- The headline argument hinges on the size of infinities to assert that you'll run out of goals to live for eventually, and thus will eventually become vacuous and despondent over an infinite timeline. But this reliance on infinities is also why they cannot propose a concrete age limit for the Logan's Run Law their gut so desires. May that remain the case for infinity.
Some counter-shower-thoughts:
Are children's lives vacuous and despondent? They have no sense of mortality, no sense of limits, no comprehension even of the fleeting nature of their childhood, and honestly they aren't really striving for a goal the way an Everest climber, or even the average salaried worker, is. Maybe there's more to the meaning of life than striving towards a lofty-yet-grounded-and-pinpoint goal?
Are dogs and cats given longer legal lifespans than humans because they seem happy enough without this vaunted sense of mortality and strife?
Why are Everest summiters or retirees left without goals to strive for, when they've only achieved one or less? That's tangential to Williams' proposition! Is it not because they have too little time left before their "dead"line to forge and pursue a new one, particularly given the toll of aging on mind and body? That seems like the opposite of the point the author's trying to prove.
- I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.
- > "the creativity of a human"
> "the economic demand for digital art"
You twisted one "goalpost" into a tangential thing in your first "example", and it still wasn't true, so idk what you're going for. "Using a wrench vs preliminary layout draft" is even worse.
If one attempted to make a productive observation of the past few years of AI Discourse, it might be that "AI" capabilities are shaped in a very odd way that does not cleanly overlap/occupy the conceptual spaces we normally think of as demonstrations of "human intelligence". Like taking a 2-dimensional cross-section of the overlap of two twisty pool tubes and trying to prove a Point with it. Yet people continue to do so, because such myopic snapshots are a goldmine of contradictory venn diagrams, and if Discourse in general for the past decade has proven anything, it's that nuance is for losers.
- If you don't understand a concept that's part of the stock market, reading the Investopedia article will go a long way. It's a nice site for basic overviews. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/buyback.asp
The short answer is that the trend of frequent stock buybacks as discussed here is not being used to "eliminate debt" (restore private ownership), it's being used to puff up the stock price as a non-taxable alternative to dividend payouts (simply increasing the stock price by reducing supply does not realize any gains, while paying stockholders "interest" directly is subject to income tax). This games the metric of "stock price", which is used as a proxy for all sorts of things including executive performance and compensation.
- If you want to be specific that general idea could be elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite plus a fat % RoI on the company's entire valuation because that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost."
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
- Counting on:
- AI never advancing past a "firehose of mediocre slop"
- Consumers as an aggregate "choosing" quality over cost and availability
is a good way to never worry about AI, yes. But that's not the assumptions this article or thread is written on.
- > If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas.
Sounds more like the world's least efficient way of querying the Median LLM Researcher about a given topic.
Every single <AI>pedia page on a topic will either default to median research-agent output (because the owner doesn't care to influence it), or be functionally equivalent to a AI-ghostwritten think piece because the owner cared enough to spin up a whole new wiki for it. In practice, a lot of owner-doesn't-care articles will be polluted by their prompt fiddling in chaotic ways that help nobody.
- Huh? 5x Arctic P12 is $24 on Amazon right now, no sale going on. And the whole Corsi-Rosenthal trend started specifically because consumer air purifiers were tested to be both noisier and less effective at their job.
But I'd honestly pay a premium for a commercial air purifier that just has a bunch of 120mm/140mm fan mounts instead of their "maybe tolerable at Very Low" integrated box-fan equivalent.
In general, all I've learned from online reviews of "quiet" appliances is that different people have very different definitions / criteria for "quiet".
- I honestly have not idea what you're on about.
First, the "by artists for coders" equivalent always existed! There's tons of free-for-commercial-use art packs and BGM tracks and sound effect packs out there, and more when you add cheaply priced stuff. Will you get hate for using those common assets in a commercial project? Only as much as you'll get for visibly running on RPG Maker!
Which leads into the second - those "no-code" solutions you refer to are a far cry from "just add art". They're really "slightly lower code", relying on heavy scripting to actually shape the faintest approximation of a personal vision out of it. They were never the "by coders for artists" gift you frame them as, any more than Godot or Unity was. They're essentially just a pack of libraries for well-trodden genre boilerplate, used by hobbyist game coders and artists alike.
Artists have always needed to learn to code in order to make their vision for a game into reality. They equally cannot "enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about" unless you want them to - wait for it - AI vibe code the whole thing. Or do you think all the artists nominally against AI art are secretly vibe coding a new wave of games too? Do you even think a vibe-coded game will hew to your expectations for a good game? If not, why?
- Cheese is very high in saturated fats, which are linked to blood cholesterol (LDL).
That said, Japanese cuisine is generally low in saturated fats, and adding 1+ instance of cheese per week is unlikely to tip it over doctor-un-recommended levels of sat. fat intake. Especially compared to the standard American diet.
- And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
- Most PE roll ups are not in your 401k - that’s what private equity means.
While some may eventually find enough success to IPO and subsequently enter a big index, the past few decades of VOO / buy-the-market growth owes far more to tech stocks than what’s being discussed here.
- > He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone
I'm not in a rock-throwing mood, but I qualify for that easily. False consensus effect cuts against AI...mass-production? aficionados just as much as hardline opponents.
- Touches on the broader problem - that the less thought and care put into a comment, the more likely it is to be posted on the internet. Not sure what can be done about statistics.
- "Implementing" a low-resolution idea is equivalent to "producing" a higher-resolution idea. It's turtles all the way down.
And ideas born without knowledge about their "implementation" are, by definition, quite low resolution.
- The "non-ingestion allergen exposure" thing is a dangerous and common misconception, and the business-idea "joke" doesn't hinge on knowing or recognizing this, nor does it encourage questioning that part of the premise.
- You could also see it as a double condemnation of colonialism - not just immoral, but an economically useless endeavor.
Looking to the future, I'd prefer colonialism not be considered a lucrative strategy (though the thesis doesn't deny that colonialism was profitable for specific interest groups - just that those groups were a small part of the newly industrializing economies, and that the nation-level balance sheet gained little from their pillaging, compared to the costs of empire-maintenance).
- That they limit opt-outs instead of opt-ins, when the opt-in is the only plausibly costly step, speaks for itself.
Reviewers/Influencers/interest-publications are often just a half-step above banner ads, but at least has more incentives than just "loudly capture attention" and "publish anything that pays the algorithmic sticker price".