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Seems pretty clear to me.

It A) gives business funding that would otherwise have to give up equity to VCS or sell to PE or whatever other forms of private, for-profit funding. And B) takes away money that could go to the military or ICE or other programs that could be used to concentrate Trumps power or aggrandizement.

> America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community.

Has Trump and his friend benefited from this program? No? Then this doesn't matter.


Thanks

ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.


Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.


In addition to this, LLMs are also simply too slow right now to deliver the results ATC would need.

Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.


Idk, you can still find outrageously potent weed in states where it's recreationally legal. But maybe it's just a residual from the fact that it was illegal not that long ago and binge consuming it is still quite normalized?


If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.


Attempting to kneecap the breakout front runner of the major American AI companies to ensure the shittier, politically compliant one wins in the short term? Gee I wonder.


Anthropic is great but not the undisputed front runner.

I can also interpret this as Sam and the administration supporting accelerationism while Dario is more measured and wishes to slow things down.


The ends are to create vacuums for big businesses to come in and provide the same services, for private profit rather than public benefit


Can anyone recommend a good source to ramp up one's understanding of macroeconomics/monetary policy to a point where they can make sense of this? Starting from more or less a layman's understanding. Could be a book or course, but doesn't have to be university quality, a good blog or youtube channel could do.


This is such a loaded question.

Because the fundamentals are basic:

Creating money out of thin air generally creates inflation, because theirs is more currency chasing the same amount of assets.

But the Devil is in the details, because there are hundreds of currencies, one currency can be exchanged for another, and interest rates vary all over the world.

Then once that starts to make sense, you open up a box called “derivatives,” and now the complexity just went off the charts.

I only need to understand it in the context of loans on assets, so I can do the math in my head or in excel. Occasionally I’ll vibe code this stuff in Python.

Because I’m not diving into the deep end of complexity, the books I absolutely LOVE are the cautionary tales of when it all blows up.

In that respect, I think “when genius fails” is an all timer.

Nearly everyone knows about the Great Recession, and the depression and the dot com bubble.

But the collapse of Long Term Capital Management was the canary in the coal mine.

LTCM blew up for all of the most predictable reasons, and as the name implies, nearly everyone involved in LTCM were at the top of their game.

Another book that is more folksy is “a man for all markets“, a book about the dude who revolutionized stock options, largely due to a fascination with Blackjack!

(The LTCM guys were big time gamblers too.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=a+man+for+all+markets+by+ed+...


Counterpoint: The problems in the US are systemic. There will be no significant change without abolishing unlimited corporate campaign donations.


Plus the separation of powers seems too reliant on the president being a decent human being. It'll be interesting to see that play out over the next decades.


Agreed. I feel like the Supreme Court abandoned any semblance of critical thinking during the Citizens United v. FEC decision.


> Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way?

This question gets directly at the cause of the author's nihilism: the necessity is borne from the endless pursuit of positive quarterly growth, the "binding fiduciary duty to shareholders". Which is a lie, there is no such legally binding fiduciary duty. So the aforementioned necessity is also a lie. Companies could operate on a longer time horizon, let engineers write better code, make better products, maybe even consider societal good in their strategic planning, and still turn a healthy profit. But the cost of perhaps taking a few degrees off their YoY trend line is unacceptable to the insatiable greed of their controlling shareholders.


Fuck Jack Welch


The flight attendants/safety card will tell you to stay buckled whenever seated, even if the seat belt sign is off, but many (most?) people will ignore that guidance and stay unbuckled for as long as they are technically allowed.

Only aviation professionals or recovering flight phobics like me who have watched every episode of Air Crash Investigation will take proactive safety measure of their own accord. To normies it's all just a pointless hassle.


I stay buckled and I’m just a “normie” not afraid of flying that understands turbulence doesn’t always happen in a bell curve with some notice. Not sure if that makes you feel any better? :)


Having an understanding of the bell curve of turbulence makes you a bit more advanced than a normie on the aviation knowledge bell curve imo :)


I'm amazed how many grown ass adults on airplanes act like little kids when it comes to seat belts and basically everything else.

Not just ignoring flight crew advice and common sense to generally stay buckled in order to gain maybe a minor amount of comfort and convenience being unbuckled, but unbuckling even when the seat belt sign is on and again common sense says being buckled in is the smart move. On my most recent flight I heard quite a few people unbuckling their seat belts while the plane was still rolling down the runway after landing. You couldn't wait 5 more minutes until the plane is at the gate?


lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).

Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.


I'm not flight phobic but I still stay buckled all the time when I don't need to move. It's a very little nuisance.


No reason to not buckle, I keep the belt a little looser, but buckled the entire time. Esp on Boeing planes, I want to get sucked out with the seat.


People have different priors for bad things that can happen on a plane. If you’ve experienced turbulence you’ll probably buckle up.


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