I mean, I think we all recognize that these are gambling sites trying to skirt gambling regulations, so all of their arguments are going to seem ridiculous. “We’re a prediction market, and individuals with specialized knowledge improve our accuracy.” “We allow people to hedge against adverse events, like Elon Musk tweeting over 300 times this week.” “These are financial contracts, not wagers.”

The interviews I’ve seen with “prediction market” CEOs, they’re openly begging for people to trade on confidential, privileged, or classified information, because that’s the source of their markets’ supposed predictive power.

Most of us lived through 2020: saw cities shut down; hospitals using refrigerated trucks as morgues; literally millions of dead. Most of us then saw the vaccine roll out and all of that just went away.

ID, credit, debit, transit, auto insurance, health insurance…

On topic, I did recently stop carrying a phone card - back before cell phones, you could buy a card, call an 800-number from a pay phone, enter the card number, and make long distance calls. My parents gave me 1200 minutes when I went to college in the late 1980s, and the card still has, probably 1000 minutes. Last used it probably around 2002.

US’s writers have gotten really lazy since season 240 or so. It’s like they turned the whole show over to a Poe’s Law bot. I keep hoping for something good…there’s interesting fan fic, but they never seem to follow up.

Don’t even get me started on the 1990s. Every new processor generation actually felt faster. Web pages had blinking banners because the creator thought it looked cool, not to advertise a personal information vacuum. There was no better introduction to the public’s absolutely awful sense of style. But I went from talking to international friends for $0.50/minute to free, and it was amazing.

Those companies have extremely well developed propaganda machines. They have to sell their technology and products as benefits to governments (i.e. society) and solutions to chaos (i.e. crime and terrorism), and they have extremely well refined language to describe themselves in positive term. If you don’t look past the company line, it’s easy to believe that the skeptics and warnings are all just FUD from haters, especially when the propaganda pays your mortgage.

Then Palantir goes and publishes an actual fascist manifesto…

This is the best option. Don’t look at “free” solar power as an excuse to be wasteful - put it back in the grid and reduce your neighbors’ CO2 production.

To me, that’s the ‘fancy search engine’ mode of AI where it works well and basically focuses the human effort. A needle-in-haystack problem. It might still be missing things, but they’re things you’ve already missed yourself, so no loss.

It’s different from asking Claude, for example, to create a new guest VLAN with limited internet access and access to only a specific service on the private network. For that, you have to 1) trust Claude because you lack the expertise to review, 2) spend time learning the config system well enough to review, or 3) already know the system well enough to check it. 1) just sounds bad. 2) sounds like Claude isn’t saving much time, but maybe helps focus the human where to study, and 3) seems like the human might have been able to just do the job in similar or less time than writing the prompt + reviewing the result.

I feel like the big mistake they continue to propagate is failing to distinguish among the uses of AI.

A lot of hype seems to be the generative uses, where AI creates code, images, text, or whatever, or the agentic uses where it supposedly automates some process. Safe uses in that way should involve human review and approval, and if the human spends as much time reviewing as they would creating it in the first place, then there’s a productivity loss.

All the positive cases I’ve heard of use AI like a fancy search engine - look for specific issues in a large code base, look for internal consistency in large document or document sets. That form lets the human shift from reading hundreds or thousands of pages to reading whatever snippets the AI returns. Even if that’s a lot of false positives, it’s still a big savings over full review. And as long as the AI’s false-negative rate is better than the human, it’s a net improvement in review.

And, of course, there’s the possibility that AI facilitated review allows companies to do review of documents that they would otherwise have ignored as intractable, which would also show up as reduced productivity.

Not familiar with opnSense, but on your PC, you can check the address it assigns - if it’s /128, it’s a single address.

My ISP does not assign a prefix for delegation unless you specifically ask for it. I had to add “request_prefix 1” to my dhclient.conf file to get a /64 I assume opnSense has a friendly setting somewhere for that. For me, the key phrase was ‘prefix delegation.’ After I got that, I could search around and get my solution.

Pretty sure that reflects its stage in the legislative process, not support/opposition. i.e.: out of 100 bills that get introduced, only 1 becomes law.

Keep at it, or people like Bernie won’t even try.

Down ballot is even more important, because those are races you can affect. There’s only 15-20,000 people voting in most US House primaries.

Vote in the fucking primaries so you can get better democrats.

He believes he is the smartest person in any room - great genes, uncle at MIT. He thinks we are more stupid than he is.

It’s almost like being embedded in a profit-motivated information bubble makes you look crazy to outsiders.

Eh. Sounds like the queer version of a “the only moral abortion is my abortion” pro-lifer. It’s kind of a thing over there.

Whatever else comes out of the 2020s, I like that the era of ‘superpowers’ is pretty clearly over. The former Soviet Union can’t bring one of its former soviets back into the fold. The USA can’t get a regional power to roll over.

I hope that means a lot more coalition building among the regional powers. Actual compromise and consensus among people with different perspectives. I hope that means less kowtowing to Washington, Moscow, maybe even Beijing, because letting one nation tell the rest of the world what to do just sucks. We can get a lot more done working together than following a bully.

As an American, if that means giving up the global privilege I’ve had, being the ‘default currency,’ the ‘default language,’ and the ‘default rule,’ then I’ll suffer through it. Maybe it will even help us focus on fixing our domestic problems as they grow to crisis proportions.

Beyond “whomever holds the highest office at the moment,” there’s “whomever gets the biggest media coverage.” That might be Gavin Newsom, who’s not very popular, even in his home state. Bernie Sanders and AOC always get good coverage, but that’s partly because they’re so far outside the mainstream.

US isn’t really set up for singular leaders at the national level, which is part of what makes Trump so unusual.

I said I understand the argument. You can rage at how the people got on the tracks and look for the real culprits all day, but while you’re ‘solving’ the big problem, people die who didn’t have to.

How about the Blade Runner question: You come across a tortoise on its back, belly baking in the hot sun: do you flip the tortoise on its feet or worry who flipped it on its back while you watch it die?