Viewing profile — pembrook

Yes, you do have to pick. Resources are not infinite. European deficits are ballooning, and europe's ability to invest in anything (go further into debt) is constrained by peoples …

I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post…

Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core str…

This is the most mind blowingly stupid thing I've ever witnessed..and in slow motion...I'm just astonished that the EU is cheerfully walking themselves into destroying the freedoms…

The concept of an income tax was originally supposed to be temporary.

I literally lol'd at the "Most analysts expect..." line. Yea, most analysts didn't expect the cookie banner nightmare we're living in either. To think you can get only the narrow o…

Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them. They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel …

And substack is free because they use YOU as their growth engine. Your newsletter is plastered with their branding and links to their app, not yours. If someone subscribes to pay f…

Not the most productive asset to be leveraging, especially in rapidly declining birth rate countries, no? Meanwhile, while headline credit card interest rates in the US look insane…

Data from the IMF says European households hold a similar level of debt if not more (especially the case in northern Europe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hou…

To be honest I like the idea of forcing merchants to accept credit cards in addition to this. Regardless of how much I like the idea of a payments layer without Visa/Mastercard fee…

I see these conspiratorial arguments all the time and I think people massively overestimate the value of the average users tokens. The problems with frontier models (design taste, …

Agreed, but the days of software projects being ambitious or impressive are over.

By ambitious and impressive do you mean for Claude? Because while cool this is clearly heavily vibe coded.

Because markets in the short term are almost a random walk and making the blanket statement that “Walmart stock is down today because Deepseek” was an easy narrative to repeat for …

This is a red herring. We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control. We're arguing about whether governments executing cens…

Yes exactly my point...so it sounds like you're admitting this "availability of porn leading to action" theory isn't a very good one? And that in fact it leads to less action given…

Does it need to be said that by making all pornography easier to access the internet obviously makes rape pornography more prevalent and easier to access as well? Hence your theory…

Yes, it’s an argument but there’s zero data to support it, in fact the opposite. If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted i…

It totally could be illegal, and I don’t care. Those laws exist to entrench dominant incumbents, and make our economy less dynamic. The history of Silicon Valley and most of its in…

I’m a huge fan of Apple but this kind of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Regardless of whether OpenAI poached some of their talent or is the one in the wrong, Apple has such …

To me this feels like the Japanese soldier stuck on the island still fighting the old war a decade after it ended. Thanks for repeating the moral panic narrative for me, it’s exact…

Yes, if the US was modeled like the USSR they could extract 100% of everyone’s private assets and the politburo could spend them on whatever moonshot projects they wanted to, unche…

In an earlier phase of AI I might have agreed but now the publicly available data they’ve trained on is increasingly useless for the frontier. RL/post-training is now a much bigger…

How charming. A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us 'stupid sheep'...with the implicit threat of a gun to the head via the state's m…