if AGI is intelligence superior to human intelligence, we're testing the proposition you can achieve it by reducing the latter rather than raising the former.
elon musk is a one man swarm of locusts.
Orban just had to kick Central European University out. Trump has so many!
from #AndreaLongChu https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/pamela-paul-goodbye-to-the-new-york-times-opinion-columnist.html ht @ryanlcooper
Text: I think of it as the far center: a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice. It can be difficult to tell the far center from regular old conservatism.
i think a pretty good, pretty accurate, way of explaining to less news-obsessed people what’s going on is Trump and Musk are turning the US into a “shithole country”, as the man himself once put it.
everyone should be in favor of a democratic people’s republic. seems obvious.
from https://xcancel.com/lexfridman/status/1887587308087427072
Screenshot of tweet from Lex Fridman: Everyone should be in favor of transparent, efficient government. Seems obvious.
we should have understood there’s no real moat around LLMs when Musk was able to stand up a near-frontier model so quickly. only the myth of Musk’s specialness allowed us to ignore homegrown evidence.
i guess what the election decided is before we rise from the ashes, we will be ashes.
“The idea that ‘fascism = strength’ is just a piece of propaganda unwittingly reproduced by critics of the fascism thesis.” #JohnGanz https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/lets-get-real
austerity is not the same thing as efficiency.
in fact, often the correlation is inverse.
This post is valid for 24 hours.
why does Microsoft "deactivate" your Skype credit if you don't use Skype for 180 days, but let you (and force you to) reactivate it to get it back? what good does this extra flow and hassle do anybody?
without comment.
Chart of gold futures, which are at an all-time high.
once a coup has proceeded to a certain degree, it becomes difficult to distinguish putting down the coup from a coup on behalf of different interests. once control of the state is up for grabs, what faction can claim to be above factions? all, of course, will try.
“A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html ht @hilzoy
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/
was today seriously or literally?
so i'm confused now. were the people who believed he would do what he repeatedly and forcefully said he would do get it right, or did the people who presumed he was bullshitting?
fwiw, since calling his office shunts me to voicemail, here's letter to Senator Rick Scott.
i focused on the USAID situation, though there was so much to choose from, Treasury, OPM too. let's act like this is a democracy to ensure that it remains one.
(when you hit submit, you get directed to a *webpage* that says "This email serves as confirmation that we have received your online submission." i hope my letter hasn't just gone poof. i haven't actually received an e-mail. maybe DOGE could look into this digital system.)
Text: Senator Rick Scott is proud to represent every citizen of Florida. Thank you for contacting Senator Rick Scott’s office. This email serves as confirmation that we have received your online submission. Please do not reply to this email. In order to contact our office again, please return to our website. For updates from Senator Rick Scott, we encourage you to follow @SenRickScott on Twitter. Thank you
what are the odds identities of confidential USAID funding recipients, named in classified files now accessed by 20-somethings with no vetting or counterintelligence training or legal authority, will evade professional intelligence activities of US adversaries? whose lives are in these kids’ hands?