Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

At least in the current climate (and quite possibly indefinitely; depending on how prudent their investments are and whether they have any uncontrollably expensive hobby) there's not really any reason for the 'AI' guys to take such a servile attitude.

If you actually need the job, or are invested in the company's mission for some reason, it's a good idea to care at least slightly about how your paycheck doesn't bounce; but that's not really the position these guys are in. Exceptionally in-demand skillset and reputation; existing net worth almost certainly already enough to at least keep them comfortable indefinitely if they feel like quitting the rat race or get fired. Why settle for doing sordid adtech if you think that, best case, your boss in the sort of dumbass who would lose billions of dollars on the idea that Second Life would totally have the GDP of western europe, because reasons, and you can keep him paying you a handsome salary and providing you with the GPU compute time and dubiously sourced datasets that you find personally interesting; and worst case, if you lose the fight, you'll just be told to go sling ads, not fired and blacklisted.

Facebook isn't running a charity; but neither are these guys. Why wouldn't they try to take what they can get? Especially when the actually-profitable business units are fat enough that there's plenty of room for boondoggles, so long as you can sell them, rather than there being fairly tight constraints on how much you can waste before the company starts bleeding out.

It would honestly be more surprising if they signed up with facebook out of a genuine willingness to do adtech swill and sordid 'engagement' hacking; rather than on the assumption that there's enough desperate dumb money sloshing around in Zuckerberg's fear of missing out on the next big thing that they can get paid to pursue their pet projects without much concern for having to deliver short term impact on the bottom line.

I assume that at least some of the tension here is that facebook hired these guys to be the hotshot golden boys of sucking less at AI; so it isn't just an it's-only-money thing. I don't know whether or not this belief is accurate; but Zuck and friends certainly hunted down and paid for the various new AI hires as though they were capable of things that in-house or more readily available alternatives are not, so the battle over where their attention will be focused is presumably being waged on the assumption that having someone else do what they aren't doing isn't really a substitute.

What I would be curious to know is why the 'build god-machine' goal isn't being treated as the obvious winner just because you can have the god machine make facebook more addictive and better at serving ads. Do they think that the AI guys are drinking the kool-aide and the only thing they'll actually be able to deliver is incremental improvements; so they want those churned directly into products? Some degree of confidence that they will eventually manage it; but fear of missing out on some sort of short term advantage means that they don't care about what is achievable in 5-10 years? Genuinely zero interest in anything except making social media more of a hellscape; so they simply don't care?

I suspect that, while it would be socially controversial, planetary colonization would be a very strong case for IVF and some population planning.

For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity, thousands to tens of thousands of genetically screened parents worth of embryos in the space a single person would require.

Unless you've got some sort of advanced growth vats you would obviously need people onsite; but instead of dealing with the probably-impossible task of keeping a tiny breeding population's gene pool in order you'd just be defrosting and gestating specimens from a much larger pool of diverse embryos as needed. Presumably you'd initially go with an all-female colony, and only start defrosting males and trying to maintain a viable natural population once you had at least high single-digit thousands to low-mid tens of thousands.

I'm sure that such an arrangement would freak some people out; and you'd probably need to do some reasonably intense social engineering to keep everyone on-mission; but in terms of efficiency of genetic diversity there's a fairly compelling case to be made.

What sort of disaster do you have in mind that would render earth less habitable than mars?

Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.

Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet with the right gravity, an atmosphere and magnetosphere, some sort of ecosystem(even if it's just algal scum and cockroaches); some soil that isn't riddled with perchlorates, and so on.

I was going to say something snide about how MCP is a laughably thin standard; but 'agents.md' is literally just a text file(encoding unspecified; I guess UTF8 but nobody actually says) that you put text in and hope your bot will react appropriately to. It describes the contents as 'standard markdown'; without mention of which markdown variant they mean.

Given that the whole thing is just an exercise in getting away with bots being more or less as OK-ish with poorly structured inputs as they are with anything else it's not like it would be a better 'standard' if there were a thicket of XML schema involved; but saying:

:"AGENTS.md emerged from collaborative efforts across the AI software development ecosystem, including OpenAI Codex, Amp, Jules from Google, Cursor, and Factory.

We’re committed to helping maintain and evolve this as an open format that benefits the entire developer community, regardless of which coding agent you use."

About a 'standard' which is 'put some kind of markdown, y'know, stuff you'd tell someone about your project in a text file called Agents.md' is a little grandiose.

There's zero evidence to suggest Beanie Babies are not going to continue upward. Anyone who knows the first thing about Beanie Babies already knows about the bear market. It's not a surprise. Beanie Baby investors tend to have outlooks that see farther out than the next quarter.

Given the boom and bust cycle of fads like this, you also might not want to best they will,

Absolutely agree. I wouldn't bet either way, but I might bet on the company's ability to make the right bet.

In general, there are very few collectibles that can beat an index fund for returns. Those that do tend to do so because some particular instance had some association with someone famous, which means you're not ordering it from Amazon.

It is much easier to choose an index fund than guess which detritus will sell like Paul Newman's Rolex and acquire it before someone else.

30 years ago it was Beanie Babies.

I recall seeing infomercials selling "investing guides" for which dolls you should horde.

Hint: if the value of something hinges on the fact that the factory only goes so fast, you might not want to bet the retirement on them not spinning up another factory.

Astute investors will note that Dude Bro's strategy was based on the notion that bitcoin would keep appreciating.

So if everything kept getting better forever, he would be right.

But so would everyone in an index fund. With far better performance when line go down.

if you go in to it thinking it is, or worse, wanting it to be, you will be very disappointed.

University sells you a bundle of services:

- Prefab peer collection - you get to pick friends/lovers/hopefully a partner from a pool of your supposed peers.

- Training to act like an adult while still adulting with training wheels.

- Somewhat related, but having time and space to explore who you want to be.

- Certification that you're capable of some professional acts that you will probably not use, but will get you in the door for some other job.

- And yes, if you want to learn, you can do that too, but many people don't. This is mainly training in how to pursue your own goals while paying lip service to someone else's. (Don't diminish the value of this - this is how most people spend most of their lives.)

So, in order to protect against possible military applications(known for their cost-sensitivity...); we are making the sale legal as long as El Presidente gets his cut? That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

It'd make my year if he went back to that. Ever since Hasbro bought them, they've looked like these useless contraptions made by Dr. Seuss; we need to get back to the CPS2000 and the other turn-of-the-century models that were actually effective at their intended purpose.