Troubled Waters

@zinjanthopus @zeta_globin I know plenty of people who make $1m+ per year and this is trashy/unusual. But I also know a couple guys who are rich, 40-50, and into hot dependent younger women. For that setup, this totally tracks, but I never know what the girl’s plan is when she stops being hot.

@zeta_globin If you look at this lady’s IG you’ll appreciate better where she’s coming from. This is a world that most of us don’t inhabit or fully understand, but I do think this might actually make sense for a guy with an income of 500k or more.

literally no one does this except one dude I dated whose dad is a literal billionaire, stop being weird

@AbstractEntityZ You have identity, credit cards, video, and a digital log of every occupant; bad actors get banned. Versus public transit where there is zero identification and any criminal can hop a turnstile. And you think the anonymous one is going to have *less* assault?

Sharing a pod with 2 or 3 random strangers as opposed to many in a train or bus might actually increase your chance of being victimized by people engaging in criminal acts.

@HiAmanKapoor @alexkoch_ai What? Like if the city's water supply turned off? What would the robot do if the city's water system failed?

@alexkoch_ai Woah! What have you done? This is future? I am amazed seeing this. One quick question, if during dish-washing the water supply runs out, no water from tap, then how does it handle the situation?

Today, we’re launching Tau’s humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at $30 per hour. Access is initially invite-only as we scale operations. If you don’t have an invite yet, join the waitlist at tau-robotics.com. All footage is shown at 1× speed. Each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI.

@boredjew @djw172 @sam_d_1995 Your argument is that you don’t know what building codes are? That you don’t know that developers pay infrastructure fees? And your coup de grâce is that middle class people are criminals?

@djw172 @sam_d_1995 What does the crime rate look like as those small apartments attract lower income families? How well does your sewage infrastructure handle the new load? How safe was the construction? How easy is it for your kids to navigate? Your flippant attitude is quite ignorant.

YIMBY Twitter has been escaping containment with all these new zoning laws, and it's genuinely terrifying. This is Year Zero stuff, people willing to burn everything down and destroy society. Absolutely, genuinely dangerous.

@georvn7 @DavidSacks that is a wild definition of 'malware'. I guess Excel and SAP is malware according to you. Try using words the way they are generally used, nothing you say gets taken seriously otherwise.

@DavidSacks I’m telling you - all software has to be open source if it is not open source to me this is not a software. It perfectly covers the definition of malware - something that runs on your machine but you aren’t sure what exactly it is

Nobody is saying that all software has to be open source. What they’re saying is that open-weight AI should be allowed. By implication, they’re rejecting your company’s incessant machinations to kneecap the open model ecosystem. Read the room.

I wonder why the founder of Legion Health, an "AI healthcare company," supports the use of mustard gas in warfare. Seems off-brand.

@BDHerzinger but he worked at McKinsey and he has Thoughts. you'd think after Princeton and McKinsey he would have learned that international law's biggest beneficiaries are its most dominant powers.

I fundamentally believe that this tweet should be a one way ticket to a muddy trench being attacked by mustard gas.

@celticsburner87 @daveweigel "repeat" is a verb, "mimetically" is an adverb, modifying the verb. a repetition can be carefully considered, or it can be mimicry: thoughtless. it was important to me to be clear that your repetition was the latter, just like your attempt at grammar policing.

@JCovetti @daveweigel also “mimetically repeat” is pretty redundant. I get that you wanted to use a fun word but doesn’t add anything to your statement

Yglesias on the 1999 "white supremacy culture" doc that spawned this: "I wonder if it’s not a psyop devised by some modern-day version of COINTELPRO to try to destroy progressive politics in the United States by making it impossible to run effective organizations." slowboring.com/p/tema-okun

@celticsburner87 @daveweigel it sounds like you don't actually read yglesias and just mimetically repeat complaints you read about on X because you think it makes you look cool and smart. you probably dislike, e.g., nate silver too, because you heard he's always wrong.

@daveweigel how could yglesias possibly be worth giving airtime too. like what does he do or say that warrants credibility. all he has done is be wrong for decades

@cyclomorph @kade_angell I promise you Mitchell has thought longer and harder about this than you have. He's very thoughtful and while I don't agree with him on everything, I respect him a lot. He deserves better engagement than whatever cheap dunk you're trying.

@kade_angell i dont even know who HE is!!

this must go hard if you don't know what tmux is

@VictorTaelin - You ignore the cost of capital for manufacturing - You ignore intrinsically scarce goods - You ignore positional goods - And worst of all, you ignore Hayek

I think these who fear "AI will take my jobs" ultimately fall to the following logical trap: "the value of my work might go down to zero (true), thus I'll not be able to afford the things that I could afford otherwise (false)". Obviously, if the value of everyone's work goes to 0, then so does the *cost* of everything. Models are getting better at everything, so, there's no realistic scenario where YOU stop being valuable yet you still need to pay the same to all the goods and services you consume. But that is somehow a hard conclusion to make. If I'd predict the future, this is how I think things will work out. First, AI will take nearly all jobs that can be done behind a computer. Period. Stop coping. I'm glad I don't need to measure my words. That IS happening. Fable is almost implementing Bend on its own, in many instances it feels more competent than myself, and I've hardly met a single human I'd attribute that title to. Accept reality. Second, once software and math becomes trivial and people get used to the fact they can conjure programs and proofs beyond human comprehension - once that becomes the new normal - science will turn its attention head to elsewhere. In particular, SF nerds will be pikachu-shocked to find out that solving math/swe doesn't automatically solve hunger, climate, violence, biology. So, these will become the next big thing in the frontier of science. Third, and this is where most are worried about - what happens to our jobs? This discussion will become more and more prevalent and some think UBI will be the solution. I don't think so. I think UBI will not be *needed* because the cost of everything will naturally go down to zero. I think this point is easy to visualize for things behind a screen. That utility app you pay a $20 / mo for? You will stop paying for it, because a local AI will rebuild the thing for $0.1, and someone will publish it for free. A 100% open App Store will probably emerge, and will be massively adopted because quality will be so high, and people don't want to pay for things they can get for free at higher quality. This is "auto-UBI" for software. We all can afford it now, not because the gov is sending us a $5k check every month, but because the cost of the thing is zero. If you accept that, then, it shouldn't be much harder to accept this will ALSO happen, to a large extent, to things in the real world. The food you eat, the water you drink, the car you ride. Real world goods cannot go down to literal zero because atoms aren't copiable, but their production will be so aggressively automated, each on their own way, that the practical result will be nearly the same. You'll walk into a store, grab stuff, and go home. You'll make a hand gesture, get into an auto driving car, and go wherever you want to. And if you think that's not going to happen, that's probably because you have this "but who pays for it?" on your mind. And that's the catch, nobody does. AI robots are producing all the stuff needed to sustain it in such an enormous abundance that there is basically no cost. "What prevents vandalism and abuse?" - Laws don't stop working, they get better too. This is so hard to visualize because we were born to live in a world where you must work to *survive*. This is so axiomatically ingrained in our brains we can't imagine another way. Your children will not live in this world. This is the future of humanity, and it will happen sooner than you expect. I'm not denying the transition won't be turbulent and I'm not invalidating these who are afraid. Some fields (swe for example) will be gone faster than others, and that IS a real concern. In particular, I think we should put a lot of pressure in ensuring this transition happens as smoothly as possible. But once it lands, humanity will be in a much better position than it is today. Your children will not work to live. They will just... live. And they'll look at work scales as view slavery today. Which is how it should be

@humankind223 @dhh Whenever someone confronts data with a meme, it is because they have lost, or perhaps never had, any ability to reason.

@JCovetti @dhh

This is a common European crutch and cope. It's all just vibes to many of them. It "feels" like America is in decline because I happen not to like their current administration. Meanwhile, US just grows bigger, stronger, richer. 26Q1 US: +2.6% y/y. EU: +0.7%.

@madmaxbr5 @cafreiman Did you think through the math on that one before posting? If it cost the city only $100 per evening, the parents would need to spend $1,000.

@cafreiman it’s an economic stimulus incentive by a city and the cost will be basically covered by the sales tax parents pay on their night out.

At the risk of being a libertarian killjoy, I don’t think that providing free babysitting during a night out is one of the legitimate functions of the state.

@ParadoxPopper @shinboson The best way for the government to serve its people is through the impartial rule of law, and to prevent Leninist socialists like you who wish the law were dictated by whatever mood you woke up in. It turns out that you are the enemy!

@JCovetti @shinboson A government is an entity that a people have collectively agreed to vest power and money into to serve the interests of its people and their descendents. It is common sense that anyone usurping that is an enemy.

@humankind223 @dhh None of what you said is true. Inflation adjusted median wages are up in the US. GDP growth is not a measure of asset prices. A Ponzi scheme does not mean anything like what you seem to think it means; look it up. You are extremely allergic to data, facts, and reality.

@dhh Most of GDP has little to do with actual production. Richer? Maybe you’re doing great but the average American’s wages don’t even keep up w inflation. The “growth” you see is asset inflation fueled by a balance of payments deficit. It’s a Ponzi scheme.

@ParadoxPopper @shinboson funny how you socialists always want to be the ones to determine whether someone is an enemy on a case by case basis, instead of the rule of law, i.e., naturalization. You really are a true socialist -- a Lenin wannabe.

@shinboson If an individual was given citizenship against the best interests of the current citizens, (essentially treason) is that person truly a citizen? It is simply caustic national policy to allow the foxes to vote on whether they can stay in the henhouse.

@lulumeservey If you don’t come across words you don’t know when reading old classics, I doubt you’re actually reading old classics.

Schools are failing students It’s surprising that a bright person can graduate from an elite prep school and USC with honors, without ever encountering words like eluded, neologism, or garrulous Kudos to her for continuing her own education as an adult

@bridlemerez @BoringBiz_ Don't know about him personally but most super smart international students I knew wanted to stay in the US. Everyone admired the US and wanted to be successful here until populism destroyed it.

@BoringBiz_ Sorry but this is dumb. He didn’t go back to China because he struggled to get a visa - he went to China because it’s his ancestral home and he wants China to win. Every single Chinese kid born in the last ~30 years has been raised on a steady “beat america” media diet

Given the backlash around immigration and visas that have taken place in the cultural zeitgeist over the last couple of years, expect to see a lot more of this I am obviously anti illegal immigration, but we should be encouraging more of these type of people to stay in America

@BoringBiz_ I went to a top 10 private university and it was incredible how many smart international students were promptly kicked out of the country on graduation. Now a bunch of them are running companies in India, China, etc.

@uyintans @GFloydinov20862 @BoringBiz_ It doesn't matter if socialism fixes it or not. If you feel like the current system is unjust to you, that you cannot build capital in a capitalist system, you are going to listen to the siren song of advocates of some other system that promises to treat you more fairly.

@GFloydinov20862 @BoringBiz_ Absolutely none of which will be helped by socialism

Peter Thiel explained perfectly why we are seeing a massive rise in socialism amongst millennials and young Gen Z