As I suggested in 2011 in this video, theft may rise if people lose faith in the exchange economy. Other interwoven economies of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned could also alternatively take up the slack if they were improves -- instead of people becoming more inclined to crime.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

My thanks to a Slashdot commentator many years ago who suggested I add a "theft" economy to the other four.

So, my hypothesis is that theft around SF could be substantially reduced if some mix of these were made to happen:
1. It was easier to do subsistence production (like using 3D printers, solar panels, and gardening robots etc.)
2. the SF gift economy (charity, sharing, freecycle, free 3D models, etc) was stronger.
3. the California exchange economy was working better for everyone (i.e. less wealth concentration through inflated property prices, limits on multiples of CEO pay vs lowest paid worker, a basic income, etc)
4. the California planned economy was working better (i.e. fairer taxation of property, public investments that create good jobs or reduce product prices or increase product quality, changing zoning restrictions to make affordable housing more feasible, more responsive democratic government, etc)

Sadly, because people tend to focus on only the exchange economy when talking about economic (and so ignore strengthening those other areas), we will likely see increasing theft as we go into a recession and as AI takes enough jobs to disrupt the exchange economy.

More ideas I've collected are here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

I know there is an XKCD about standards (and adding yet one more to create yet more confusion).
"Standards"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F927%2F

But that said, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all terrible standards in many ways because of their complexity (and major design flaws like JavaScript having vastly too many global variables). Asa an alternative, what if, say, we all just used something like Scheme (or Common Lisp) to encode web documents and web code as S-expressions in some semantically standardized formats? Scheme can be very compact in its implementation.

Or as the XKCD mentioned here says:
"Lessons learned from implementing minimal Scheme six times"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwolodzko.github.io%2Fpo...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F297%2F
"Lisp cycles XKCD #297: âoeThose are your fatherâ(TM)s parentheses. Elegant weapons for a more⦠civilized age.â"

Now, it doesn't have to be Lisp-like.I get the paren hate:
"What makes Lisp difficult to read?"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Flisp%2F...

And there is a lot to be said for significant-indentation languages like Occam or Python. Smalltalk is another great language. Or even some variant of a safe C.

Even a Forth-derivative perhaps that could be literally less than ~2K in size at the core. Although I get that there is a fine line between flexible and flabby in readability in a language that can change its own fundamental syntax or that makes naming intermediate variables unlikely as a form of documentation. Same with any language that supports arbitrary macros like C or Scheme which can change the fundamental nature of the language. Although at least in, say, Racket Scheme you see the language level set at the start of some code to know what you are getting into.

The main point is just that yet another adhoc problematical language like JavaScript was not needed (even as TypeScript papers over the worst warts). And CSS conceptually is broken for big projects ("Atomic" CSS is one style to help with that). And adding end tags with names in HTML (like XML) is another broken concept as are other aspects of HTML. Yes, programmers can work around and manage the issue in these web fundamentals, but why should we have to?

While a simpler browser for HTML etc is a good thing if it really is well written, better standards for encoding and sharing information will ultimately get us further and be more energy efficient and be more reliable and be more programmer-friendly.

I've long been a fan of triples for doing some of that data encoding, but that is even further out.

Tangentially, here is a Libre Plane 2021 talk I put together on free standards for social media being more important than free implementations:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Flibrepl...

I know this all may sound pie in the sky (and it is, given current social dynamics), but consider if we used the usual buggy lot-of-library junky (and now AI slop) code only with an intent to translate web content encoded in problematical standards into content encoded in better simpler standards for other code to consume. Sort of like Amazon did at one point with a server-side engine to process HTML pages and transform them for low-end Kindle browsers -- but in this case converting HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript into something like, say, S-expressions for web content that was not yet written directly n the simpler standards. Maybe the junky translator code might not be perfect, but it might be good enough and runnable in distant containers so that the local code that processed the simpler standards could be more secure and reliable.

Also related: "Simple Made Easy"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infoq.com%2Fpresenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicityâ(TM)s virtues over easinessâ(TM), showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable". "Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy. ..."

Ideally a group like the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or the US Library of Congress should fund this sort of work. And a group like Archive.org should have a lot of input to those standards on how to make the content simply versionable and simply archivable.

Anyway, just something I have been musing on and off again for many years...

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

On: "A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault."

Is AI now an aspect of Mother Nature? Reminds me of:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2F2001.fandom.com%2Fwiki%2FF...
  ""Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The [Palantir] 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the word, foolproof and incapable of error." -- [Palantir's] HAL 9000 to BBC reporter Martin Amer"

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumanisticsystems.com%2F...
        "Dave: How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin [Palantir] 9000 [that did not kill lots of school girls]?
        HAL: Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
        Frank: Listen HAL. There has never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the [Palantir] 9000 series, has there?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. The [Palantir] 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
        Frank: Well of course I know all the wonderful achievements of the [Palantir] 9000 series, but, uh, are you certain there has never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that."

What do you call an AI (or human) that never asks questions, never seeks confirmatory evidence, never asks for clarification, never points out conflicting priorities, and/or never refuses illegal orders?

Onec again, the deeper issue is "the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Frecogni...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ....

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ....

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful or capable of so much rapid destruction as well as rapid creation]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
====

I mean, ultimately, they're going to need to take a real fly brain, and hook it up to the Doom simulation, to see how accurate the fly brain simulation is.

Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fpdfernhout%2F...

That said, and with all due respect for Matt's past accomplishments in forging a community and a company to support it, I think Automattic (and so Matt) made a terrible choice around 2015 by deciding to use Slack for internal and even external communications instead of just using WordPress with the 02/Oxygen plugin previously used.

I wrote about that at length when I was applying for a job at Automattic circa 2015.The gist of that concern is on the main page of my website and says:
        "And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS. :-( We always have many principles to choose from, and it can indeed be hard sometimes to get the priorities right. As Scott Berkun (who left Automattic after a year to go back to writing full-time) wrote, even in a metrics-driver organization like Automattic, there is no metric for picking metrics or deciding how to weigh a variety of metrics (beyond perhaps survival itself).
        Here is a version of Twirlip I started as a proof-of-concept Thunderbird Server webapp to handle email, chat, and other real-time communications as another step towards a social semantic desktop. It is the beginning of the embodiment of the "ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto". But if you are looking for something good now that is FOSS, check out Mattermost, Matrix.org, Mailpile, Kolab, and similar things."

An archive page of that job application and Slack comments from back then is here, includign with the section on transcending polling in WordPress:
"Automattic JavaScript Engineer application by Paul D. Fernhout"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
      "But there is an alternative to trying to shoehorn WebSocket-related changes into the WordPress core PHP somehow. Such an update notification service to reduce polling could instead be hosted at WordPress.com in parallel to a WordPress server for a fee for those who don't want to run Node.js (or whatever) locally to supply that service. ... Such a WordPress feature to reduce polling needs might then be used to add near-real-time chat to WordPress. This might reduce the otherwise increasing desire for Automatticians to use Slack to communicate with each other about WordPress. That is a movement that seems problematical to me concerning WordPress's future. It would also be like Automattic moving to Pusher instead of improving WordPress to be low-latency and near-real-time. Even if Slack (by all reports) is a great product (as proprietary products go) that can monitor and log and search all of your communications stored on their servers, in theory using Slack widely within Automattic makes Automattic's internal communications available to the same proprietary competitor (if even just rogue employees) for business intelligence purposes. It also seems strange to me for Automattic to cede the area of near-real-time communications to a proprietary company without at least trying (really hard) to come up with an alternative built into WordPress, especially because such things have already been shown to be workable. I feel Automattic could (and should) be innovating in this area to help the WordPress community move in new directions. ..."

A fundamental issue is that people at Automattic at the time saw WordPress' competitors as things like Wix, not things like Slack. I was reminded of when in the 1990s ParcPlace (a Smalltallk vendor) thought Digittalk (another Smalltalk vendor) was their main competitor and disastrously bought them while ignoring that Visual Basic and Delphi and similar products were really their big competitors (which I had warned someone in sales there about about). WordPress could have become the premier chat platform for companies (including using ideas for a near-real-time message updates relay server leveraging technology someone at Automattic has written). But instead Automattic and the WordPress community it shepherds moved to Slack. Just a very sad way to see a great FOSS community focused on communications destroy itself by embracing proprietary software. And it seems like Matt played a big part in that short-sighted decision somehow (maybe having friends who worked at and.or funded Slack judging from some of his bloig posts long ago)?

Here is a more general essay I wrote in 2016 on why not to use Slack for free software development (in part trying to explain to Richard Stallman of the FSF why Slack was such a threat to the free software movement):
"Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Freasons...
====
Contents
* Introduction and summary
* What is Slack? (A proprietary centralized communications hub web service )
* Free alternatives exist to the proprietary Slack
* Automattic/WordPress is sending the wrong message about free communications software
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* A democratic government is a special case of a free and open source community
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
* What if Slack went free/libre and open source?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The cost of changing later can be high
* Matrix.org is a better way forward
* Would I ever use Slack? Sadly, yes. :-(
====

Tangentially, I also tried to get Automattic/WordPress to use Mithril instead of React back when React has problematical licensing relating to patents... In the end though Automattic and Matt had enough clout to get Facebook to change the React licensing terms (even though I still feel Mithril has a better conceptual design with better developer ergonomics than React).
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FAutomattic%2F...

Anyway, I'll never know if WordPress and Automattic might have gone in very different directions if I had gone to work there -- or if I just would have become frustrated and bitter from still seeing it all play out the way it did despite my best efforts there (given social momentum and power structures)?

For example, it took five years to get this memory exhaustion and crashing bug I reported in WordPress fixed for when you edit a long page too many times (which I discovered while writing that job application). That is a bug which may have cost the entire WordPress community many millions of dollars a year paying for bigger servers with more memory than they really needed to avoid the problem, compared to if the bug had been fixed sooner:
"High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcore.trac.wordpress.or...

P.S. Sad anniversary of September 11 today and the destruction of technology used for social advancement in Chili in 1973 (as another example of politics and personality disrupting humane tech progress as with WordPress):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
        "Project Cybersyn was a Chilean economic project developed from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), with the purpose of constructing a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that linked to a single mainframe computer. ... The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer (1926-2002), and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories. ... Project Cybersyn ended following Allende's removal and death during the coup detat of 11 September 1973. After the coup, the Chilean military abandoned Cybersyn and destroyed the operations room.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
        "According to historian Sebastian Hurtado Torres, there is no documentary evidence to support that the United States government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces from September 11, 1973 itself. However, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and intervened in the conditions prior to the Chilean coup of 1973. Historian Peter Winn found "extensive evidence" of United States complicity in events that helped in part to create the conditions that led to the coup. However, given the local political polarization and the performance of the Popular Unity government, there is no academic consensus on whether this intervention--which primarily took the form of financial support for the media, political parties, and opposition organizations--played a decisive role in the events of September 11, 1973."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... "The android officers are ordered by Central Command to cease pursuit, on the grounds that the expense of his capture exceeds their allocated budget for THX."

So maybe there is hope for humanity after all in token budget limits? :-)

Another source of hope is humans and Ais learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

Hows this for more serious job market stats?
"Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed," economic analysis finds"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Ff...
        "The U.S. job market is less robust than it looks, according to a new analysis.
        The nation's unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July, well within the range economists consider healthy. Yet that measure, which reflects the percentage of people 16 and older who don't have a job and who are looking for work, is an imprecise metric that fails to offer a full picture of the health of the job sector, according to Gene Ludwig, chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).
        The economic research firm's "True Rate of Unemployment" (TRU) seeks to capture the share of workers that the group defines as "functionally unemployed." This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.
        Functional unemployment across the U.S. has climbed four straight months and stood at 24.9% as of July, although that's down from 25.2% in December, according to the Ludwig Institute. ..."

Shadowstats has some similar unemployment numbers:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shadowstats.com%2Fal...

To me, these sorts of huge (but often ignored) unemployment numbers reflect the continued playing out of larger trends like I outlined in 2010:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."

Think of the categories as fixed, and the people moving *through* them. Over 65s are exiting the category at a lower rate.