GreenBeard

To be fair, the US has never won a war without either Britain, France, or both working with them. Americans are very good at causing a lot of destruction, but they have no idea how to stabilize or rebuild. Even when they can effectively beat the enemy weapons, all they know how to do is leave a chaotic mess in their wake, and whatever warlord is left with enough firepower to dominate the rest takes control eventually. They may take an objective, but they can’t hold it long term, because that’s not their job, that’s for private contractors, who are always grifters who take the money and leave things worse than they found it.

Roman legions spent more time building highways than fighting for a lot of the Empire. States build infrastructure. Markets build around it. The US is ideologically incapable of recognizing this fact that has been true since time immemorial.

That’s not a gun. That’s an autonomous killing device. The only gun that ever killed people of its own free will was the STEN gun. If you make something that kills without human intent, that’s not a gun anymore.

If I make a gun that actively chooses to kill people, I didn’t build a gun and that whole argument falls apart. I’d hold everyone from the CEO to the janitor accountable.

Yeah, even a well built agent is pretty resource intensive. Your hybrid idea makes more sense. People underestimate just how resource intensive AI is. Anyone who has built their own AI rig can tell you it is NOT a lightweight process that can conveniently sit in a browser plugin without being its own annoying obstacle.

What do we do? We’re doing it. We’re asking questions, we’re building communities IRL and in digital paces outside the bounds of the major corps. We use poison pills to make corpos that embrace these systems pay dearly. We give grace to those who sincerely pull back and we move on.

Cocaine exists and it can be a major boost to productivity. But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to live with its downsides slowly killing us and robbing us of our humanity.

No. I refuse. We may die, but I refuse to surrender. Where there is life, there is hope, and we’re not dead yet.

Yes. He doesn’t want to admit, he’s gone as far down this path as he responsibly can. He doesn’t want to transition to the “producer” role, where he becomes a resource for a new generation that’s seeking a future away from the old platforms.

It’s a bit like the oil man who knows his work enabled so much good, unable to also admit his product has a dark side, and it’s time for us all to move on from it. That times changed and a new world is struggling to be born.

I disagree about “edutainment” in a qualified way. We still need communicators and domain experts sharing their knowledge, and there’s still a great deal of knowledge to share, but I don’t think it’s on YouTube (or TikTok). People talking out of turn on matters so far outside their expertise and experience they’re effectively neophytes, and just as vulnerable to Dunning-Kruger impulses certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think that AI or better algorithms are going to save them either, that’s a good way to end up lost in a psychotic hallucination. I don’t know what it will look like yet but it isn’t going to come from the tech giants. Unless Wikipedia wants to take a crack at it, they might be the only ones that could pull it off.

No. This is a line we cannot cross and if it destroys us, so be it. I’m not against AI, or automation. But not these tools. Not these companies. Not these models. The question is death or death. So we learn to live without, or we die. There is no synthesis possible with this paradigm.

This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don’t hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn’t understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.

I don’t judge him for wrestling with it. I’m sad for him. I’m sad for a lot of us. We’re all working in a system that’s slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.

I don’t think that we should lose hope, but the future can’t look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn’t be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.

No, what you need is something that can facilitate coordination and communication between many moving parts, inspire confidence in the team, create stability, and sell a vision to generate investment, and those functions do not necessarily all need to be one person. You do not “need” a leader, you want a leader because it’s easier to conceptualize a relationship with a figurehead. Much like the rump English monarchy, the executive is a vestigial appendage and an artifact of of an aristocratic era of patronage. Locking in a coherent direction does not require a “decider”, there are other ways to achieve that. By designing companies to minimize personal liability and accountability, they have also designed themselves out of a useful role.

The reality is no one person is qualified to “run” a multinational megacorp. Not a single human being knows enough for this level of complexity, but the only reason any of them can justify the ungodly amount of marginal return they take is to pretend they’re super-geniuses while relying on ‘consultant’ teams to do the actual thinking, and also keep it quiet that they’re no more competent than the janitor they’re making 1000x the salary of (all in stock options of course, but 1000x nonetheless).

All of this would work better if the “bosses” could accept they aren’t demigods, that the domain expertise to make collective decisions is within their existing org charts and they just need to step down off their high horses and remember they are just a cog in a much bigger machine that makes its own decisions with or without their input. They’re self-important sales reps, with just enough of a grasp of finance to be dangerous to themselves and others. I’m sure me and my 10 closest colleagues would also be inclined to say we do a billion $ of work every day if we were writing our own bonus agreements. We just wouldn’t have the hubris to convince ourselves it’s true.

Oh I know a lot of school districts, and you’re not wrong, the career educators and administrators would absolutely be on board, it’s the elected officials you have to worry about. They tend to hold the purse strings in most places.

I want to be clear, I like your vision, just from an execution perspective I’ve seen a lot of these ideas go completely off the rails before because there’s a lot of landmines to doge. You might want to start in Europe. There’s a lot more checks on corruption over there.

That’s just publicly funding with extra layers of separation from politicians though. I’m fully behind such a plan, but I do have some concerns:

1. FOSS works great for the core layers, but lets be honest with ourselves for a minute, engineers suck at building interfaces that make sense to users, particularly children, and interface designers are expensive. Also I love FOSS hardware… as an enthusiast. Distribution at scale, durability, and so on are also going to be a challenge, and no having “Joe down the street with a 3D printer throw something together” is not the same as having professionally manufactured PCBs.

2. Vulnerability to embrace-extend-extinguish, situations like where a “Non-Profits” end up being converted to a for-profit through shady shit, means we’re going to need legal defences and people with uncommon character coordinating the project.

3. The nature of the modern political sphere is not conducive to plans where there isn’t a billionaire’s toady in a suit wining and dining the school board members and offering political kickbacks to run with that platform. The platform is the easy part compared to the task of getting sufficient adoption to make it viable.

These are all solvable problems but the scale of the team needed to accomplish it would be… significant. It’s achievable, but it’s not going to be easy or quick.

Montessori style education works very well for certain learning types, but often under-supports others and can suffer from poor implementation just like any other educational model. One-on-one is far superior for some students, and that will never not be the case.

That does suggest the profit motive specifically works against the best interests of both students and teachers such that any “fit for purpose” platform is going to suffer from ill-conceived feature creep. Any suggestions on that front? I can already hear the howls of corporate overlords and political fiscal hawks at the suggestion of publicly funding such a platform.

Right?

“What’s that Google? When you design things from the ground up with planned obsolescence in mind, it’s suddenly hard to UNDO the mess you made of the hardware? Who would have thunk it.”

If I read it right it’s effectively two aluminum heat sinks sandwiching an insulating foam. Outer sink takes on the ambient heat signature, inner sink keeps heat trapped internally, and the insulating layer resists thermal transfer between the two zones. That said, I have to assume someone’s tried that before and they’re just doing it… better?

My condolences

Yeah. Has been for a long time friend. ICE stopping charter or even city busses to round up working people and make them prove they’re citizens just because they happen to be within 100 miles of a border is practically a cliche at this point. Any international airport, shipping port, etc. works the same way. They operate on guilty until proven innocent, and if you are proven innocent, they’ll invent a reason you’re not anyway.

We thought we were signing up for libraries. We forgot the “Public” part of how libraries work.