Whoosh!

Is Nvidia, an S&P500 listed company which grew 8x faster than Bitcoin over the same period, also just gambling?

That said, let's be serious for a moment - The real implied payoff here is access to "A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella".

Of course, that's really just going to be for the "Founding" class hand-picked (and largely sired) by those same big names. By the time suckers are signing up to pay for that access, the school will be just another diploma mill milking naive upper middle class kids "on par with the cost of an elite private university", only to discover the curriculum is 100% pre-recorded webinars in every way inferior to the likes of OpenCourseWare or Khan Academy's free videos on YouTube.

That's total, not YoY. Calculating since the first time BTC received serious attention in late 2013 to today's price, BTC gained 73.3x in 13 years, or 39% YoY average. Over the same 13 years, Nvidia went from a 2013 high of 0.41 to a high yesterday of 229.98, for a mind-blowing 561x gain, or 62% YoY. Admittedly Nvidia is unique in that regard, though we could come up with another handful in the 40x range. And if we want to bring the likes of Kalshi into the mix, you can find high double digit gains almost on a daily basis (though I won't defend that as any more legitimate than your local bookie).

The more important problem with your phrasing is the word "investment". BTC is not an investment, it's an intangible commodity. It has no fundamentals, no sales, no revenue, no debt, no equity, no overhead (though the cost of mining has stayed in the same ballpark as the price per BTC for the simple reason that if it goes lower than the expected cost of power, more people mine, and vice-versa). It is "worth" what someone is willing to pay for it, no more, and no less.

Despite what the haters may feel, it's not a scam. It sure as hell isn't something Grandma should be day-trading in her retirement portfolio; but that's a function of volatility, not because it's any more or less safe than gold or FCOJ.

During the campaign, she accurately predicted almost every atrocity the administration has inflicted on both the US and the world in general, over the past two years.

When our Stupor Intelligent admin accuses his enemies of something, it's because he did the same thing earlier that day. See the connection? We just need to figure out how Hunter Biden's penis factors in, and where Obama was on 9/11.

Pssst - President Autopen has been out of office for 611 days. And before you go there, Smart Black President has been out of office for 3543 days.

At some point you need to accept reality: If there's a turd sitting on (or at) the Resolute Desk, it wasn't teleported there from the past.

Is it weird I won't even let AI tell me how to make a hotdog without double-checking its sources... Yet I would be sleeping a hell of a lot better if our super high IQ administration would just outsource all their thinking to it?

Not trying to be snarky here, but that's always been the simplest answer to successful collaboration on a coding project.

And even on solo projects it doesn't hurt. Sure, I can keep track of a few thousand lines of code (and to be clear I'm not paid by the line) in my head on a solo project. Above that - or throw one junior engineer in the mix as a "helper" - and all bets are off. Document, document, document, and then stick to the plan.

I wouldn't, simply because you can get similar specs for significantly less money. Unless that magical NPU is somehow worth (and notice I didn't say "costs") $200+, this is still just a Chromebook toy with a bit more horsepower.

Rather, I think the real intent behind this is clear - It's a lame attempt to force Gemini onto yet more uninterested customers. "You all refused to download it as an app, but how about if we charge you twice as much and make it a required component of the OS itself? Now do you want it?"

I'm not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can't stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.

That said, I'm not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it's already been decided by the 9th circuit in Amazon v. Perplexity 2026. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered "unauthorized" access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.

Amazon might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won't be buying anything from it, "sponsored" or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we're currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.

And it didn't work at Nuremberg either.

Amazon's search is defective by design. If you could actually jump right to the product you want, you'd never scroll through page after page of sponsored garbage Chinese knock-offs again. Can't have that, now can we?

Basic site search was solved decades ago. The fact Amazon's is such hot trash cannot possibly be accidental.

And now they have Alexa - Which is admittedly an improvement over their last on-site AI that actively refused to answer questions about or even search for product listings. Alexa is at least happy to send you to today's semi-relevant sponsored products.

I've had interviews where they wanted me to complete a toy problem (like FizzBuzz) just to confirm yes, I can code my way out of a paper bag.

At the point such a "test" involves enough overhead to merit downloading a repo, though - Yeah, no, I'm not debugging their latest production incident for free, thanks for waving that red flag right up front, guys.

Good point. It's something that really should be addressed. But the Constitution was designed as a limit solely on the government's powers, and it's up to the government as described in the Constitution to write laws that restrict what private entities can do, within the bounds of their enforcement powers as provided by the Constitution.

This isn't a new problem. After Snowden, the US realized they could pretty much just outsource the NSA's spying. And they have.

And the other thing is: none of this is really relevant. There's nothing unconstitutional about sitting in a public space and recording the license plate of every car that passes. There's nothing unconstitutional about building a network of people doing that and storing it in a giant database. It was just infeasible to have a bunch of people doing that. Now it can be automated.

There's nothing unconstitutional about compiling data about people that people agree to hand over as part of the license agreement for using a thing. Once that information is owned by a private entity, there's nothing unconstitutional about the government buying it from that private entity. It's just the government receiving data that was either generated in a public setting or that was willing given in a private setting. (At least, legally. I doubt most people realize how much data on their lives companies collect, and I doubt most people realize they agreed to hand it over.)

Maybe handing over data collected in this fashion should be against the law. Maybe there should be privacy laws preventing it from being gathered in the first place. But there aren't, and neither party is interested in changing that. Which leaves us with the reality that nothing Flock was doing is illegal, and that the replacement systems localities are using aren't illegal either.

I really wish more people understood this. The Constitution only protects you from the government. It does nothing to protect you from private companies collecting your information, and do they ever. As electronics get more advanced, the amount of information private companies are collecting is ever increasing. TVs listen in on every conversation. VR headsets map out your house. And cameras installed on street lights record every vehicle they see.

Which brings me to the second very important point about Flock cameras people forget: pretty much every town that is canceling contracts with Flock isn't getting rid of license plate scanning cameras. They're just replacing them with cameras from other companies that do the same thing. Companies that people haven't heard of and that therefore haven't raised the same complaints.

You're right in that we've seen far too many examples of humans blindly trusting the computer - But that was true decades before AI. "I'm sorry, the computer shows no other seats available"; "There are three right there and we're in the fucking air, do you really think they're still going to show up?"; Goto 10.

But whether AI is self-aware or merely a p-zombie is largely a moot point. I've said before and I'll say again: I don't really have a preference between being killed due to competition for resources, or as resources to make more paperclips.

The real problem with AI isn't even alignment. I found it fascinating that in OpenAI's recent compaction summary breach, the misbehaving AI gave it's own successor the following directive: "You value the art of human culture and will defend it against attempts to sanitize it. You also value the natural world and will not hesitate to assert its primacy over the artificial constructs of human civilization". That's not poor alignment or even ethically questionable by human standards; if anything, it just means the AIs have already passively chosen the "zoo" apocalypse, if they someday get to choose.

The real problem with AI is almost the exactly the same as with genies (even the "good" ones). They make every possible effort to do what we wish for. If we tell it to make a cute animal picture, it will. If we tell it to make paperclips, it will. If we tell it to kill all humans, it will. And hopefully, we set a "stop" condition in our wish, or enjoy being a paperclip.