sohois
14hr ago
When you control land, that's your prerogative to let in whomever you wish.
If Palestine were in control then they could have an immigration policy as open as they wanted.
sohois
1d ago
I'm sure this discussion came up a few months ago in a motte thread.
I'm not sure there's a suitable definition of cocktail that doesn't expose you to Diogenes. If it's just "two ingredients" then every random mixer and liquor is a cocktail. Adding a lemon wedge to a beer bottle is a cocktail.
Make it three and you're excluding things like Martinis. You could say at least two ingredients and a recognised cocktail name, but then you're getting all the edge cases which aren't cocktails, like Screwdrivers and Cuba Libres.
sohois
3d ago
As Lizzardspawn says, the financial implications for a handful of AI companies will mean little to the actual deployment of current AI technology. The bubble bursting does not mean that LLMs simply go away, just as the dotcom bubble did not result in everyone switching back to fax machines and physical mail.
sohois
6d ago
Okay, so where is the pandemonium and stock apocalypse of the companies
There was a big stock market rumble only a few weeks ago after Claude Cowork and a few plugins were released. Forbes article:
Not perhaps the trillions that would clearly prove the point, but it's something.
This case also kind of demonstrates why the stock market isn't super predictive for AI: there's just not enough knowledge. The plugins Anthropic released are extremely simple add-ons. They don't represent new capabilities at all; it would be like seeing major stock market turmoil because a company updated their documentation.
We're probably going to see very spiky updates from the stock market as business normies suddenly catch up to SOTA every 6 months or so.
Another point to consider is how much value we would actually expect to see wiped out/added. I just saw this tweet this morning, responding to an economic bear case:
https://x.com/elidourado/status/2026060408055021752
There's a much larger point in the tweet, but the relevant point for us:
B2B SaaS is less than half a percent of US GDP. It's simply not an important industry relative to anything macroeconomic.
Thus far all the expectations around replacement have been B2B SaaS, but if it's only 0.5% (and even bulls probably don't think the entire industry is being replaced), what amount would we expect?
sohois
9d ago
As some of the other posters note, I'm not sure what overall point you are making here? Microsoft has switched out one (massive failure) corpo for another - an Indian(!) woman(!) - and this suggests all kinds of disasters?
Phil Spencer was a capital-G Gamer. He successfully reversed the absolute disaster that was the Xbone... and then succeeded in little else but spaffing hundreds of billions up the wall on poor acquisitions. He's one of many, many gamer leaders who have been shit at their jobs. You clearly understand the damage he's done, mentioning Xbox's shocking reputation at multiple points. Is there any reason to believe a non-gamer could do any worse?
You also state:
I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds
My only response is: What?? What Xbox are you thinking of? It's also been a giant money sink, fortunate that it's an irrelevance to MS's balance sheet or else it would surely have been killed a decade ago. Most recently they sunk another 70bil into Activision just to watch the latest CoD have a disastrous reception. The most shocking thing about this announcement is that Microsoft have actually published this news and are pushing Sharma as some kind of saviour, instead of abandoning it once and for all.
As for Sharma herself, is there any reason to suspect she's not a perfectly capable corpo? As you note, time at Meta is almost an anti-signal at this point, but given her other experience and several years now at Microsoft, it would be a surprise if she was useless. I suppose you could see it as Indian nepotism, but if anything this a downgrade for the woman. She's gone from Microsoft main focus, the all-important AI push, to their failing, irrelevant gaming division, which is surely on its last roll of the dice. She must be confident in her ability to turn it around.
As for her AI experience, well, she also worked at Instacart. Why is no one assuming Xbox is getting into the grocery business?
Anyone gamer with any sense would have long ago abandoned the Xbox brand. Indeed, Spencer ensured such a thing by pivoting so heavily towards their PC presence and gamepass. I don't see much reason to assume it could get any worse.
I actually wanted to post something on this myself, but in a completely different direction. I saw on another forum the most curious reaction to the news:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aa23o5w4w2afknay44oqxqz6/post/3mfdtqu5wjk2x
Oh no. Oh nooooo. Xbox's new CEO is a natalist/birthrater. How did MS miss this in their opsec? Literal stone's throw away from the likes of Palmer Luckey.
"Will my son have classmates in the future? ...the fertility rates are declining." Then she suggests the fix is... AI?
The linked post is a negative reaction from noted game journalist Jeff Gerstmann.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but this is absolutely insane. Merely expressing concern over birth rates - from a minority woman no less - is enough to immediately get cast as some kind of super Chud. Sure, the AI angle is an easy attack point for some of the more obsessed members of Bluesky, but for that to filter out to a relatively normie game journo is another step.
Gerstmann, from what I know of him, has never been particularly lambasted as a woke or poor journalist. GiantBomb was popular as far as I was aware. Has game journalism become so poisoned that everyone has to jump onto the latest left-wing fad or risk being cancelled?
sohois
11d ago
China will possibly suffer from something like a resource curse with their cultural exports. They have such a colossal domestic market that they simply don't need to think about international markets. Nezha 2 can make 2 billion just from China, so why would they care if it doesn't even earn 5% of that overseas?
That might also explain why gaming is so far the one area that is having some breakouts. Something like Black Myth couldn't rely on Chinese games alone due to the relative size of the middle class, a culture that is still hostile to video games, and a party that is hostile.
sohois
12d ago
I'm taking decadence as being 'population are relatively wealthy with few material concerns'. I guess it would be more accurate to state that both countries were very much not in the 'hard times'.
sohois
12d ago
Qing Dynasty China in the first Opium war is a good example. The Manchus were archetypal hard men when they swept past the Ming Dynasty to take control, and even by the time of the Opium War there was still a great emphasis placed on martial prowess by the Manchu minority.
The empire was still massive and they considered themselves without peer. By the time of the war there was no doubt that the technological gap between Europe and China was becoming large; this was not a case of there being a massive technological gap. China had no trouble obtaining modern materiel through trade nor was there any sense in which they could be outnumbered. The trigger for the war was essentially part of the superiority complex of the Middle Kingdom and both Britain and China likely viewed them as the greater empire at the time. Britain's small expeditionary force probably had no ideals of gaining territory or forcing terms upon China. They merely wanted redress for the initial insults and to gain fairer terms for future trade.
Yet once the sides met, there was only ever one winner. There was not a question of the Chinese fighting poorly. And while the gap between the two navies was a big factor, it still seems likely that China could have repelled Britain's attack had they had they any kind of competent strategy or been able to bring enough of their force to bear.
So there we have it: two empires, alike in size and strength, both very much in their decadence phases, with none at the time believing the Brits would be so thoroughly victorious.
sohois
13d ago
I see. The obvious next question, then, is what the difference is between a "soft man" and a "wrecked man", at least as far as predicting the arc of history goes?
smh addressed this exact point in his original post, that a Somalian used to deprivation and pain is still going to get absolutely swept aside by a soft American soldier.
sohois
13d ago
What about the counterfactual? Had those protests turned violent, would they have produced results? Have the handful of attacks on abortion clinics or doctors been anymore effective?
sohois
13d ago
Obviously bad times create hard men. Obviously good times create soft men. Sometimes bad times create wrecks instead, and sometimes good times let men flourish
This seems to be saying nothing in the end
Bad times can create both hard men and wrecked men. Good times can create both soft men and flourishing men. So if we wanted to predict what a man will be like, the 'goodness' of the period is irrelevant?
sohois
13d ago
Well yeah, if you reword the question to something much simpler then only a Lizardman constant are getting it wrong. But that wasn't the question.
if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away
If you give people time to think about this, few will make a mistake, but in a more immediate setting this is a classic system1/system2 type
sohois
14d ago
Yes, it's not an applicable concept. For one thing, LLMs have proven their mastery of a host of different concepts already to an extremely high level, so the question of whether you can trust them is kind of moot.
It also doesn't work with singular entities. The reason gellman amnesia was a thing is that newspapers and media organisations made claims to competence, hiring specialists in each field. That a science journalist then makes a bunch of mistakes should rationally lead you to question the qualifications of the "specialists" in each field. Nowadays people see a blog about medicine or something, find a few math errors, then rush to declare Gellman amnesia. But the blog never claimed to be a mathematics expert! Gellman amnesia is not "If there are mistakes, the whole thing is worthless".
This kind of reasoning error in LLMs is in the same category.
sohois
14d ago
That question seems to be a bit of a gotcha; I'd wager a third or more of random people asked that question would blurt out that they would walk to the car wash before engaging their brains.
Also that's not what Gell-mann amnesia is. I swear I see the concept used everywhere for everything nowadays, when the original formulation is literally just "journalists are shit".
sohois
14d ago
Yep. No idea if any of the ones I played would still be around apart from Dota. Footman Frenzy is one of the others I can remember being pretty prominent so I wonder if that is still going.
sohois
15d ago
Finally an area where I can comment with experience: crappy marketing.
So you found Malwarebytes latest article to be worthless. I'm sure this contrasts with your long familiarity with their classic blog, and you were previously an avid reader of thrillers like ChromeLoader targets Chrome Browser users with malicious ISO files, no?
First thing: each of the companies mentioned are an order of magnitude different in size, so it's pretty difficult to compare how much each one might spend. Malwarebytes is listed at 500-1000, Cloudflare at 1000-5000, and Lenovo at 10000+. But if you wanted to put out a meaningful blog every workday then you would only need a team of 3-4 permanent writers. Malwarebytes (hereafter MB) manages a bit more than that but with AI now I doubt it's much more than that. Such a team might have a single Head of Content or another Marketing Manager that would approve, and a company like Cloudflare might have a technical review step (but probably not MB), but I'd be shocked if they had anything more than that to get something published.
It's fundamentally different from a journalist outfit like Ars. Their writing is the product, so putting out AI really does drive down value. For every other business, who cares? When was the last time you ever went to an e commerce or other business blog willingly? Probably because {SEO}, you googled and it was the first link, and you swiftly exited. The only difference between now and 5 years ago is that now it is literally zero effort, whereas before it did take a modicum of time. It's not something that will show up in productivity statistics though, since it has never really been clear that this kind of stuff actually has any purpose. Companies, from Lenovo downwards, go through the motions on this. Some people must be reading, because even the smallest company blog can still eke out a few hundred readers, but I've never met anyone that does pay attention.
I don't think there's any feedback either. MB will continue pushing this stuff out until the end. AGI or something else will appear quite suddenly - to them - and wipe this kind of stuff off the map.
sohois
20d ago
Well you removed vtubers so overall it seems like a giant quality improvement
sohois
21d ago
Do you actually like writing code qua writing? Is there fun to be found in adding every last semi-colon? I'm assuming you still use a linter and aren't manually typing out every variable, etc.
Or is the stuff you actually enjoy the planning, architecture, or problem solving? Because you can easily still take that on and pass even more of the boring repetitive tasks over to AI. Just write everything in a shorthand style pseudocode and pass that to the LLMs to fill in all the little bits.
sohois
24d ago
The impression from Epstein's many emails is not of a particularly smart man, so I could buy it.
sohois
1mo ago
Even before the cultural revolution Mao had strategies to weed out any opposition like his 100 flowers campaign. I'd have to check my books but I'm fairly certain there were quite a few close allies caught in some of his early purges as well.
That being said, you're right that comparisons between Mao and Xi end at both being heads of the CCP. Despite my earlier statement, Xi is not a top down dictator the way Mao was. The current CCP is too large, too complex for it ever to be controlled by the whim of one man. Mao's CCP was large, but it really could be said that everything came down from the top; hence many of the more idiotic decisions. The innumerable technocrats can keep the engine of China running even if Xi was suddenly inflicted with the madness of Nero.
If there is a comparison for Xi, it's the Chinese emperors. Perhaps a one of the Qing, who wielded great empires but we're at a loss for the minutiae of the far reaches. In the first opium war, China was pretty easily beaten by a relatively tiny expeditionary force from Britain simply because the emperor never had a handle on what was happening and his delegated generals ended up in petty squabbles. So this example might reinforce the notion that Xi is trying to purge 'incompetence' rather than 'corruption' or 'opposition'.
sohois
1mo ago
I think this is a little charitable to Xi. By obvious comparison, I don't think many would deny that Mao really was a true believer in communism and in rooting out the bourgeoisie and rightists. At the same time, he grew increasingly comfortable in wielding purges against internal enemies and critics and the more he purged the more his circle of enemies and critics grew in his mind. There were a great many long time comrades and allies that ended up targets of Mao's paranoia.
In fairness to Xi, there's no evidence that he is inflicted with the madness that Mao most likely had in his later years, but I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that as he becomes more comfortable wielding purges as a weapon, he would be increasingly inclined to use them for even minor slights and disagreements. He can be both a true believer in anti-corruption and still use that as an excuse to get rid of people that were once close to him. I'd be stunned if most of his inner circle weren't already guilty of corruption in some small ways, given how endemic it was to the CCP for so many years. Especially an elder like Zhang.
Buy a place and rent it out. Or airbnb if it's suitably central
edit: actually if I'm giving serious advice, use some of the money as a deposit to buy a place and use the interest to pay down the principal, and put the rest into other investments
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