William

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William

William

@robot__fan

director

sf Katılım Mart 2023
406 Takip Edilen122 Takipçiler
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William
William@robot__fan·
my notes on 2025 and the completion of my 23rd year on this earth: william.computer/writing/2025 including writing on work, travel to bangladesh, and thoughts on screens, ai diffusion, ai coding, datacenters, waymos, and more
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William
William@robot__fan·
doubled again
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William
William@robot__fan·
Officially doubled my money on the "always bet on socialism" trade (Intel)
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William
William@robot__fan·
kinda unrelated but ive been thinking about how "enshittification" is the slopulism explanatory word de jour, and the implication that either 1) someone should fund $3 ubers forever or 2) that any type of market capture tactic should be illegal. dont understand how either of these are coherent positions
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Deva Hazarika
Deva Hazarika@devahaz·
Worked to get society hooked on on-demand private drivers and food delivery butlers…
Deva Hazarika tweet media
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William
William@robot__fan·
there are a number of subjects where it would be seriously beneficial for the english-language audience to get the full context, not some minified simplification (which, ive also anecdotally seen to be skewed in a way that reflects whatever one editor did the translation). now I get that from one more step of remove, bc translation is instant and free we don't actually need to centralize the repository, but you'd think just for convenience and epistemic benefit to the average user who isn't gonna go do the loop themself, that we should do this
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William
William@robot__fan·
I don't really understand why there's such a big gap in wikipedia content between languages, particularly when the english article is sparse and one (or more) others have immense detail. shouldn't we be auto-PRing this detail to the english version? whats the holdup here?
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William
William@robot__fan·
@devahaz @sporadica if we're wishing for impossible things, a ~1.5hr maglev SF <> LA also immediately fixes this whole situation
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Deva Hazarika
Deva Hazarika@devahaz·
@sporadica You need cheaper housing, more accessible studio/practice spaces, etc. Which prob requires some combo of a crash, rich person patronage, or city sponsorship.
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spor
spor@sporadica·
SF culture could be fixed pretty quickly if someone would come 'round and find a way to be the bridge between the tech crowd and the creative, underground crowd, and then actually produce cool shit remind the people how to have fun and be unserious thank goodness it's happening
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William
William@robot__fan·
just take the waymo bro the airtrain doesnt even take that long plus its kinda vibey
Sheel Mohnot@pitdesi

Alarming how bad @lyft is at fraud detection. It logged a ride from SFO to SF in 3 minutes. The driver never picked me up but claimed he did and I got charged. It should auto-flag an error. When I complained that I didn’t get picked up they sided with the driver Wtf

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based16z
based16z@based16z·
Jensen speaks to Dwarkesh like you might to your dumb nephew who asked if your work at the NSA might be evil
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William
William@robot__fan·
@JHWeissmann @kenmartin73 I am really hoping its just procedural: x.com/robot__fan/sta… now, they should get an enterprise plan for claude asap if this is true...
William@robot__fan

I think there's a chance they have an enterprise subscription to Gemini and are really paranoid about "data privacy" to the extent that they are banning staffers from using free versions of other plans predicated mostly on that. I had to put a similar policy in place (and IP ban the other models) at my company for a while bc we deal w lots of HIPAA data and we couldn't trust everyone to not just copy paste it into free chatgpt and cause a breach. now I think this gets to a second issue, which is non-tech people not understanding that AI companies aren't doing something with your data, or reading your chats and sending them to the RNC, or you can get subpoena'd, or whatever, but it is very much boomer corporate mindset to believe fully you need an absolving BAA or you're legally fucked

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William
William@robot__fan·
I think there's a chance they have an enterprise subscription to Gemini and are really paranoid about "data privacy" to the extent that they are banning staffers from using free versions of other plans predicated mostly on that. I had to put a similar policy in place (and IP ban the other models) at my company for a while bc we deal w lots of HIPAA data and we couldn't trust everyone to not just copy paste it into free chatgpt and cause a breach. now I think this gets to a second issue, which is non-tech people not understanding that AI companies aren't doing something with your data, or reading your chats and sending them to the RNC, or you can get subpoena'd, or whatever, but it is very much boomer corporate mindset to believe fully you need an absolving BAA or you're legally fucked
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William
William@robot__fan·
anyways, alongside a screens-are-banned library / salon space in an apartment along northern Hyde St, the SF Institute for Macron Studies has been a target idea for what I'd do if some ultra wealthy guy gave me a blank check for years at this point
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William
William@robot__fan·
im looking into it
William tweet media
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William
William@robot__fan·
@jasonpjason @jakeonrails I think most "tech leaders" are ghouls, but I don't understand the utility of assigning all technological development as dialectical opposition to material conditions. maybe im too leninist but this just feels reductive to me
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software crisis actor
software crisis actor@jasonpjason·
@jakeonrails @robot__fan i admit i lump in all the techno-optimists. their rich leaders explicitly advocate for the end of public transit so i don’t see why i should be a nuance bro about it.
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software crisis actor
software crisis actor@jasonpjason·
to replace SF transit with waymo we would need to knock over most of the buildings in the city to build more roads. waymo supporters suffer from severe innumeracy. the mathematical part of their brain isn’t developed.
bryan culbertson@bryanculbertson

@PippengerHarlo Yep, Waymo has average occupancy of 0.7 people, compared to personal cars 1.5 and urban transit 22.4 Every trip shifted to AV increases congestion, incentives road widening, and hurts density It is wild that some twitter urbanists have tech pilled themselves into supporting AVs

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Kelsey Piper
Kelsey Piper@KelseyTuoc·
@jdcmedlock Losing the only flexible hours, low-barrier-to-entry, pays-out-same-day jobs out there seems like it might be really detrimental to people honestly
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James Medlock
James Medlock@jdcmedlock·
I think progressives were right to be skeptical of the gig work labor model, so I’m happy to see it automated away as quickly as possible.
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William
William@robot__fan·
(also, all those studies are based on the initial VC-sponsored uber rollout where there was actual price-parity to transit, which obviously isn't true anymore. again I find it beneficial to be epistemically cautious with one-off study claims that are pretty dependent on the experimental setup and the natural confounders)
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William
William@robot__fan·
see this is the more interesting question -- are the safety benefits of replacing all existing rideshare (and some fraction of individual car ownership) worth the additional fraction taken from transit? if I had to guess, I would assume we see greater shift from individual ownership to waymo than transit to waymo, partially predicated on the most likely consumers to defect from transit already having done so. in the limit, you can control this tradeoff ratio in policy via taxation, there's some sort of price threshold lever you can pull
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Harlo Pippenger 🥕🛠🎀
Harlo Pippenger 🥕🛠🎀@PippengerHarlo·
feel like the Waymo safety discussion is ignoring how unsustainable/impossible it would be to shift a significant fraction of transportation to autonomous vehicles. It’s pretty cost prohibitive now but if it’s ever not, it will just choke cities in traffic
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William
William@robot__fan·
@bryanculbertson @jasonpjason which, as I thought we established, is not what waymo or ride-hailing are advocating for -- instead, to replace individual cars. there are a fixed number of cars on the road who are driven by accident prone humans, why can't they be waymos?
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William
William@robot__fan·
so to be clear, do you believe our current steady state of gig work rideshare / transit to be the global equilibrium? would it be better to go back to three years ago pre some amount of waymo deployment? I guess im trying to drill down on your line of criticism beyond your lack of confidence in govt/regulation to prevent runaway privatization (also, I think there is a large difference between VCs and twitter personalities who impact no change posting bad opinions and the actual policymaking / strategy of waymo and its lazy thinking to pretend otherwise). as a thought experiment here, do you think waymo could responsibly deploy in say, paris, or beijing, or otherwise somewhere with more responsible transit-forward governance?
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software crisis actor
software crisis actor@jasonpjason·
@jakeonrails i guess i don’t believe that. beyond the (many, rich, loud) tech chuds who explicitly say transit should go away, i think the capitalists and their pawns will strive to privatize every last trip and strangle public life. maybe you see some evidence to the contrary.
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William
William@robot__fan·
@bryanculbertson @jasonpjason yes thats what im saying, I don't see how waymos replacing ride-hailing changes the state of the debate here. we already have ride-hails, that we both agree should be congestion-taxed, why can't they be waymos instead of ubers?
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Keşfet

@mattparlmer @tolstoybb @devahaz @sporadica @based16z @JHWeissmann @kenmartin73 @elonmusk