I wasn’t dismissing the problem that they exist. That’s the first problem. I was saying uncertainty prevents as much investment as do tariffs. No one knows what the tariffs will be in a month. His brain is a non-Newtronean fluid at this point.

A big problem with Trump’s tariffs isn’t that they exist; it’s that they’re subject to change at any moment. To be clear, they’re idiotic. But no one can invest in anything long term in America right now.

Imagine opening a restaurant in the U.S. right now. Half your kitchen equipment is subject to steel or aluminum tariffs. You don’t know if you can import anything. Or you can wait a year and see how full Trump’s diaper is. He also looks half dead without makeup and might have pissed off the Yakuza (or worse). The smart move is to wait to open your restaurant.

Now imagine any business bigger than a restaurant.

Even if it does the basic shit at the expense of me working one less hour a week, it’s not worth paying for. And that ignores the downsides like spam, bots, data centers needing power/water, and politicians thinking GPU cards are national security secrets.

I don’t think we need a Skynet scenario to imagine the downsides.

I use it in software development and it hasn’t changed my life. It’s slightly more convenient than last gen code completion but I’ve never worked on a project where code per hours was the hold up. One less stand-up per week would probably increase developer productivity more than GitHub Copilot.

Did you see the wack ass Quake II version Microsoft bragged about? It wasn’t even playable. A fucking 12 year old could do better.

Because it’s alpha software. We’re 40 years away from “A.I.” being able to be competent at anything.

Dear CEOs: I will never accept 0.5% hallucinations as “A.I.” and if you don’t even know that, I want an A.I. machine cooking all your meals. If you aren’t ok with 1/200 of your meals containing poison, you’re expendable.

Humans or even regular ass algorithms are fine. A.I. can predict protein folding. It should do a lot else unless there’s a generational leap from “making shitty images” to “as close to perfect as it gets.”

Hard to imagine a CEO doing something that would make me less likely to apply or use their service.

I live in Louisiana. The police don’t come for a few hours even if you call 911. If someone swats me, it might take 5 days before someone gets around to it. And I have a nice machete so they’ll probably just file it under “suspect had left the scene” and enjoy some overtime pay.

There’s an episode of King of the Hill where everyone finds our Hank has a narrow urethra. And his dad says, “I ain’t got a narrow ureetee. Mine’s so damn wide I could pass the child myself if I had to.”

Or something to that effect.

No one will ever know my Cajun ass ancestors are from France and that I have the gene where you’re urethra is so damn wide, you can pass the child yourself if you had to.

I encourage hostile governments (including my own) to study my DNA. It’ll ruin morale. Balls so big, they have a tenuous atmosphere and a measurable time dilation effect.

Braaaaiiiinnns. And a 16 piece family deal, spicy, with a side of red beans, mashed potatoes, and extra biscuits.

With this kind of speed, we could invent Call of Duty games where the Zombies want slightly more than brains. Generative A.I. uses internet data for training so at first, the zombies will probably request Doja Kat in the racial chat rooms showing feet but human progress marches ever forward. Within a decade, Zombies might just want to get drunk and go to Popeyes.

I’m confused by the map. Why aren’t parts of Colombia and (maybe) Peru ditching the U.S.? I love Cartageña but I don’t expect them to side with us when society collapses.

Also, if we’re fighting, we get Pablo Escobar’s hippos. I don’t know the right balance or if the rift hits Medellin but the hippo gap must be even before we fight.

I’m hoping in 500 years, my DNA sequence is found on a perfectly preserved micro SD card and my clone gets to meet President Camacho and take on Beef Supreme and the Dildozer on Monday Night Rehabilitation.

One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.

BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.

I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.

Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.

I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.

A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.

That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.

I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team

So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)

It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.

Even ignoring geopolitics, I don’t think Tencent is going to accept shares in an unprofitable start up in an unproven and possibly permanently unprofitable industry in exchange for one of the most valuable tech properties on Earth.

That’s probably the Occam’s razor explanation. I obviously have no proof for my little pet theory.