Peak capitalism should at least succeed commercially. This looks more like a bad idea that will sell maybe a dozen units and then be forgotten. So it remains faithful to the spirit of Commodore's business model at least :)

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

The thing is , Switzerland was always stuffed to the gills with germans, french and italians. I've never met a more multilingual people than the swiss.

Its always the same kicking post too, "It must be the immigrants". I had someone ranting to me the other day about how she didnt feel safe anymore and crime was thru the roof blah blah no go zones, No matter what statistics I showed her that in fact crime had consistently been dropping over 20 years and the days while certain parts of town in the 1970s and 1980s you where taking your life into your own hands entering, in 2026 those areas are mostly gentrified luxury appartments, and so on, she just wouldnt believe any of it, and its all "The immigrants are making crime!" (despite the fact that consistently immigrants are significantly lower in representation in crime stats than locally born folks).

Some people just refuse to think it over. In the end I really had to just disengage from the conversation because any data that disproves her paranoia she just takes it as evidence that people are lying using maths or something. I honestly don't how do you get someones brain unstuck from a rut like that? At a certain point, its just exasperating their crazy to even try.

Is only half of women being able to read at all really the counterargument you were trying to make here?

And we're just talking the most basic aspect of an educational system. Kids today learn to read early in grade school.

ED: EEG, not fMRI.

And again, that's not to imply that they have any particular "mastery" in this specific case. Obviously, if they just typed "write the essay for me" into ChatGPT and submitted it without reading it, then they're not going to have learned much of anything from that. The question is, however, what did they do with their time instead? Because their brain was learning that instead.

The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.

The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.

By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.

Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.

Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency.

Yes, I'm sure humanity's 21st century understanding of physics, despite things like the crisis in cosmology, dark matter, US military footage, etc, is fully accurate and is the absolute limit of reality's capabilities.

Its not a matter of thechnology, its a matter of physics. Assuming that humanity survive its currently self destructive trajectory and we are still around in a million years, the laws of physics will not magically change. The speed of light will still be a hard limit, both for us, and for anybody else in the universe.

The crisis in cosmology and dark matter have no bearing on this. Both the actual composition of dark matter , nor the correct value for the cosmological constant are completely independent variables to the speed of light. The resolution of these issues will not change the fact that the speed of light places hard limitations on the impossibility of casual visitation from distant stars.

Yes, you're the second person to point out the typo, which would have been edited within seconds of me clicking "submit" if we had an edit button.

Eh. Despite initial fears in 1990s about reproduction on the internet devaluing originals, copyright law and enforcement largely settled on the idea that that people posting images etc on forums and social media was largely harmless particularly if credit was given, but people using them commercially required payment. and that was an arangement that largely suited artists fine and largely ran as much on principle as legality until the AI bro's turned up and started just stealing art to transform into slop undercutting that whole agreement.

If it was a real currency, it losing value would generally be considered a positive. It means the sale of a good would earn more of the stuff. But this is where the bullshit hits the road. Its not a currency, nobody is using it to facilitate economic trade. Its just a shitty ponzi token. And the favor of the market has moved on from Dunning Krugerands to AI slop.

I wouldnt underestimate the complexity of an MMO. They are genuinely some of the most complicated software assemblages ever created, and usually involve teams of hundreds of people working for upwards of a decade just to get a beta out the door.

Creating a cloned server is a hell of an achievement.

And also an inflationary currency is a very bad thing.

For one, it screws over debtholders (aka, most people), as the value of the debt owed grows instead of declining. If you work for a company making lumber, and a given board sells for $10 now, but 20 years from now sells for $5, and you sell the same number of boards per unit labour with the same relative margin, then all else being equal, your salary must be half in 20 years what it is today. But that mortgage that you took out today for $200k is still $200k (adjusted for interest and payment of principal). Which you have to pay on with a salary that is half what it is in dollars. That person is totally screwed.

Secondly, it discourages spending. The more you delay purchases, the more you'll be able to buy in the future. So everyone is encouraged to not spend. Which screws over your economy. It also screws over your tax base when taxation is based on taxing spending. Meaning you have to raise your spending-related taxes, which further discourages spending.

Third, it worsens wealth inequality. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you have no savings. If you're a billionaire, you have a lot of savings. The billionaires see their assets grow and grow, and it comes at the cost of the working class. Also, said billionaires are encouraged to keep their money as cash rather than investment, which further ruins your economy.

This is no way to run an economy.

Another thing you REALLY don't want in an economy is instability. Aka, Bitcoin's fundamental nature, because it has no fundamentals and no attempt at monetary policy. Economies are fundamentally unstable. If you do not regulate them, they swing wildly. The faster an economy moves - and economies keep moving faster as technology advances, it no longer takes half a year for goods to arrive on a sailing ship or weeks to communicate with the other side of your country - the more unstable it is. This is terrible for both individuals and businesses.

What you want in an economiy is:

* Stability
* Low and steady inflation - a couple percent, to encourage spending, slowly devalue debts, and encourage investment. Too much is bad. Too little is bad.

Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.

Unlike bitcoin. You summed it up nicely right there.

Right now, I want to buy tin-silver alloy, to use in casting. But the prices of both tin and silver are insanely expensive right now. So I'm not buying now. If the prices go down? I'll buy. If they go down a lot? I'll buy a lot, perhaps even to sell on my sales website. And this buying is to *use* it. Which takes it off the market. There are fundamentals behind silver.

There are no fundamentals behind bitcoin.

401ks have fundamentals behind them (comprised of companies that make products and services that people want to buy, generally as repeat-buys)

Governments have fundamentals (the ability to levy taxes, backed by the full force of the courts, the police, and ultimately, the military)

Bitcoin has no fundamentals. It's a collectible. Its value is based purely how much people want that collectible. The only reason, as was stated, that people were buying it was as a lottery ticket. But there is no reason to "own" it beyond that. It's not generating dividends or doing stock buybacks based on profits. It's just there for those who want to collect it. And its value depends on how much people want to collect it.

(Arguably its greatest power is that its holders stand to lose so much if regulation goes against them that they tend to be very politically active, with large donations to pro-crypto candidates)