Viewing profile — BrenBarn

What a load of insincere hogwash. If Zuck wanted to dilute the power of large institutions he has several billion ways to do it other than making limp gestures in the direction of …

As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.

What makes economic sense isn't necessarily the same as what is rational. All of what you said is factored into people's notion of "economic sense". My main takeaway from that is t…

> Meanwhile, only a few academics and small companies are defending us from these technologies. “The thing about cat-and-mouse games is that we know how they usually end up for the…

It's because people became addicted to building apps using HTML and JS instead of writing actual programs that run on the actual OS and display their UI using native OS widgets.

As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a…

> Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? That is…

> Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent. I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are in…

I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around i…

> Why shouldn't they? Because it's evil?

It's kind of sad to me to see this because I find Gwern's website so fascinating and impressive. But I don't believe that this kind of doubling down on LLMs is a good path forward …

This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me. One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning…

AKA "Love of money is the root of all evil."

That's why the burden of proof needs to shift and our thinking about responsibility needs to shift. Your liability should increase in parallel with the benefits you derive from you…

> A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. I think we would be…

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Pascal

Yet another reminder that the companies providing the AI tools everyone is so gaga over are in it to make money off of you. They can and will engage in rugpulling, deception, and o…

I could write a really long thing here about my thoughts on video shops. Suffice it to say that there was a video shop in my town that I went to a lot as a kid, and continued to go…

> The moment external investors acquire ownership interests in FIFA competitions, football changes forever. Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation. Investor expectations …

The whole "human nature" argument always irritates me. We deny human nature all the time, and if we didn't our world would be far worse. Human nature has many aspects that are bad …

The article doesn't mention what I think is one of the most notable AI aesthetic tropes, which is lists of bullet points where the bullets are emojis. Admittedly these mostly occur…

Amen to disgust with the cult of speed. A large part of what people spend their time trying to do fast doesn't really need to be done at all; most of the rest doesn't need to be do…

It's not just technical practicality that's disregarded, it's nearly everything valuable about anything that's worth doing. It's why VC is a cancer on the world.

I think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.

The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a lo…