Mario Callous, x grinder & amusements editor

Diplomacy is the art of telling lies that everyone can live with.

@UnderSecE @RnaudBertrand That’s it? That’s your reply? The irony.

@RnaudBertrand Are you seriously using Huawei as an example of capitalism right now?

This is pretty insane: the U.S. just tried to literally re-colonize part of the Philippines. They did so under the so-called "Pax Silica" initiative, the brainchild of - surprise, surprise - an ex-Palantir guy named Jacob Helberg who now runs U.S. economic "diplomacy" from the State Department. It's causing a big outcry in the Philippines, which is quite a feat given this is by far the most US-friendly country in Southeast Asia. If you're the US and you're getting the Marcos administration - of all governments - to push back on sovereignty, you've really overplayed your hand. What is the "Pax Silica" initiative? In a nutshell it's about the US getting other countries to commit to restructuring their AI tech infrastructure around a US-led stack. It's basically vendor lock-in: you hand over your critical minerals, align your export controls with Washington's, regulate AI the way America wants, and in return you get to be a US "trusted partner," whatever that means these days. In essence, let's not kid ourselves, it's all about China: this is the US's initiative to "win the AI race" by getting other countries to contractually commit to keeping China out of their tech supply chains. When you can't preserve your lead through innovation, you seek to lock countries in contractually. For instance as a country, this would mean telling Huawei they can't sell you AI chips, and telling Chinese firms they can't invest in your data centers - even if they're better and cheaper. It's not about choosing the best technology, it's about choosing the right flag. But in this instance, the US went much further still: they literally tried to carve out 4,000 acres of Philippine territory (in New Clark City, 60 miles north of Manila) to be governed under US common law with diplomatic immunity - the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the modern world. This is according to the WSJ who ran the story last month (wsj.com/world/asia/u-s…) as if it was a done deal (it wasn't). Heard about the "French concession" or "British concession" in China during the century of humiliation? Same thing: the US basically asked for an "American concession" in the Philippines. Unsurprisingly, there was quite a bit of backlash in the country with for instance the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP) calling it a “massive sellout” of the country’s land, minerals, and sovereignty (punto.com.ph/us-led-pax-sil…). So much so that the Philippines' government - namely Joshua Bingcang, president and chief executive of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) - issued a statement saying that the Philippines had rejected US proposals that would place the project beyond local jurisdiction (asianews.network/philippines-re…). Note, by the way, this delicious irony: the BCDA is the government agency that was created in 1992 specifically to convert former US military bases at Clark and Subic Bay after the Philippines spent decades negotiating their closure. New Clark City - where the Pax Silica's hub would go - is built on the old Clark Air Base. So the agency whose entire reason for existing is to turn former American colonial territory (i.e. US military bases) into sovereign Philippine land is the one now being asked to hand part of that very same land back under US jurisdiction (and, apparently, declined). Of course though, blocking this specific jurisdiction grab doesn't change the bigger picture. The Philippines is still a Pax Silica signatory, and Pax Silica itself is structurally neocolonial: you supply the cheap labor and raw materials, align your export controls and regulations with Washington's, cut yourself off from the world's rising technological powerhouse - and in exchange you get assembly jobs and the privilege of getting a pat on the head and being called a "trusted partner." They dropped the most cartoonishly colonial demand - governing Philippine soil under US law - but the underlying architecture is the same: you serve America's supply chain, on America's terms, and you relinquish your sovereign right to trade with whoever offers the best deal.

@TheKevinDalton @unlimited_ls This is a sad byproduct of mental illness. You assume some homeless guy is going to stab you. It’s also Boston.

@unlimited_ls This is a sad byproduct of homelessness. You see some dude passed out at the bottom of the escalator, you assume he’s going to stab you in the neck if you try to help him.

🚨NEW: Father of two died after getting trapped in a Boston subway station escalator while more than a dozen people walked past him without helping Steven McCluskey, 40, lost his balance while going down an escalator at Davis Station in Somerville just before 5 a.m. on February 27 Surveillance video shows his coat getting caught in the escalator as he desperately tried to free himself As the fabric tightened around his neck, McCluskey eventually collapsed at the bottom of the escalator Video released by the MBTA shows multiple people walking past him without stopping to help, including one man who watched briefly before walking away An employee finally stopped the escalator more than 20 minutes later before medics arrived and performed CPR

@jwarwick @tobi The link is a globe and mail article, sheeple.

@tobi And our captured media is not reporting on this or any of the other draconian bills that are about to pass. As a result, the average sheeple has no idea what is going on, but I'm not even sure it would make a difference if they did.

C-22 is looking like a huge mistake. It worries me a great deal. There is so much nonsense in there that It may well end up dealing a death blow to Canadian tech viability.

I hear Starmer is going to retire in New Zealand and live in a Keir home.

@newrelic node-agent v13: two false alarms on healthy ECS Fargate runs — • ERROR "Failed to get vendor aws" — Fargate doesn't expose IMDS, working as designed • WARN "no profilers to stop" when profiling.enabled defaults to false Agent shouldn't cry wolf re: normal lifecycle.

@newrelic it's poor design on your end. A failed vendor probe during normal operation on a platform that doesn't expose IMDS is expected behavior, not an error condition — it should be info at worst.

@VistaLargaGames @Rainmaker1973 That’s Rosie O’Donnell

@Rainmaker1973 You’re all wrong. THIS is the real Mario

Super Mario, one of the most beloved video game characters of all time, was named after a real person. In 1981, when the character first appeared in Nintendo’s arcade hit Donkey Kong, he was simply called “Jumpman.” At the time, Nintendo of America was renting a warehouse in Tukwila, Washington, from a local landlord named Mario Segale. According to multiple accounts, Segale once showed up demanding overdue rent from Nintendo’s president, Minoru Arakawa. The tense exchange reportedly inspired the developers to rename their mustachioed hero after their no-nonsense Italian-American landlord. Segale’s short, stocky build and dark hair also perfectly matched the image Nintendo had in mind for the character. Years later, in a 1993 interview with The Seattle Times, Segale jokingly remarked, “You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty checks.” Mario Segale passed away in 2018 at the age of 84, but his name continues to live on through one of gaming’s most iconic figures.

@Austen Wait, you *both* didn’t read the article you’re commenting on?

Counterpoint: I work with hundreds of people who do this all the time and I don’t think even a single person has walked away thinking Claude is conscious

@typesfast @ConorNeu Always say no but you should improve your diet and get more exercise and you have a hundred billion dollar business.

@ConorNeu If you just say “no” every time wouldn’t you be right way more often than 86% of the time?

I'm personally invested in a company that can tell you whether you will have a heart attack in the next 12 months. With 86% certainty. From a blood test. Unreal value. They are weak at scaling. Someone please buy this and take it to the masses.

@i_hate_intel @Dan_Jeffries1 @Sergey_lll Daniel and other humans won’t even understand the new problems that come up let alone be able to do a job solving them.

@Dan_Jeffries1 @Sergey_lll It doesn't assume the problem space is finite at all. The argument is that AI will be capable of solving these new problems as they come up.

AI will create more jobs than any other technology in history. The doomers' fundamental error isn't just the lump of labor fallacy. It's deeper than that. They assume a finite problem space. This is the fundamental error of AI and job doomers. They look at the economy and see a fixed amount of work to be done, a pie that can only be sliced thinner as machines take bigger bites. They see humans a competitive resource for a finite amount of work and a finite amount of problems to solve that must be eliminated. This is fundamentally, totally and completely wrong. The pie isn't fixed. It never was. And the reason it isn't fixed is baked into the very nature of technology itself. Technology is nothing but abstraction stacking. And abstraction stacking is infinite. Therefore the work is infinite. The hammer didn't reduce the amount of work. It moved the work up the stack. And the new work was more complex, more varied, and more interesting than the old work. Complexity breeds more complexity and more variety. Once you have houses instead of mud huts, you have a cascade of new problems that didn't exist before. Plumbing. Wiring. Insulation. Roofing materials that don't rot. Drainage systems so the foundation doesn't flood. Fire codes so your neighbor's bad wiring doesn't burn down the whole block. Each of those problems becomes a job. A plumber. An electrician. An insulator. A roofer. A civil engineer. A building inspector. None of those jobs existed when we lived in mud huts. They exist because we solved the mud hut problem. Think of all of human technological development as a stack of abstraction layers, each one built on top of the ones below it. At the bottom: raw survival. Finding food. Building shelter. Making fire. These are the base-layer problems. Each major technology wave solved a base-layer problem and in doing so created an entirely new layer of problems above it: Agriculture solved "how do we reliably eat?" — and created problems of land ownership, irrigation, crop rotation, storage, trade, taxation, and governance. Writing solved "how do we remember things across generations?" — and created problems of literacy, education, record-keeping, law, bureaucracy, and literature. The printing press solved "how do we spread knowledge at scale?" — and created problems of intellectual property, censorship, journalism, publishing, public opinion, and democratic discourse. The steam engine solved "how do we generate mechanical power without muscles?" — and created problems of factory design, worker safety, urban planning, railroad engineering, coal mining, labor relations, and environmental pollution. Electricity solved "how do we deliver energy anywhere?" — and created problems of grid design, power generation, appliance manufacturing, electrical safety codes, utility regulation, and an entire consumer electronics industry. The Internet solved "how do we connect all human knowledge?" — and created problems of cybersecurity, digital privacy, online commerce, content moderation, network infrastructure, cloud computing, social media dynamics, and an entire digital economy that employs tens of millions. Notice the pattern? Each solution didn't just solve a problem. It created an entirely new problem space that was larger, more complex, and more varied than the one it replaced. The stack grows. It never shrinks. It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

@Dan_Jeffries1 That’s a lot of words for what starts with a strawman and ends with missing a fundamental point.

@GaryMarcus @AFpost AFpost is not a serious journalistic endeavor.

@AFpost shame on you for not asking for a counterview from other experts. here’s one: open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus…

Evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious. After feeding the LLM a segment of his new book and receiving detailed feedback, Dawkins was moved to exclaim,” You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” Dawkins cites the complexity, fluency, and ‘intelligence’ of Claude’s answers as evidence of consciousness. Follow: @AFpost

Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots." There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates. One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate. "Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered. Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act. I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund. The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.

@SantiagoAuFund @mbell58 A stable genius

@mbell58 What does it make those who voted for his opponent?

“The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them." Tywin Lannister

@GaryMarcus Grok is estimating about 40,000–45,000 US developer/engineer roles cut YTD 2026. Some of this was “over hiring” but that was the excuse for massive layoffs last year. Anthropic has maybe 3000 developers, tripled revenue in 4 months and has 70 NEW positions. Impressive!

@idonevenknowho • 25,000 is (as far as I know) a made up number • 70 is the number of NEW positions, not total positions.

Nonsense. We are going to need software engineers for years to come.

@GaryMarcus 70 vs 25,000

and see

@pmarca I guess all the new jobs won’t involve long term planning, idea generation, and taste.

Three things the leading AI models are quite good at: long term planning, idea generation, and taste. Sorry, but it's true.

@scoopercooper This says more about the fact that there is no credible opposition than anything else.

If their current polling numbers hold until 2029, they would win a massive majority government, guaranteeing uninterrupted Liberal rule until 2034, or for almost two decades.

@APompliano You’re ignoring the Molotov cocktail effect.

I have changed my mind on how AI will impact jobs in America. Previously, I believed AI would replace many entry level roles typically filled by young employees. The technology would then work its way up the organization and eventually reduce the total number of jobs in a company. The data is saying something different, so when I get new information I am willing to change my mind. The number of software engineers being hired has been increasing. The number of open software engineer roles is growing. The number of new college grads who get hired has increased 5.6% over the last 12 months. The unemployment level for people aged 20-24 years old who have a college degree has fallen from nearly 9% to almost 5% as well. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote “AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S., according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as Head of AI and AI engineer.” And I am starting to see companies throughout our portfolio aggressively hiring to keep up with the demand for their products and services. If AI can make employees more productive, which is widely accepted as fact, then companies are going to want as many productive units of labor as possible. This is a key reason why I am changing my mind. AI appears to be a magical technology that will make companies more productive and more profitable. The net result will be more corporations, more startups, and more jobs. All three are big, positive wins for the American economy.

@Jeyffre Was with you until “it still requires real human interactions to see if higher-level understanding holds up.” An AI can interview and test understanding.

How I think CS education will/should evolve in response to AI. Let's begin with a thought experiment. I ask you to create an operating system from scratch that runs on a Rasberry pi. "No problem!" you say. "Claude: make an operating system for the Rasberry pi. Write it to the SD card using the MCP. Make no mistakes. Run the code review subagent after you are done." --dangerously-skip-permissions Now I will give you an oral exam at the end and ask you to defend the advantages of your new implementation relative to existing ones. You will totally draw a blank. That blank is what new CS education needs to fill—or at least target more effectively. There are a lot of ways you could say your system is "better." It's more secure against certain types of attacks (e.g. more effective sandboxing), and your scheduling algorithm is "faster" in some way, it boots faster, etc. etc. But most vibe-only-coders don't even have the vocabulary to begin the discussion, and certainly not the ability to have a discussion that holds up under scrutiny. AI can drill students on low-level explanations (e.g. "what is a sandbox and why does it matter?") but it still requires real human interactions to see if higher-level understanding holds up. The "interview" isn't going anywhere. We might as well make the "interview" part of the education process. (Which @RareSkills_io does already btw)