"priors updated" was the same desired outcome all along.

And as my senior dad likes to say, "Ying and Yang Baby"

It's a good interview, and I really like putting economics here in perspective. If I could pour water on AI hype in a succinct way, I'd say this: capability is again, not the fundamental issue in nature. Open system economics, are.

There are no known problems that can't theoritically be solved, in a sort of pedantic "in a closed system information always converges" sort of way. And there numerous great ways of making such convergence efficient with respect to time, including who knew, associative memory. But what does it, mean? This isn't the story of LLMs or robotics or AI take off general. The real story is the economics of electronics.

Paradoxically, just as electronics is hitting its stride in terms of economics, so are the basic infrastructural economics of the entire system becoming strained. For all the exponential growth in one domain, so too has been the exponential costs in other. Such is ecosystems and open system dynamics.

I do think that there is a future of more AI. I do think there is a world of more electronics. But I don't claim to predict any specifics beyond that. Sitting in the uncertainty of the future is the hardest thing to do, but it's the most honest.

Recently, a sign showed up in El Paso advertising San Francisco as a sanctuary city, as a great "own the libs," I suppose because SF would receive of applicants overwhelming their social service programs?

It didn't work.

Precisely. The contradiction comes full circle. Respect for the self doesn't start or stop based on intelligence. They'd prefer a world view that allows them to clearly draw a circle around themselves, declare freedom from uncertainty, and demand our eternal gratitude.

This isn't hard. Relationships, not capabilities, are fundamental.

I use nix to manage all my personal infrastructure. I enjoy it and it has many benefits.

But, I still have trouble recommending it openly or advocating its usage in any of my workplaces. There are so many gotchas that run against the grain, in practice. There are so many different patterns for using nix (like a big sore point is that nix flakes aren't the default way to manage dependencies, instead it's an experimental feature alternative to the default, which is fragmented tooling (pinned channels? fetchUrl? overlays? NIX_PATH? oh lord), (or even just the fact that minor version changes in nix completely deprecates certain core build utilities. See how nix docker images are still in major flux) that in practice a newbie who wants to go beyond playing with the simple compile a C project with make to... a nodejs development environment (shudder), is gonna have some struggles with unobvious decisions they make early on.

I totally understand that they have greatly improved documentation, examples, tutorials, and community. These are all high quality. But the offense remains the fact that you really should read the whole manual before you get started, because the --defaults-- of solving the small problems with nix, and the deep baggage of historical packages and tooling, means that you can dig yourself into a corner that one day will require rethinking how you organized your work. That to me isn't super great.

But yes, I do love nix and am happy to see them continue to work through these issues.

Elon: "I created OpenAI! It only exists because of me!" Also Elon: "I created this new AI, which I copied from OpenAI, because it was... mine all along?"

Desperation of delusion. "End of all value" => "I don't understand things, so I better at least have control!" I wonder if these kinds of people would send literal Nazis to my doorstep if I suggested that I don't have any stake either way in the "coin flipping on the end of my world view."

We need to filter people who exhibit voice stress, because no one likes a person with the humility of taking uncertainty seriously.

Commoditization is a real market force, and yes, it will come for this industry as it has for others.

Personally, I think we need to be much, much more creative and open to understanding ourselves and the potential of the future. It's hard to know specifics, but there is broad domains.

Lately, I've been hacking at home with more hardware, and creating interesting low scale, low energy input systems that help me... garden. Analyzing soil samples, planning plots and low energy irrigation, etc, etc. It's been fun because the work is less about programming in depth and more broad systems thinking. I even have ideas for making a small scale company off this. At that point, purely the programming won't be the bottleneck.

If it helps, as an engineer, take a step back and think about nature and how systems and niches within systems evolve. Nature isn't actually in the business of replacing due to redundancy, it's in the business of compounding dependency via waste resources, and the shifting roles as a result of that. We need to be ready to creatively take our experience, perspective, and energy gradient to new places. It's no different for any other part of nature.

I think something like UBI will succeed but it won't look to us like UBI. Like, maybe it seems stupid, but as far as political systems go, the key is persuasion in absurdity and narrative. To persuade people into UBI it has to be dressed up politically as --something else-- in the same way that all kinds of welfare (social and corporate) tends to get simultaneously denied and reinforced with conflicting narratives.

Once enough disparate and contradictory parties are convinced that "more of the good guys benefit from this than the bad guys", it gets locked in and becomes political cannon. Until later when the political systems feint undoing it again for a different set of points.

I want to live in space where it's safer.

Good, we feel the same way about that.