Regardless of whether its the west coast or the east coast thats to blame for this mess, the reality is;- its a fucken mess.

And yes, theres a particular cohort of SF zillionares, Musk, Thiel, that weird psycho who loves to rant about killing people at Palantir, Zuck, Larry Elison, and the Nvidia dude, who are very clearly of the opinion that there is no cost too high, including the errosion of civil liberties, democracy, and public sanity to achieve AI supremacy while the rest of us are left wondering "Who actually gives a shit if China gets there first? Is it worth burning down the planet and causing massive poverty to avoid that?!"

and worse it would provide 1 meal a day to those 42 million... not solving their hunger but keeping them from death or organ deterioration from starvation at best. A good solution would cost... twice as much? add medicine?

858 million are hungry in the world they say, and I believe them. Really things like massive canals, energy farms and other big projects would make lasting dent in world hunger. The cost might be trillion or over but that's being realistic at least. We could have tariffs on all well-off countries, that might be a solution that works. tariffs on stock and etf trades the world over, that might be another solution.

utter nonsense, there is no way $7.25 for each of the 828 million living in hunger would help in any meaningful way. there is no credible plan in that price range. The World Food Program you make a claim about said it would cost $40 billion per YEAR, that I believe.

Theres a simple way to clean this shit up that would end this kind of thing overnight.

Put Meta financially on the hook for these scams. If facebook convinces some poor old lady with low tech literacy to hand over her retirement fund, then facebook should be on the hook to repay her. Facebook then can, at their own leisure, chase the scammer down to pay them back, but facebook must be held accountable.

Do that, and those scam ads end overnight.

... with a Linux setup on her brand new good Lenovo laptop with the lates W1ndows pre-installed. Backed up her Thunderbird Mail directory, wipe-installed Mint Linux and set it up in a few minutes. The difference in boot time and responsiveness is night and day.

I started at a new company a year back and hat one of their Win Laptops for a few weeks before my dev MB Air arrived. The system was so finicky to the point of being unusable. I was speechless. I fundamentally don't get why people even use W1ndows for regular stuff these days. If all you need is Mail, Web and some digital project and content management. there is absolutely no need for anything other than a lean modern Linux. The last version of W1n that I used for anything meaningful was Win2k and that was just about 25 years ago.

Totally bizarre.

... big techs obscene cash reserves and not so much third-party or VC investment money, so I'm not too concerned for the market, to be honest. The environment and the looming AI threat is a different issue, but's that's not so much about the market. If the bubble pops I hope for little impact for ordinary folks.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

While the photo was taken by her assistant, the fact is that it was Franklin's expertise in X-ray crystallography that resulted in a superior level of image quality. Her contribution is deservedly significant because if she had not used such techniques to precisely control the humidity of the imaging chamber, the images Gosling took would not have had the resolution they did.

To say that it was Gosling's photo, thus implying that he--of anyone at Kings College--should have received some measure of credit for the discovery, is a misrepresentation in the sense that a lab assistant whose responsibility is to operate machinery is not necessarily the one who devised the method or protocol of operation, nor the technological innovation that enables the research. No one who has worked in the applied sciences can deny this truth.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

To be accurate, he said "we" are going to win so much, while leaving "we" ambiguous.

The missing definition of "we" is "we billionaires" but was purposefully left ambiguous so that ignorant salt-of-the-earth types would think they're included too when they never were.

"We" are now finding that out the hard way. Well, some of "we" - about 75 million people figured it out previous to the election last year, but not everyone learns at the same pace.

Awesome analysis. /s

Now take a crack at this one:
IF the government receives all the same paperwork that I do for filling out that 1040 form and dropping it in the mail;

AND they use that exact same paperwork for checking my math for any of hundreds of tiny mistakes that can be made;

AND they are always thought to be right, with the burden of proof otherwise being on me

WHY does each and every one of us need to bother with this bullshit instead of receiving a 1040 that we can review and open a request if we think it's wrong?

This process is so fucking backwards it's not even funny.

Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftlc.ku.edu%2F
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see 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."

I'm sure the billionaires that run operations like Intuit TurboTax had no input on this delay, either.

Just as soon as we stop letting rich people do whatever the fuck they want with no repercussions or consequences.