It mocks -- in peak Millennial Humor fashion -- a major contributor to the tech industry and tech culture. If you don't like his opinions, the honorable response would be to debate those opinions, not attempt (poorly) to make a joke of the man over an inherited, immutable aspect of his physiognomy.
By making jokes about the physiognomy, we encourage future applications of eugenics to avoid this unappealing one. This is the right choice as long as the market votes in favor of this post.
There, I used Andreeson's ideas so you can understand it.
Bingo! Mocking the elite is a deeply rooted historical tool used to challenge the powerful. Historically, the "carnivalesque" tradition aimed to mock all customary kinds of social hierarchy. By donning masks or mocking those in power, ordinary people could temporarily dissolve the differences between the rich and the poor, challenging the legitimacy of the ruling class. Elites have always feared and suppressed these displays precisely because ridicule has a leveling effect that makes it impossible for them to retain their dignity and authority.
Over the last several decades, a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families in America—the top 0.1%—have effectively transformed the United States into a civil oligarchy, using their unfathomable fortunes to manipulate government policy and the legal system to serve their own financial interests.
Public mockery and collective joy are incredibly effective at forging unity among the powerless. In the face of overwhelming corporate and state power, achieving the immediate joy of solidarity is often a movement's sole source of strength.
Fuck that. All these rich assholes have Carte Blanche all but enshrined in law to make proven-to-be-harmful products free of any liability. The least we should be able to do is make fun of them.
This man and those like him will never have to work again in their fucking lives. They will want for nothing. The world is effectively their theme park. Surely they can bear the psychological weight of mild mockery.
Surely they can, but this particular kind of mockery reflects poorly on the man engaging in it. A person is known by what he does; there are real costs to spending your time engaged in elaborate mockery and vitriol.
If you've read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, think back to the character of the knight:
> And though that he were worthy, he was wys, And of his port as meeke as is a mayde. He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde In al his lyf unto no maner wight.
He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde -- he has never said a villainous word -- in al his lyf unto no maner wight -- in all his life to any kind of person.
One should aspire to be more like a knight and less like a jester.
You are unbelievably out-of-touch with the state of the world and social relations, although citing twelfth-century verse isn't in itself inexcusably outmoded.
The other poster is right about tit-for-tat. I'm afraid you're giving advice of the "let them eat cake" variety.
In other words, you don't seem to recognize that America not a society of equals.
Maybe I should read Canterbury Tales, though. Is the knight high-born?
Sure. But if you’re going to take the piss, do it upward to those in power.
They will still sleep comfortably on their satin sheets and often badly need a reminder to be wise and meek themselves. Most of them started out like regular humans and can probably be prodded to recall what was like before they were raptured into places where their billions are normal.
IDK, jesters are running the world and I think Canterbury tales was written before "generous tit for tat" was determined to be the superior game strategy.
I don't understand these simp style comments. Who cares what he's done (debatable itself), everything that he does is open to criticism in whatever way people choose, including mockery, ridicule and contempt. It's not about being honorable, it's about speaking freely.
People like you seem to think people earn some sort of 'indulgence' because of past achievements. They don't.
People like Andresseen, Musk, Thiel have all earned their infamy. It's up to them to change our minds, not us to moderate our opinions.
The stock market has stopped making sense since the 2008 financial meltdown. Many reasons for this. In part, ZIRP is to blame -- a ton of money flowed into stocks simply because they were the only way to tread water and get a return. In part, you can blame Bitcoin (which demonstrated at scale that you can have an "asset" with zero underlying value and net-negative social utility that still functions as an appreciating value token,) and the meme-stock.
The stock market is basically detached from the industrial manufacturing/production economy -- and even to some extent the services/insurance economy -- and is now vibes/feels based.
Regardless of individual stock performance, present-day total stock market liquidity is a proxy for expectations of future total stock market liquidity.
If people are keeping their money in the market (regardless of allocation inside the market) they are expecting that any other asset class will perform worse in the near future. If they expect that commodities are too volatile, spending won't pay off, monies and bonds will inflate away and land may face legal risks from populist, technocratic or extrajudiciary changes to the legal system then their least worst options are to go all in on stocks. Furthermore, the energy sector is going to have a windfall from filling up the VLCCs of the world and look for anywhere to dump the cash that helps escape taxes, driving future liquidity expectations even higher.
Right, and "monies and bonds will inflate away" is related to what I said re ZIRPs -- you can't expect a decent return by parking your money with the bank, either, as interest rates are low to nonexistent. The stock market's the only good option. This was no accident, it was an intentional policy move... And now, "the DOW's over 50,000!"
What's even more troubling is that there was once the pretense that valuations had something to do with fundamentals, but this has gone entirely out the window since about 2013.
So basically none of it makes any sense and you've just got to ride the tiger.
Thanks the second chart is more concerning than the first. The first has a variety of potential distortions at play first of all portion of industrial activity that's done by public vs private companies shifts over time and second of all a lot of these companies do 40 to 50% of their business overseas.
Whereas a historically low ratio of earnings to index value is a deeper concern to me
I’ve never looked at the numbers to see exactly how large of a pool it is but millions of Americans are effectively forced to buy into the market to fund our 401ks and future retirements. That’s billions of dollars of inflow every month that has to go somewhere, usually index funds.
it is exactly this. I am self-employed and have been managing my solo 401k for 15+ years now. while I am fully aware of market being overvalued I will still max out my 401k this year ($80k, I am over 50 :) ) and that money needs to go somewhere. I could theoretically sell and sit on the cash and wait on "crash" but I could have technically done that a year ago (this were similarly not very rosy) or even earlier and that obviously would have been a terrible financial decision. no one can time the market and therein lies the core issue, money will always be flowing in...
Opus 4.7 really has its own weird writing style, huh?
lol at this howler of a paragraph:
> "I want to leave that on the table for a moment, because the absurdity of it is easy to miss on the first reading. A young man about to commit a hundred thousand dollars and two years of his short life to a credentialed path that AI is currently dismantling, and the reason he has not yet picked up the instrument that is dismantling it is that he cannot find two hundred dollars a month. Not for a year — for a month. The credential he is about to buy could fund the subscription for forty years."
"Not for a year, for a month" of course makes zero sense -- but the intro sentence is also so characteristic; a variant of "let that sink in."
In truth, the whole thing makes zero sense:
(1) Because LLM access costs $0, and you can learn almost everything you need to know on the free tiers. You won't be able to work on serious projects, but that's not what noobs need, anyway.
(2) Because "Comp Sci" isn't coding. The friend's nephew could be doing more theoretical (and more prestigious) stuff in computer-adjacent mathematics or physics. Here LLMs might be an interesting tool, but they're strictly non-essential.
> "... that he cannot find two hundred dollars a month. Not for a year — for a month. The credential he is about to buy could fund the subscription for forty years."
> "Not for a year, for a month" of course makes zero sense
It made good sense to me - I read it as understanding that the claim is that one month of a subscription would be enough for them to understand what this technology is offering, and to make a more informed decision. It's a "try before you buy" argument - why would you put down the equivalent of 40 years of something, before giving a version of it a quick try for a 1 month's price?
I read it as $200/year vs. $200/month. So "not for a year, but for a month," seemed silly, as the year would be much cheaper and would make it a real no-brainer...
But that's the whole issue, really. There are $10/month and $20/month tiers that are amazingly functional, even if you can't afford or don't want to pay $200/month. So $200/year is already a reality. As is $0/year, especially (but not solely) if you're on the kimi/deepseek/huggingface/OS path.
It was such a great time for fringe musical subcultures.
Black metal was a 1992-1998 thing. It was dead (and many of the genre's leading lights were looking to move beyond it, mostly without success,) by the end of 1999.
Those six years also produced an explosion of experimentation in industrial, ambient, darkwave, and many other niche genres. In some cases, musical and aesthetic boundaries were pushed as far as they can possibly go.
From where I'm standing, the 26 year period from 2000-2026 absolutely pales in comparison to just those few years 1992-1998.
The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.
Sort of a taste receptor I’m sure many have developed now.
The most obvious patterns here are: antithesis constructions, words choices and distribution, attempt at profundity in every paragraph but instead are runs of text that doing say anything, and even the perfect use of compound hyphenation. I think and can appreciate that there is definitely an attempt at personalization and guidance to make it less LLM-y and not just a default prompt, but it’s still kind of obvious. You could use a detector tool too of course.
What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap.
This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about offshoring that the article wants you to bring along.
I'm not trying to defend the blog post, but I gave Slop Cop 775 words of an essay by Schopenhauer (translated into English) and got "15 patterns detected."
I fear we're approaching the point where AI-written text grows indistinguishable from human-written text, unless the AI-user is exceptionally lazy and uses an obsolete model...
It's actually really fascinating that there isn't a scientific theory of deep learning, especially as it's a product of human engineering as opposed to e.g. biology or particle physics.
There are very good reasons why it took this long, but can be summed up as: everyone was looking in the wrong place. Deep learning breaks a hundred years of statistical intuition, and you don't move a ship that large quickly.
Calling it “a product of human engineering” is misleading. Deep learning exploits principles we don’t fully understand. We didn’t engineer those principles. It’s not fundamentally any different than particle physics or biology, which are both similarly consequences of rules that we didn’t invent and can’t control.
Something you've got to realize is that this form of culture is something that has gone far beyond America's borders. To the European, it is the very pinnacle of "American Food" -- and 50s/60s themed diners are all over the place.
I'd hazard that there are nearly as many of these restaurants outside the US as there are inside of it. Within the US it's "throwback/nostalgia." Outside the US it's "exotic/kitsch."
Maybe your Finnish friend was remarking that the American version somehow felt more "real"? I don't know... I've been to all sorts, and the ones in Europe are truly very similar.
Your first link is a restaurant in a shopping mall. It has the interior facade of being a diner, and it serves...avocado bites, spicy chicken nachos, kimchi burgers, etc. Not really the same!
Every now and again someone will open a "American Diner" here in London, then have normal opening times and serve basically the same food every pub serves, only with more milkshakes.
Like, no. I want my American-style hash browns, over-easy eggs, and country-fried steak, not the same burger every pub on the street is doing.
And (refillable) filter coffee please, not just espresso drinks.
I think there's a difference between the "squeeze-in" style diners and simply American-style diners like the ones you've posted. A lot of the nostalgia comes from the tiny prefab buildings that barely manage to fit a bar and row of booth seats. Those are the ones from the movies that feel more authentic/classic in person, at least to me.
> Something you've got to realize is that this form of culture is something that has gone far beyond America's borders. To the European, it is the very pinnacle of "American Food" -- and 50s/60s themed diners are all over the place.
Burgers, shakes, pancakes, hot dogs, sometimes BLTs and tuna melts. That sort of thing. In Europe, the "American Diner" is usually the only place that'll serve a normal plate of pancakes. (Everywhere else it's crepes, which are completely different...)
At a diner in America, I'd be unsurprised to see some less "diner" offerings. When I go to my local non-chain diner, I order fettucine alfredo. And the article here has a good picture of a diner advertising "American and Korean food". I think part of the core diner concept is a somewhat athematic menu that is meant to cater to local tastes.
So I'm a little surprised at the idea of a diner that only has classic burgers / shakes / pancakes, but I'd have to admit those are fairly core dishes.
Yes, absolutely. They talk to you the way I expect to be talked to in a diner (lotsa “huns”), the coffee never ends, and sometimes you get to watch UFC live. The food is so easy to eat, too.
Fried chicken, liver and onions, biscuits and gravy - the breakfast options are my jam, but not really the other entrees. You can order dessert regardless though!
Fun to see all that, but curious why I haven't seen any on any of my trips across the UK and Ireland. I even asked some locals and they did not know of any diners anywhere in the country. I would've thought they would've been all over it.
Eddie Rocket's is an Irish chain of American diners. I've eaten there in Dublin. Although at least that location is downtown, and in a bigger building, not a classic diner style building. The inside is very much American Diner themed with vinyl seats, chrome, jukebox controls at the table, and of course the menu of burgers, fries, shakes, etc.
We have an independent one, Herbie's, just down the road from us outside Cambridge. It's pretty good! They have a wide range of imported US fizzy drinks cans too!
It mocks -- in peak Millennial Humor fashion -- a major contributor to the tech industry and tech culture. If you don't like his opinions, the honorable response would be to debate those opinions, not attempt (poorly) to make a joke of the man over an inherited, immutable aspect of his physiognomy.
reply