The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.

Yep. The broker is effectively buying at $19.80 and still selling to their customer at $20.00. Now, crypto is actually innovative in just how easy this is to do. In fact it’s almost required since the transactions are processed in bulk and the miners get to decide what order all the transactions in that block go in. The public mempool also means that even if the miners aren’t doing it themselves anyone who wants to front-run basically has a whole conga line of good-faith users (suckers) to get set in front of and identify the most profitable position. Without the miner’s privilege you’ll need to deal with transaction fees and it’s going to be harder to find opportunities, but it’s so easy to search that I wouldn’t expect it to matter.

For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.

Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.

I think the more telling aspect here isn’t the possible employment impacts, it’s the fact that it’s making all the things it’s supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people’s livelihoods, it’s also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don’t know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people’s concerns, I think there’s decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.

I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn’t be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you’re looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn’t move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.

I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.

With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it’s basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they’ve created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I mean, to be fair that’s not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.

I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

I’m not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren’t inviting good programmers to work with you. You’re inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I’m sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

It’s not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it’s that it’s uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.

But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.

But I listened and agreed that you had serious concerns about certain aspects of this technology. I even agreed when you talked about how frustrating it was that specifically other people wanted to do bad things. I listened as you asked whether I had any options to address those concerns! What more do you want from me before you agree to let me do and say whatever I want!

The whole slice-of-life subgenre is all about this. No real conflict or plot, just scenes of the characters existing in their world. My wife both reads and writes that kind of thing and let me tell you the level of research and worldbuilding that goes into writing a simple meal scene or whatever.

I only know that word from an old (pre-pandemic) book episode of Behind the Bastards, so the immediate association is esoteric antisemitism. I’m not sure how common this is but it seems to support your thesis here.

I mean it’s the same thing with sponsored content anywhere, right? The user assumes that the system is providing information in accordance with purposes, but the ads and sponsored results create opportunities for the platform hosting them to profit at the user’s expense. AI platforms are absolutely subject to the same economic incentives for corruption as say, search engines, but I don’t think they’re uniquely so just because the model in question has a more humanlike UI.

Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don’t actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don’t matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.

See also: https://youtu.be/u1_dy1EmV6w

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of Scott’s close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he’s saying applies to normal financial markets, but what’s striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.

I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren’t actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.

I tried digging into it a little bit and it looks like the key word was definitely “less openly racist”. According to A blog from someone else who tried to trace jt the term originated with Theo Beale, better known by his nom de merde Vox Day. I know I first became aware of this guy when he started trying to politicize the election process for the Hugo awards in order to make them less woke. It was real dumb.

You know, I kept expecting both this racist and the racist he was arguing with to start making the very obvious argument for why the racism is not only evil but also dumb. And instead they just kept being racist.

To summarize and spare anyone else curious, the argument is about immigration. Racist 1 argues that since some people are objectively better than others [citation desperately needed but not wanted] we should have free migration so that our superior quality of life can attract all the best people so that we can be the best place. He (correctly) notes the absurdity of Racist 2 arguing that although some people are objectively better than others we need to protect ourselves from all foreigners even if they are the best people because their foreignness would hurt our “magic dirt.” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this criticism elsewhere and from a better and less obviously racist writer elsewhere because the phrase “magic dirt” sounds real familiar.

Also, because I am trying everything back to my particular bugbear today, I have to note that the fundamental and wrong argument that some traits being heritable makes some people objectively better than others is yet another manifestation and justification of what I’m going to start calling the Great Man Theory of Everything. If you start from the position that history, politics, economics, and basically all forms of human activity are fundamentally driven by the actions and decisions of a few people who are for one reason or another destined for power and greatness, you can derive an impressive amount of the libertarian/Rationalist worldview, and if you additionally accept that those people are disproportionately rich white dudes and we shouldn’t think too hard about that fact you can get most of the rest of the way there.

Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.

Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there’s a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.

So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we’re missing something.

So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren’t going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don’t have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.

Now if you assume that the majority of people are “NPCs” or aren’t very “agentic” or whatever then they’re not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public’s benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.