lol.

If you dislike vapid slop that’s designed to maximize adherence to opaque and fickle metrics, you might wanna reconsider whether gen AI is fine and unrelated to the problem.

We’re seeing the genesis of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome here. Toxic promotion algorithms are quaint, comparatively.

Edit: Fwiw, I did not downvote you. Have a good day, friend.

What’s the “bigger problem”?