Nice post and an interesting comparison, but I think there's one big difference: live music remains hugely popular and a big business despite recording technology, but you don't see a lot of people showing off their arithmetic skills for profit. Today's mathematicians are more akin to composers.

There's also an interesting historical side to the analogy, as the separation between composers and performing musicians is relatively modern (and only really applies to classical art music genres anyway). And as you pointed out about Euler et al, modern math started out as a way to simplify practical calculations, such as the geometry of farming and city planning, or accounting. But this also shows a crucial difference: music has never been so much about practical utility as it's about esthetic or emotional experience. So while modern math has become a thing with its own sense of beauty, simply adding up numbers isn't very fun — though some might disagree.

FTFY.

Sure. Lots of things can be done in the name of freedom that aren't sensible.

You're free to go put on a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops and go for an all day hike in Death Valley

You're free to pick up a rattlesnake in the SD badlands and give it a kiss

Freedom in the legal sense sometimes bumps up against those other pesky laws of nature and physics, and when you do, those freedoms you're trying out suddeny aren't very free.

How's that? LLM image matching makes Flock useful. That's how they can track someone from start to finish with a single query.

I'm just pointing out that the useful tools can very easily be turned into very bad things. Pretending otherwise isn't productive.

"and that's what they're counting on."

And yet again they're disconnected from reality. The AI Bros aren't making the appliances, the appliance companies are. And they're already seeing backlash from smart devices, and the carmakers are seeing near open rebellion on a normal function requiring a subscription (BMW heated seats). They won't be adding subscription based AI to appliances for a looooong time if ever, especially with some brands pushing non-smart appliances as a feature.

Unlike the AI Bros who need AI sales to stay solvent, appliance companies need regular customers buying their stuff to stay solvent, and part of that buy cycle is not introducing a new cost that will tarnish their reputation and tank sales. Two two groups' goals are in diametric opposition.

" Ask the doomers and we'll live in a hellscape soon because of AI."

And by the doomers you mean realists right? One shit sandwich that AI has brought to existence is the whole Flock thing. Flock cameras + AI pattern recognition = surveillance state that just showed up without anyone really noticing until it was too late:

https://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2026-08-19-472a
https://gizmodo.com/flocks-new-ai-tool-does-much-more-than-track-license-plates-2000800372

Cops are already using this to track people for hours and you'll never guess what specific 'crime' they targeted:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texas-deputy-searched-83-000-152212195.html

""had an abortion, search for female." That single query swept across 83,000 cameras in 6,809 law enforcement networks — including cameras in Washington and Illinois, states where abortion is legal and protected. A small-county Texas deputy, hunting for a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion, had just searched a surveillance apparatus stretching from Spokane to Springfield. No warrant was required for the search."

So yeah... hellscape incoming. This kind of thing is something many dystopian scifi books from a decade ago would have thought was a bit too far fetched. And yet here it now is.

Sam Altman and the rest of the AI Bros are desperate to have everyone think these tools are incredible and will transform society. Dean Kamen thought that about 'It/Ginger' as well, as did a lot of the early viewers of it, and yet no transformation has happened other than now the Segway is a weird novelty and cheap Chinese 'hoverboards' have eaten what little market it actually had.

AI is going to be somewhere in the middle as there are uses for the tool, but nowhere near the adoption they need. I've noticed a lot of people are now using ChatGPT and Gemini and others instead of doing traditional search engine searches, so that is driving use for now but as time passes the AI rot will make those results less useful. And the real elephant in the room - cost. 99.9% of the people using it now for free will never pay for it if it becomes a paid service only, so many of the revenue projections are completely out to lunch.

This is why the Bros are desperate to push it into every crevice, so that some of it sticks and will have to be paid for. But they overestimate how willing everyone is to pay.

Comcast and Verizon were granted special tax breaks in order to reach 98% diffusion of 'broadband' in PA. By 1998. They still haven't met the 1998 definition of broadband, but Comcast has exclusive licensing to the region I live in. I have only starlink, dialup, or god freaking awful geostationary satellite as an alternative, and it is not legal to start another cable provider, even if I wanted to here.

Those cell companies throttle down to LTE all the time. I tried the T-mobile thing once for about half an hour. It flip flopped connection protocols in the middle of conference calls and dropped in the middle of downloads in order to hop between connection types. It was damned near unusable.

One person can download the whole archive and make it available. Silly talking head man knows that, but doesn't want anyone to panic. I've never actually seen anyone make a security by obscurity argument unironically in defense of a breach.

yes and it maximizes engagement. period. it doesn't differentiate between positive and negative engagement. They have the tech to do that, but it would be expensive to run it at that scale for every comment on every post all day long.

IF they don't pair engagement signals with sentiment analysis on those same ones and treat them like a whole signal together (subtracting points for negative sentiment and adding it to positive) then they will all do this. The algorithm is public. We already know it doesn't use sentiment.

How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

> We also have a small cluster of 7900xtx for local inference when you go over your allowance

That's actually one of the conversations I've been hearing at work is that 'free' LLMs we can self host at one of our datacenters is the long term plan once they're Good Enough(tm). I think a lot of companies are planning the same. Medium to big corporations with large tech departments remember vividly how Broadcom screwed them on VMWare pricing and they're not going to get caught in the same bear trap with AI. They're already planning to be mostly to fully self sufficient - which again is going to cause a lot of those "AI will be worth XXXXXXXX" predictions to be completely and utterly wrong and kill a lot of those companies.