Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.

It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.

For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/

The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.

The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world

I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.

Technology has politics, and it often serves to reproduce terrible modes of operation instead of something that could be described as "good progress" for humanity. The renewable energy landscape is the best example of a space that has had to fight against the old world's financial interests, even in the face of obvious monetary and technological supremacy.

The software world unfortunately has followed adtech + social media companies' operational structures, and we lost decades of "good progress" to attention-funded software.

I have a feeling this is why very few novel companies are springing up from this LLM shift: the relationship of a) lines of code b) solving problems to achieve progress c) getting paid for it has been decoupled for so long, because attention has been the main currency online.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese technology market leap is fueled by a focus towards the "physical" (raw materials, manufacturing) and it's no surprise that a highly educated population is beating many Western economies in the electronics market (from small gadgets all the way to cars and energy). It's not impossible to try catching up by educating our people to reorient money to industry that brings "good progress", instead of industry that brings virtual money in the form of stocks or tech that mainly serves vices and/or entertainment.

We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.

this is the sad part for me.

I remember when computers did things FOR you.

now you have to do this careful calculus where you balance what you get vs what you give up.

ill stop there about the book, but i think you get the point. The book was depicting the realities of both one's own life ups and downs, which includes a side comparison of a organizations reality. In many ways this isn't much different. The enabling aided by the government has increased many sectors of the US to not be agile or just toss the idea out the window " we don't need to be agile we'll just try to takeover this sector in Italy to increase revenue". Becoming comfortable with just creating alternatives to problems is not FIXING the problem that originates.

Anybody have any idea what diagnostic shapes he's talking about?

I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close. It's such a blunder it will probably be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era. It's not lost on people that the US would rather let the world burn than split with its attack dog in the region, even slightly. We're also seeing that, as the author notes, a tiny power can strategically defeat a military that over $1 trillion a year is spent on.

The author rightly points out of the lawlessness of everything going on and the destruction of trust in financial markets. All of this is correct. But I don't think the auuthor really identifies the reasons for the push for AI. And that is, labor displacement and wage suppression. Or, to put it another way, further wealth concentration into the hands of the "oligarchs". I guess it's another version of "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."

And now there's evidence that Epstein was behind the prosecution of Swartz. He knew the man was onto something.

The authoritarianism is only more obvious. No one bothers to hide it. The social irresponsibility ramps up and up. Genocide in Burma? The cost of social connection. The cost of freedom.

At some point, it all breaks. No one knows what happens next. Models smooth reality, but reality, at some point, detests smoothness enough to become pointed.

This as been so overwhelmingly obvious in 3rd world countries (viz. India's "non-alignment" foreign policy) but, still, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia didn't fully get it: the concept of "rules based world order" is just a layer of makeup over "American Imperialism". Americans make rules the same way Tony Soprano made rules: strictly for self-advantage. We should be thankful to Trump to wipe out that makeup, finally.

True, Mark Carney explained that in Davos. But I am not sure Canadians got it.