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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

    Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.




  • But what data would it be?

    Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.

    OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE











  • I hear that again and again, but I don’t quite understand the endgame anymore.

    There was the theory Russia had compromising material on him to get him to play along, but the MAGA crowd is so committed and reverent that I’m not sure anything could shame him anymore.

    Russia could show a tape of him porking his 7-year-old daughter on the Times Square Jumbotron and the GOP would rally to lower the age of consent to 6. If the Russian financial authorities showed incontrovertible proof that Trump was broke, Congress would declare he had a bazillion FreedomBux ™ to magically settle his debts.

    Why would he bother listening when there’s no leverage left?

    It’s more chilling to think this is pure domestic terror with no evil-other boogeyman to blame. The far right got all their best and brightest in one place, and thry couldn’t dilute their paranoia and hate enough to serve their greed.



  • I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

    Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

    I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.