This has been the case since 9/11. I’m so sick of being looked at like I’m an idiot when I’m remove my shoes, then on the flight back they treat me like an idiot for asking if I have to take them off

Yes, electronics are very cheap… But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It’s literally a piece of plastic and a few wires

The tablet thing is true, they’ve changed cars to computerize everything, and once you’ve done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything

But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it’s just worse

But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he’s Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It’s present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn’t have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit

This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.

Now it’s responding all confused, and saying things like “I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla” when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon’s tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way

He micromanages and meddles constantly… That’s what he does at his companies

For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas… But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson

No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)

Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses

Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology

Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering

Because it looks like candy. It feels like jelly. It’s individually wrapped in clear plastic, just like candy

Now, imagine someone leaves one of those on the counter, or in a random drawer. That’s where loose candy lives.

So of course other people, who maybe don’t do laundry and don’t often see tide pods, are going to go “oh, look, candy!”

And then they call poison control as they retch and the cells in the mouth turn to soap, and they get added to the statistics

Nah, they’re actually fantastic at brain numbing tasks. I like to feed it sql tables and have it act like an ORM, but without the tradeoffs of an ORM. I’d never do it manually, but it’s far more readable and easy to work with

I also love using it for api’s. You can feed it a response, say “hey, I just want the id, status, and amount” (or whatever) and it’ll restructure the data for you

These are not hard problems… They are tedious ones though. They solve a problem by brute force, a problem we “solve” over and over because at the end of the day: programmers are lazy.

You can over engineer complex bindings until the cows come home, but a simple pattern with each field explicitly mapped is the best solution. It’s just really, really annoying to actually do it

No, that’s the rationalization. They admin wants to use palantir to collect data on American citizens, including giving ICE mobile camera installations to do face tracking. They want to do a 1984, and they don’t want any speed bumps from the states

Also, AI companies gave Trump money and there’s talk of restricting their power/water access to data centers to prioritize the people living nearby

Because lobbyists get angry and markets get nervous when you mandate a change overnight, but no one seems to care if people get nervous angry

Can’t you just get a new launcher? That’s day one of getting a new phone for me

Lol hell no.

We had all that before! The old solutions were better in almost every way but cost. It also didn’t fill the world with micro plastics

You can still get real soap, it’s better for your skin. You can still get real clothes, they’re far more durable and lasts hundreds of times longer. You can buy real gum, I haven’t found any to try yet but apparently it doesn’t keep flavor for as long, but it also doesn’t fill your body with micro plastics

Obviously there’s exceptions - like glass made with plastics are an actual modern marvel. Some healthcare devices basically require certain plastics

No, it’s actually crazy.

Clothing. Chewing gum. Carpets. Detergents (meaning most “soap”). Paint. Glue.

Packaging (obviously), but the paper and metal stuff usually has a plastic coating

If you aren’t sure what something is made of, it’s probably petrochemical… And even then, there’s likely some coating or binder

The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context.

That’s a massive oversimplification, it’s like saying humans don’t remember things, we just have neurons that fire based on context

LLMs do actually “know” things. They work based on tokens and weights, which are the nodes and edges of a high dimensional graph. The llm traverses this graph as it processes inputs and generates new tokens

You can do brain surgery on an llm and change what it knows, we have a very good understanding of how this works. You can change a single link and the model will believe the Eiffel tower is in Rome, and it’ll describe how you have a great view of the colosseum from the top

The problem is that it’s very complicated and complex, researchers are currently developing new math to let us do this in a useful way

Something about heavy and light crude oil, and some head scratching decisions that involve shipping things around the world

Hey, friend, take a breath. Listen… This isn’t how we all die. Unless you live in Iran I guess, and then maybe, depending how it plays out - but even that is not at all a sure thing. I know this is pretty bad, but you can’t burn yourself out on this one

This isn’t world war III. It’s just another bad thing. China has signaled nothing on this and Russia is in no position to do anything. Europe has been quiet, the other Gulf states have been quiet… This could turn into another forever war, but this isn’t going to spark a powder keg.

But yeah, Iran has clearly been trying to return to the fold for years now, and netanyahu has started a second conflict to hold into power. It’s very obvious who the aggressors are

And yes, if you use targeted means to hit civilians and their family, obviously that’s a war crime.

But war crimes don’t cancel out. There’s no place for whataboutism when real human lives are being snuffed out in their homes. We make a list, and hopefully soon the fascists will fall and all the war criminals will stand trial

But that’s it exactly - cluster bombs just fling granades all over a city block at random. It’s basically just collateral damage in the hopes of hitting a soft target

I mean, fuck palantir and I really don’t like this tech in general, but blowing up a room or a house is way more precise. You’re hitting just what you mean to hit

And that’s what a lot of war crimes come down to - certain weapons are unacceptably imprecise. Which gets into the first rule of war crimes - you’re not supposed to attack noncombatants

Let’s not defend cluster bombs just because Israel is going to use this for justification…

Because of course they will, this whole thing started by blowing up the Iranian negotiator, they’re obviously not going to start acting in good faith now

The argument being cluster bombs are a dirty move, but using simultaneous AI powered assassin drones to strike while people are sleeping makes you the good guys?

I mean… That is how this works. Cluster bombs are bad because they’re less precise and cause more collateral damage. So weapons that target individuals with high precision are better

But like… Presumably, you’re not just individually killing a bunch of civilians precisely

How about: they’re a major factor in the rise of post truth and in ruining the Internet. And in hacking democracy itself

Their control is endangering the human race. They’ve crushed countless innovations to keep a stranglehold on technology. They proactively helped fascists get into power

They don’t deserve to make ever increasing money off us. They’re not content creators - they’re bad stewards of a public forum they bought and expanded through monopolistic practices.

I’d say it’s not only moral to deny them ad revenue, I think watching their ads is a danger to society

No, they do. They don’t die, but they lose their current life

I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think you dropped this: .com.ru

No no no… It’s not democracy, it’s abstraction

Democracy would be a worker owned business. Where the people who do the thing decide how it should be done. And it’s great, it makes sense, it’s ethical, and the decisions are made democratically by the most informed people

Stock markets don’t work like that. At one point you had voting, but now it’s all speculation and layers of abstraction

Do you think the shareholders know or care how the business is being run? No, they just want line go up, because they’ve got a dozen other places to shift the money to if it’s not going up fast enough

They don’t know or care if the company is dumping chemicals into the lake until the rest of us do. They don’t know that the cars are dangerous, but it was cheaper to set aside money for damages.

They aren’t part of the company at all - they have no responsibility for what the company does. They have no control… Except, collectively. Maybe they could join together to replace a board member or sell to lower the price negligably. And the board has a responsibility to the shareholders. And the CEO just listens to the same consultant the shareholders do

So really, it’s no one’s fault.

Chick fila donates to hate groups, but they also front the money for new franchise owners. Costco pays well. Arizona iced tea doesn’t raise their prices because they have no debt and the guy says he’s making enough money.

Yes, you’re going to have shit heads and good people… But as bad as my pillow guy is I’d be shocked if he was knowingly poisoning people… That usually weighs on a person’s conscience, but not so much if they can diffuse the responsibility

Yes. Unambigiously.

What would you rather have, one person with a ton of power making decisions, or abstract it out over a group and diffuse all responsibility?

Both are bad, but one of them has a (likely not morally great) person at the top, the other has lots of robber barons sharing ownership and collectively demanding line go up

A person isn’t usually dumb enough to fire half their workforce, because they know their bread and butter comes from that workforce. A consulting company advising the business and shareholders at the same time can easily do such stupidity for short term profits