Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

> "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit.

No fault? None at all? That seems... counter-intuitive.

I get it that the technology failed spectacularly, and that this is a serious problem for which people need to be held to account, but my car is working just fine.

Just a bit more than five hundred years ago Cortes & Co. arrived in the Americas. They were riding horses, wearing steel armor, wielding firearms, and spreading diseases for which the natives of the western hemisphere had no defenses. When two previously unconnected networks of similar entities encounter each other, there is conflict, and one "giant component" emerges. The natives that are left are perhaps 1% of their former number and in general they subsist at the edges of a transplanted European society.

AI has reached the point where it's hard to tell meat from machine and the internet is now having that same experience. These attempts to create human only networking are going to crush the life out of existing social media KPIs, and I think it'll be good for the Fediverse. Bot operators don't want to manually work their way through archipelagos of tiny spaces that do NOT want them. There's a political repression angle to the identity verification as well - if you want to manipulate the masses, gotta herd 'em into a space where you can DO that. Ten thousand digital islands are frightful when you have clear memories of being able to operate in a few globally flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter.

I've done computational social sciences stuff with a heavy conflict component. The day Musk took over Twitter was the equivalent of the Titanic bumping that iceberg. The sinking took about six months and I'm glad I made it to a life boat. But the really frightful thing here?

The same dynamics that apply to these social sites today are coming for white collar jobs and this isn't going to be measured in decades, it's going to happen in at most a few quarters. I hope my health care startup is about to get funded, because the alternatives for me are pretty grim. As for the vast majority of people who don't have a computer science background and the autistic focus superpower? I imagine what they feel is akin to the mood in Tenochtitlan in the early 1520s.

After a few months of Windows 95, I switched to NT 3.5. Much better.

Unintended consequences are the most common consequences. Once you take that into account, the world makes a lot more sense. I totally get what you're talking about, though. I felt the same way when I first read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and thought "whuffie" could be a really interesting idea if actually implemented. Eventually, I really I realized it's just as bad as stuff like Polymarket is turning out to be. Pure democracy has a way of always spiraling out of control.

There is nothing at all surprising about this, you have to look at what AI fluent operators can DO with frontier LLMs.

I have a health care startup that has been enabled by Anthropic's AI. The $100/month I pay for Claude Max gets me the full time equivalent of a really smart (but completely unseasoned) developer, and a half time MBA research assistant. I spend time every day trying to figure out how to employ the 40% of my weekly allocation that currently goes unused.

Clawdbot and its successors are sketchy AF, but I did just give Claude Code the run of a one liter HP EliteDesk with a Proxmox cloud install. No way would I trust it with production systems, but for exploring new stuff it'll get the job done, so long as I stand over it.

If you're any sort of knowledge worker and you can't tell a similar story to this, your career is pretty much cooked.

Right now I run with a $100/month Anthropic Max subscription, and the net effect is that I have a really smart (but completely unseasoned) Ph.D. in computer science who works for me full time, and a very organized generalist MBA research assistant that's roughly half time. There are a couple of gratis services in that mix — Exa and Perplexity, that I will start paying for in April. Overall this $200-ish monthly expense would cost me around a quarter million annually if I had to hire humans to replace it. And I won't get someone who matches the 16x7 focus I bring to getting my startup moving.

We are about to hit a hard haves/have nots boundary on this stuff. I've already accepted that AI access is like a turn of the century professional cell phone bill and by summer it's going to match the cost of the sort of luxury sedan an enterprise sales wiz would select. Come next fall I think the choices will be pretty stark - be ready for an inference bill similar in size to the rent on the cute SoMa studio I'm sitting in as I write this, or ... the price of failure is just too ugly to contemplate.

What are you talking about? It does that kind of thing _now_.

I work for a Microsoft shop and use Copilot a lot. When I have a hard question, I use Claude Opus, otherwise ChatGPT is fine.

Dude's got an impressive CV, no doubt. Using this to slam Microsoft is lame. He's written a ton of impressive code, literally using it as a CV to get a job at Microsoft (with SysInternals, nee WinInternals).

I hate how "ask" is now used as a noun. Although that's been around for at least 10 years.

To be fair, a lot of scientific endeavors are using "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" as blueprint... to build the Torment Nexus. I think we're safe with respect to our downfall being perpetrated by something with an appropriately villainous name.

Fuck you and that Ribbon.

I'm sorry. This is a topic that makes me nerd-rage.

LK

How in the fuck does using 15% of the screen for a ribbon provide a compact interface when the menu bar is the competition?

LK

I'm so happy to hear of how many people are expressing this same sentiment.

I absolutely abhor the Ribbon interface. I don't care what their market research shows. I don't care what their shills and evangelists say. I do not like it. It's not intuitive at all.

LK