Documenting Life

“The thing is… this is kind of how the ideas industry functions in general, these days. Many, many arguments that find their way into the public consciousness have this general two-faced nature, a more incendiary side to generate publicity and a more equivocal side to evade criticism. I don’t exonerate Kendi for the deficiencies of his thinking, at all, but I do think that advancing a more provocative version of academic ideas as a way to garner attention and then retreating to a more limited and qualified version of those ideas when challenged is just how it works. (I will leave it to you to determine if things have always been this way or if this is a new development.) And yeah, I mean… alas. This stuff isn’t good. But it’s how things work”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-think-ibram-kendi-is-just-an-academic

“It seems too cheap and on-the-nose to point out that in their unwavering confidence and abstract relationship to the truth, large language models like GPT-4o project a kind of intelligence that most closely resembles the intelligence projected by the founders and investors and ambitious little freaks behind this generation of generative A.I. applications. But, you know, if Leopold Aschenbrenner impresses you I can see why “the talking computer that confidently bullshits in order to tell you what you want to hear” would also impress you”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-leopold-aschenbrenner

“In the social-media era, websites and article formats became more generic in order to fit in the templates of feeds and search results. I think in the near future we’ll see more differentiated websites and presentations, not in a scroll-y HTML5 way but the sense of new interactions and bespoke interfaces. My experience of the NYT should be very different than the Washington Post, and not just in the sense of two different iPhone apps. Scarcity is value that someone — consumers and / or advertisers — will pay for”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/voice-taste-trust-scarcity

“So a little public money on the front end could save a lot of money and eliminate a lot of corporate extraction on the back end. Tax prep is one of those areas in which the long, neoliberal push away from public goods really hurt society, on both fairness and cost; what should be a niche industry catering to people with truly complicated tax situations instead became a functional extension of the government, with a complicated and easily abused qualifying process leading to heaps of waste”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-twilight-of-big-tax

“The tech industry can no longer rely on the idea that every year (or couple of years) somebody will find an idea that will create 200 more startups or trillions of dollars in market capitalization. It must reconfigure both venture capital investment and public tech companies to a more sustainable, profitable and useful model where — get this — existing products are made better and more profitable with the understanding that we’re approaching Max Internet, and that products cannot be built with the assumption that more and more users will always exist”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/

“And now, one version of a type of software that has been around for a long time is suddenly on everyone’s minds. It’s being used to make a variety of toys. A number of people are hooking those toys up to heart machines and bombs. And I’m fifty years old and I get to watch it all with a pleasant cola in my hand.

I’m profoundly cynical but I’m not generally apocalyptic. For me, what’s being called “Artificial Intelligence” and all the more reasonable non-anthropomorphizing terms is just a new nutty set of batch scripts, except this time folks are actually praying to them. That’s high comedy”

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5638

“To Wall, it’s beyond comprehension that antitrust enforcers might not actually believe what businessmen are telling them. And any attempt to address a corporation that everyone hates is simply a “populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works.” And in contrast to the crazy lunatics today, Wall says, “The Obama Administration saw things differently.” Wall even cites antitrust scholar Herb Hovenkamp’s treatise that these kinds of corporations are usually lawful, though Hovenkamp himself said the case is solid”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster