Simon Chandler

@PeterMcCormack @garyseconomics It's also what happens (and has been happening for a long time) in the US, the world's archetypal socialist country. Nothing but socialism going on there.

@garyseconomics Inflation bruv, why do you never talk about inflation? Why don't you talk about monetary expansion? Why? Because this is what happens in every socialist country, they expand the money supply and where does that money go?

There's a difference between normal people spending money and really rich people spending money. And it explains why our economy is failing.

Heaven forfend that the plebs use AI for something useful.

THREAD: Gonna say it again: what a lot of us do in higher education, at least in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, should be very cheap. Yes, we have professional salaries, like teachers and nurses, but beyond that the things I normally actually need are very simple:...

@ShoaibMKhan @afneil As soon as you get a cushy job in the media.

@afneil What's the age when you must stop calling out massacres and war crimes?

Grow up. You’re not in student politics any more.

Social media trends have turned the world’s most beautiful places into endless bathroom lines at a concert, where everyone waits for hours just to take the same photo to show to people who couldn’t care less 🌎📸 Nothing captures the shallow decay of our time better than this

@galgitron Here in the UK it's drummed into us that we must strive towards owning our own homes. That renting is 'just working to pay off someone else's mortgage' and that 'you'll have nothing at the end of your life' if you rent. But ownership comes with so many unacknowledged stressors.

Rent. x.com/leamaric/statu…

@Orthophenia @PeterMcCormack Yes, but when they dispose of or redistribute their wealth they generally act independently of the market. They might try to anticipate what the market wants, but their actions are not equivalent to an aggregated market acting with 'collective intelligence.'

@_simonchandler_ @PeterMcCormack A billionaire is not a single actor. They are the titular owner of assets made up in no small part of other actors, assets which are valued at that amount. If the billionaire lacked the capability, this value would not emerge, since capital is only attracted to returns.

Here’s to the trillionaire class. Let’s make more of them.

Australia’s housing obsession is one of its greatest weaknesses. Rising house prices are not a sign of prosperity. What they actually tell you is that more money is being borrowed from the banking sector to buy homes. The cause of rising house prices is rising household debt, and that is unproductive. House prices are now five times more expensive than consumer goods compared to 1970. We should never have allowed that to happen. Housing should not be an asset. It is not something you should profit out of. It is something you should live in. The people who really benefit from rising house prices are real estate agents and property developers, not the families who live in them. We are paupers living inside castles. Paying a fortune on the mortgage, a fortune on private schools, and out of the remainder, just trying to live. For the more information, check out the comment section, #SteveKeen #AustraliaProperty #HousingCrisis #MortgageDebt #Economics #HousingAffordability

@matdryhurst @neilturkewitz @benjaminjriley Punk does have an authentic, punk reason to be anti-AI, which is that the AI industry threatens to exacerbate inequality and to enable additional transfers of wealth to the already obscenely rich.

@neilturkewitz @benjaminjriley punks: famously pro copyright and asking permission from authorities. Anti-photocopiers, appropriation, pirate radio, bootlegging, samplers, file sharing. cmon

This morning, @benjaminjriley posted an essay entitled “Punk is Anti-AI.” open.substack.com/pub/buildcogni… I wholeheartedly agree, as noted in my reply to Rick Rubin’s absurd, reality-distorting, comment that AI is the "punk rock of coding."

This comes to mind immediately 😭🤣🤣

turns out AI models cannot do math.. even grade school math. the kind a 10-year-old solves. Apple published a devastating study that exposes a massive illusion at the core of artificial intelligence. they took the standard math benchmark (GSM8K) that every AI company uses to brag about how smart their model is. first, they just changed the names in the word problems.. the models' performance fluctuated for no reason. then, they changed the numbers. the performance immediately dropped. but then they ran the test that broke everything. they added one single, completely irrelevant sentence to the word problem. something like: "By the way, 5 of the apples were green." A human 10-year-old ignores the green apples and solves the underlying math. the AI didn't. across every state-of-the-art model, performance collapsed by up to 65%. the AI blindly grabbed the irrelevant number and tried to shove it into the equation. it didn't know why it was doing the math. it just saw a number and assumed it was supposed to use it. there is no genuine logical reasoning happening under the hood. we are deploying these systems to run our finances, analyze our legal documents, and make complex strategic decisions. but the models don't actually understand the logic they are spitting out. they just know what a smart answer is supposed to look like.

@TheEconomist Pray tell, will you be 'fighting back' by making a good-faith attempt to appeal to them, to offer workable solutions to their problems? Or will you be merely attempting to delegitimate them and prevent them from having a voice?

The next generation of illiberal leftism is gaining ground. It is time to fight back econ.st/3RFewAX

All those AI data centres, and all that computing power, and why? So that people can confront their loneliness on their own.

From a young age, I have always wanted to be the exit liquidity for shareholders of artificial intelligence companies

@SoCalledSound @edzitron As much as I disdain the AI industry in its current form, I am always reluctant to make bold predictions in either direction. So I'm not sure that AI is the end of anything.

@_simonchandler_ @edzitron I mean....he wasn't wrong. But the thing that I find really strange is any comparison at all to the internet revolution. AI is....the end of the Internet revolution

we're in the early innings of AI, and will be every single year apparently

Opus 4.8 is insane, nothing will be the same after this model 💀

At least I was alive when the BBC interviewed me.

@unusual_whales Good luck with that.

"Microsoft, $MSFT, AI chief gives 18 months for all white-collar work to be automated by AI," per FORTUNE.