It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.

He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39

I think I used to play Halo 3 with that guy

A lot of expensive hobbies don’t have to be expensive. I’m a musician, and I have spent thousands of dollars on musical equipment but realistically, if I weren’t going to play out, or record high quality songs, you can get away with just a $200-$300 guitar (you might even be able to go lower. Cheap guitars are crazy good these days), a used amp, a tuner, and a cable. With that alone you have a lifetime of entertainment and challange, and the most expensive long-term cost is your strings. It’s honestly a steal in term of cost to entertainment ratio.

Now. That said. The real challenge is not falling into GAS (Gear Aquisition Syndrome), which is a real challange. And if you become even mildly capable on guitar you’re probably gonna wanna play live and record too, so, easier said than done, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.

“Yeah. I really do want a big salty lugee in my mouth” ~ Oyster Enjoyers

Are we sure it’s cheaper though? I mean it legitimatly might not be. I have some friends who work in tech and they use an AI model for, amongst other things, summarizing information on their internal documentation. They’ve told me what their company is paying for the license to use this thing, and it’s eyewatering. also, uhh last time I checked, the company they got that license from does not turn a profit… so it appears to be too cheap at the moment.

It might really be the case that it isn’t cheaper than just paying someone a normal salary to do that work, and it probably isn’t cheaper than just jamming the work being done by the AI now back onto preexisting employees (which is what they did before ~2 years ago anyway).

The other thing that makes me feel this might not be unreasonable is that everyone on the team likes the tool, except their manager, who has thrown out the idea to cut it twice now (that I know of).

Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.

Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.

Is he fondling the grunt’s junk?

Nah. Poor public schools spend waaaay to much money on shit like this. Source: Have worked as a teacher in a poor public school.

https://youtu.be/X9FGRkqUdf8?si=L3qIpoF6TfV5S8D9

This really saddens me. I’ve lived within a few miles the coast basically my whole life and I’ve seen the floods get worse; Friends’ houses getting ruined. The river that flows by my house to the sea regularly consumes the nearest neighborhood to it now, once a year or so. Noone is moving because of it. People are moving here, in fact, and all the new houses are on stilts with first floor parking. I know it’s gonna keep getting worse, and when it finally gets bad enough, where are these people gonna move. All the “nice” towns a little further inland are entierly single-family zoned and woefully unprepared for all the people who will have to move. My town’s population is like 6 of those “nice towns”, and like half of it is gonna be underwater or so flood prone that you can’t live there. It’s gonna be really bad.

Andres Malm suggests in his book “Fossil Capital” that part of the reason that fossil fuels (stocks of energy) are so profitable is that you can pick and choose when to extract and then again when to release the energy stored in them, which will always be more profitable than, for instance, wind and solar (flows of energy) because you can manipulate production to prevent over supply, and choose when to release energy instead of waiting for the energy to be available in the flow. The higher capability to profit means that they will remain more profitable than renewables long after any other sort of calculation other than “profitability” would favor the renewables (cost to produce, damage to the environment, ability to satisfy energy demand).

I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.

I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.

Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who’s inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.

tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you’re at it.

I’m not going to claim this is a positive take that will make you feel less hopeless, but the “climate transformation” is guaranteed to succeed. We will be hitting “peak carbon” and it will decline from there. The only choice we get is whether that transition is by choice in the next decade or two (the easy way) or if we are compelled to by cataclysmic collapse of the world systems we depend on to maintain our modern society (the hard way).

The transition is guaranteed, we just get to decide if we wanna do it the easy way and maintain a reasonable quality of life for billions of people, or the hard way and watch as millions of people die and put planet’s ability to support humans is substantial cut down.

Noone is saying that. The argument is pretty much that people want more scrutiny applied to other companies beyond tiktok, and ideally not be under constant surveillance by any of them, not that people want to be monitored by all police states equally.

I recently heard somewhere that the joke in India is that in western tech company’s “AI” stands for “Absent Indians”.

it’d be a great place to grow some weed.

There’s good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.

The most important features to carbon in this context are:

1. Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.

2. Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren’t just wiggly noodles of atoms.

3. Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of “goldilocks zone” where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.

4. Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.

No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it’s very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.

I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements… but it’s a stretch to say that suggests “alien life might not be carbon-based”. Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it’s poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as “life” beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.