Meanwhile, the Alexa team is hoping to have a conversation with ChatGPT on how to successfully monetize Alexa.

The infection was already there. Anyone who'd invested in any mortgage derived securities was compromised because the underwriting and scoring process was fundamentally fraudulent. Securities are rated and, at least in theory, those ratings are supposed to reflect the degree of risk. But the scoring agencies essentially became captives of the folks minting the securities and just handed out great ratings like halloween candy.

The Fed and the money printing and all that -- concerning as it all was -- really had more to do with making sure the national banking industry and therefore the currency didn't fail. There was a moment there when it really felt like a financial 9/11... like everything could come crashing down all across the world as a result of something that happened in Manhattan.

It's just an anecdote, but I vividly remember the short-term credit markets freezing up and everyone collectively realizing that nearly every business in the country uses short term credit to manage cashflow so that they can decouple employee paychecks and infrastructure purchases from sales and client payments in terms of timing. Most people just didn't know that and, without credit to make the accounting process move fluidly, like half the country was looking down the barrel of "well, we'll pay you when we know we have money in the accounts."

It's easy to run the Fed down now, but we were one or two days away from a grim fable with an unhappy, bloody ending.

This all powerfully reminds me of the deals the big banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns struck back in 2006 and 2007. If you're too young to remember that particular shitshow, the mortgage industry was fundamentally toxic and a bunch of securities were created by mushing bad mortgages in with good ones so that the combination looked secure enough to invest in.

And then THOSE securities were subdivided up and repackaged into even more securities. And so on. And so on.

Bad debt ended up "infecting" the entire market such that it was essentially impossible to invest in "safe" mortgages and so, when the collapse happened, many of the banks found out that the bets they *thought* they were making to hedge their bets on the risky side of the housing bubble were, in fact, just MORE BETS on the risky side of the housing bubble.

At this point it's essentially impossible to invest in technology without investing in AI which means its very hard to bet against AI in the tech industry. And that feels very, very dangerous.

It's because it's very difficult to imagine circumstances other than what we live in. I agree with what you're saying in general but only in general. Plenty of liberals live in small towns and plenty of conservatives live in big cities.

But a LOT of liberals have only ever lived in a big city and a lot of conservatives have only ever lived in rural areas. And for those people, a move is transformative

For the conservative, the idea that government can do anything useful seems insane. But move to a big city where government services form the backbone of your water, sewer, mass transit, snow removal, etc and it's really hard to look at government and say it can't do anything right. Government somehow keeps Chicago clear of snow. Like -- really think about that. That's an ongoing and ENORMOUS project and it goes off largely without a hitch. It's difficult to see that in person and really say "government can't do anything right."

For the liberal, the opposite is true. They've spent their life surrounded by largely competent government. They move to small town America and suddenly the entire local government is run via the good-ol-boys network. Distance makes it all but impossible to actually get services to the people who need them. Taxes seem like they take a lot out of your pocket and don't put much back.

The problem is that our votes -- especially at the national level -- govern both groups.

Please explain exactly why the crypto companies can't or don't "register as broker dealers".

I suspect it is because they have to pay something to do that, and want something for free instead. But would love a real explanation.

Certainly it could orbit the earth, but the orbit could easily pass through the earth since it does not interact. The reduced gravity from earth while it is below the surface will mean the orbit wonâ(TM)t be an ellipse and i think it would be unstable.

I thought there was an explanation that Theia formed in the same orbit as Earth, each at a Trojan point with the other. This is unstable and eventually they crashed into each other. Is this now considered impossible?

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

Not a big fan of this, but I'm pretty certain they need that money to actually replace all the working parts of the reactor. Only the concrete shell will be reused. They could probably use the same amount of money to fix reactor 2 the same way, they are just not touching it because of history.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

At least the main body got it right.