The voting system exists and works more than well enough to bury bad comments. That's why my comment up there is at -4; it was bad. Problem is solved.

> There is a global resource shortage.

> Authoritarian state on the other side of the planet controls it.

> US is finished.

> American farmer in the middle of nowhere US discovers the largest supply of said resource known to mankind.

> Repeat.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1e77yxp/it_keep...

Its a good system that should exist. It could probably be made better by finding any way to help it act faster (e.g. the moment a post is even in the process of community notes voting, attach a temporary banner like "The Community Notes people has suspicions about this post, it might be misinfo, we're doing our research").

One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to something that is truly useful to consumers.

> I use a heavily customized Firefox config on Linux.

If you really care about privacy, you should blend in to look like everyone else. Avoiding being tracked raises alarm bells. You have to let them track something; but no one ever said it had to be you.

When you combine that superpower with our insane natural resources; our insane oceanic coverage on the west and east borders; and our cultural and governmental bias toward personal freedom; there's simply no alternate reality or predictable-term future where America isn't a global leader.

H1Bs are figuratively a policy disconcertingly similar to slave labor.

Much of this election cycle has been about the schism between the ground truth people observe, and what we're being told by the elites; the economy is good, but many people are struggling, stuff like that. H1Bs are that for me. Everyone says we need them, that our industry would be screwed without them; but what I see is a program which exists only to prop up unsustainable companies on the backs of cheap indentured labor; it does not serve the interests of the American people. The vast majority go to companies like Accenture; trash consulting companies.

Immigration is America's superpower. Temporary migrant workers are not immigration. The goal of every foreign worker entering America should be citizenship, every migrant worker program should pose citizenship as the outcome, and if it would be politically/economically unsustainable to do that the program should not exist.

The clone site got nine million requests last month and costs basically nothing (beyond what we already pay for Cloudflare). Some goals for 2025:

- I've purchased ~15 realistic-seeming domains, and I'd like to spread this content on those as well. I've got a friend who is interested in the problem space, and is going to help with improving the SEO of these fake sites a bit so the bots trust them (presumably?)

- One idea I had over break: I'd like to work on getting a few megabytes of content that's written in english which is broken in the direction of the native language of the people who are RLHFing the systems; usually people paid pennies in countries like India or Bangladesh. So, this is a bad example but its the one that came to mind: In Japanese, the same word is used to mean "He's", "She's", and "It's", so the sentences "He's cool" and "It's cool" translate identically; which means an english sentence like "Its hair is long and beautiful" might be contextually wrong if we're talking about a human woman, but a Japanese person who lied on their application about exactly how much english they know because they just wanted a decent paying AI job would be more likely to pass it as Good Output. Japanese people aren't the ones doing this RLHF, to be clear, that's just the example that gave me this idea.

- Given the new ChatGPT free tier; I'm also going to play around with getting some browser automation set up to wire a local LLM up to talk with ChatGPT through a browser, but just utter nonsense, nonstop. I've had some luck with me, a human, clicking through their Cloudflare captcha that sometimes appears, then lifting the tokens from browser local storage and passing them off to a selenium instance. Just need to get it all wired up, on a VPN, and running. Presumably, they use these conversations for training purposes.

Maybe its all for nothing, but given how much bad press we've heard about the next OpenAI model; maybe it isn't!

Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely not an obvious pivot at the time, to just become a studio like those dozen other guys. In retrospect, it was a genius move because their access to fine-grained data on what their users watch became a differentiating factor to feed back into what the studio greenlights. But, it would have been the right move even if they didn't capitalize on that data, because there genuinely is no business to be built being a middle-man who has to pay for content. Spotify knows this, but they don't have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they're tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.

I would bet every dollar of my net worth that they are critically wrong on this; its such a beautiful little package that some VP can sell a higher-up to explain away why something they're responsible for isn't performing as expected. I've heard dozens of people complain about how crowded the Spotify app is becoming. I don't know anyone who actively and regularly uses Spotify as a podcast platform; when Joe Rogan was exclusive to Spotify for a bit, I heard a couple people complain about that, which means they were (begrudgingly) using it; but that isn't the situation anymore.

How these complaints convert into behavior changes, subscription cancellations, etc; I don't know.

Apple is the world's most valuable company, and many would attribute a strong part of their success to Jobs' legacy of high-quality decision-making. But anyone who has worked in a large company understands that there's no way Apple can so consistently produce their wide range of highly integrated, high quality products with only a top-down mandate from one person; especially a dead one. It takes thousands of people, the right people, given the right level of authority, making high-quality high-creativity decisions. It also, obviously, takes the daily process, an awe-inspiring global supply chain, automation systems, and these are areas that computers, and now AI, can have a high impact in. But that automation is a commodity now. Samsung has access to that same automation, and they make fridges and TVs; so why aren't they worth almost four trillion dollars?

AI doesn't replace humans; it, like computers more generally before it, brings the process cost of the inhuman things it can automate to zero. When that cost is zero, AI cannot be a differentiating factor between two businesses. The differentiating factors, instead, become the capital the businesses already have to deploy (favoring of established players), and the humans who interact with the AI, interpreting and when necessary executing on its decisions.

This is especially concerning because many top minds in the industry have stated with high confidence that artificial intelligence will experience an intelligence "explosion", and we should be afraid of this (or, maybe, welcome it with open arms, depending on who you ask). So, actually, what we're being told to expect is being downgraded from "it'll happen quickly" to "it will happen slowly" to, as you say, "it'll happen similarly to how these other domains of computerized intelligence have replaced humans, which is to say, they haven't yet".

Point being: We've observed these systems ride a curve, and the linear extrapolation of that curve does seem to arrive, eventually, at human-replacing intelligence. But, what if it... doesn't? What if that curve is really an asymptote?

Clamping pace to 5 seconds is a similar idea. GPS isn't super accurate: within 16 feet some sources say [2], though it gets better if you've got dual band, if you're moving; but it gets worse when you don't have an open sky. Just ten feet of GPS inaccuracy over a ten minute mile means your recorded pace is somewhere between 9:58/mile to 10:02/mile. And, experimentally, these systems are way, way more inaccurate than that: on a recent bike ride, with no major sky obstructions, I wore both an Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Garmin Enduro 3; the AWU2 recorded 25.05 miles, Enduro 3 recorded 25.18 miles. That's a difference of ~686 feet; ~27 feet/mile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures

[2] https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

Battery is another less major factor: Even the AW Ultra 2 struggles to make it through a full marathon run (~70-90% battery usage IME) and that's not an uncommon-enough situation for users of the quote"ULTRA"endquote to be an invalid criticism.

Nothing else matters. Your comment continues into talking about sleep tracking and recovery scores and strain scores and third party apps and literally none of that matters. That's silicon valley brain stuff that many customers don't care about. The Apple Watch is, to some people, a Bugatti without a steering wheel; it gets a lot of the basics wrong.

One note though: Many Garmin users would also say that Garmin is, sadly, also losing track of what their core userbase wants, as the experience has become more buggy and less focused over the years. I'm not asserting that Garmin is king and Apple are idiots; Garmin just has momentum and is generally great at the things its users care about.

If you asked most people "what password manager do you use" they would give you a blank stare; but sadly, the answer is rarely "I'm not using one" the answer is usually Apple or Chrome or whatever is built in and most convenient.