"Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.

After a period of branches and patchsets, full national hard forks are going to become de rigeur, and linux-derived OSes across the world are going to bloom necessarily, as we no longer have the kind of ambient trust required to collaborate across borders.

Look forward to Euro-linux, Sino-BSD, and I guess probably some sort of GCC-area build as well.

Patches will be accepted across national boundaries with only the highest scrutiny, which itself will likely be provided by nationalized AI platforms.

Gods I hate this era

My hot take is that it's now or never for Xi, and from the specific things he is reported to have said to the US president at their last meeting lead me to think that he at least knows this is his big chance; whether or not it is taken is the part of the forecast that is opaque to me.

I know because I too had this initial take; however, upon analysis, it is not sound.

If this kind of argument were generally valid, it would imply that:

- all change neither accelerates nor decelerates, which is absurd, on the face of it;

- the initial stages of a deep change are always surface-visible; for instance, cancers announce themselves when they begin to gestate, rather than when they metastasize

- A few recent points of data of questionable significance outweighs a hypothesis with considerable support from reason, intuition, and other (unpresented) data. For example, the plight of recent CS grads, which _is_ new, and _is_ on graphs, just not the one the author here chose.

So, since these implied claims are self-evidently _false_, it means that the author would, at a minimum, need to provide an explanation as to _why in this one instance, these considerations do not matter_; for example, the author could have argued that the graph positioned at the center of their argument is the one to look at (as opposed to, say, recent CS grads,) but that _itself requires further argumentation._

It also does not account for the other obvious possibilities; e.g.,that there is a delay between the (as it were) lightning and its thunder; or that even strongly nonlinear effects would have shown up by now in the metric chosen; etc. But since these contributions were not included in the original post, I have no choice but to discount it.

So too, Zitron?

Would an angry Pythagoras' theorem be wrong, simply by virtue of his anger?

The money is indeed losing its mind over AI, and Zitron is a stopped clock. A correction is coming but the tool isn't going anywhere.

Style and vibes notwithstanding, is there anything in your view that wrong with the argument itself? Could a better or more polite writer have convinced you with the same shape of logic?

Cf Putin, Germany of a certain vintage.

The solution is rhythm and trust. You do things regularly and predictably whenever it is safe to do so -- potlucks, rallies -- and recharge trust in those moments, hopefully enough to carry you through until the next one.

That is how you resist autocracy.

The world is a more terrifying place if you think about the murk surrounding a thing that is neither a complete person nor a washing machine, but some completely unknown third thing, with traits and aspects of the other two.

Banging pots together will not lift the staggering strangeness of this frontier, where either some things that seem to be people aren't, and familiar faces might instead be worn, like a sock puppet, by a tentacle of ChatGPT, Claude, or any one of the other leviathanic near-minds, in their racks and rows, humming on the nectar of bespoke mini nuclear plants.

I used to love watching and reading sci fi, but it's superceded by present events.

- 'Panzer', of course, is a famous Nazi tank model

- 'Schrek' is from _schrecklish_, terrifying (sp?) in German

- The typeface, Fraktur, has a specific meaning in the National Socialist design language, which is, by about a century, the last time it was regularly used (IIRC.)

So, you tell me. In an Internet awash with encoded symbols, what are these ones telling you?

Use your eyes, your noggin, and your German history texts.

I can't help but notice your username, and the fraktur font, and of course the umlaut.

Are you aware that the flavouring you've chosen for your user account, the product name, and its logotype are referencing 1930s Germany?

I wonder what the intent could be.

NB non German speakers, "shreck" is fear, and "panzer" is well-known to anyone who has watched nearly any documentary about WWII. The Fraktur typeface is an older Prussian typeface vigorously revived by the National Socialists, who, IIRC, made it mandatory for government documents, because Helvetica was considered woke.

The epistemic signal you await cannot be sent.