Documenting Life

“The woman across from you at the coffee shop may be someone who will never ever want to fuck you – that is often the case – but she’s also not a jewel locked in a vault that only a six-foot-three hedge fund manager with a Greek statue’s bone structure can crack. Rather, she’s a human being with free will and a body that wants things, a mind that gets lonely sometimes, a heart that may like very much to find someone else to press against in the dark… a person, in other words”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-incels-veto-and-other-observations

“You can imagine Trump as Gollum with some of Sauron’s powers, but to his credit, Gollum understood the One Ring was only as good as the powers that went with it. (While I’m at it with the Middle Earth analogies, let’s call Silicon Valley’s overlords orcs who think they are hobbits.)”

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/visions-of-life-agents-of-death-on-love-thy-neighbor-and-love-thy-nature/

“I can see this all happening. I hate it. Science — and the social sciences, in particular — will get worse, while the capabilities of a few distinct technologies improve. The people who most love these technologies will insist that the future is bright, and they’llspeculate on the wonderful possibilities that have just been unleashed, and they’ll never once notice the obvious parallels between today’s digital future and digital futures’ past”

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-comes-next-if-claude-code-is

“For just one instance, in the run up to Operation Desert Storm, both President Bush and Secretary James Baker openly talked about our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and preventing a recession and therefore the loss of US jobs. But then the administration’s rhetoric shifted, pointing to Saddam’s human rights abuses and how horrible his regime was in general.

As the analysis of one historian contends, the public pretty much bought the oil explanation; the human rights stuff didn’t add much and may have even muddled the overall case, contributing to the rather short political gains of the war.

So maybe Trump has some good reason to believe that being openly rapacious is a better political path than making up fairy tales about democracy and human rights”

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/crude-ideology

“ENTRY LEVEL: A bunch of kids with resumes. Some of them will be creative thinkers, hard workers, good managers, some will be lemons. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think you can reliably pick winners based on the information available. All you can do is select out people who aren’t even capable of keeping their massively disqualifying personality problems under control for the length of a selection centre. You are going to be selecting based on a bit of nepotism, a bit of PLULPLU (people like us like people like us), quite a bit of “am I in a good mood, did I have a nice lunch” and mostly random chance”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial

“Democracy is an attempt to create some level of political equality, to mirror the inherent moral equality of all humanity. This is simply not possible in the presence of the level of wealth inequality that America now has. It is not possible. We can have our level of inequality or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both. The numbers, at present, tell us that we have chosen the inequality. We are just playing out the string on the rest right now”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/abominations-of-capital

“It will also, more insidiously, lead to the introduction of tech reform bills that are reform in name only, written by the industry as a way to head off anything that would be meaningful, introduced by legislators who want the political benefit of being perceived as “doing something” on tech while also accepting tech industry money”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/the-battle-over-big-tech-will-be

“The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cold-shoulder

“To the extent that their output is pushed into “mid-ness” by economic circumstance, L.L.M.s are not unprecedented. In a real sense, “why A.I. is writing mid” and “why most professional writing is mid” have the same explanation: “Good writing,” whether authored wholly by humans or generated by an L.L.M., requires capacious resources (whether in time and education and editing or in compute and training and fine-tuning) to create an idiosyncratic (and likely polarizing) voice for which there usually isn’t economically sufficient demand”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-writing-ever-be-good