I mean real profit, not "adjusted profit."

Making citizenship as hard as possible for acculturated foreigners is a good way to guarantee the culture will collapse from the inside out.

Racism and nationalism are cultural monkey traps. Sometimes you have to let go of the thing you're holding on to to keep it alive.

Meanwhile Sweden has started deporting British citizens who didn't do the paperwork.

If you travel out of a country, your odds of being allowed in without a visa, residency, or a native passport are basically zero.

Holmes is interesting because she's not a freak or a one-off. She's pretty much a generic tech startup CEO billionaire wannabe, finance industry person, and/or familiar political archetype - arguably more extreme than most, but there's nothing truly exotic about the DNA here.

If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.

It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.

I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.

So you get permission flags and multilayered data structured with complex interfaces, and there is never any sense of "Wait a minute - we don't need this."

It's much like the way AI art looks meaninglessly busy with too many random lines or other elements, and AI writing is always exactly, precisely, specifically, unnecessarily adverbial.

The best thing about movies is that you get to experience the vicarious thrill of being a heroic revolutionary without having to spill the popcorn.

That isn't even snark, it's plain cold hard on-the-record facts.

My prediction is Musk will become less and less stable, more and more flamboyant and performative, and less and less effective.

He's already saying he suffers from occasional AI psychosis, and there is no chance that's going to get better on its own.

Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?

Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?

It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.

This is the first action that has had that effect. Taking out refineries for month after month produced grumbling. Taking out data centres produced an immediate response.

If the data centres didn't matter, Russia and the Trump people would have shrugged and said "Cute..." and/or repeated their standard rhetoric.

It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.

Not that FGTM is comparable, but Rationalism really doesn't do as good a job as it believes it does of explaining why people end up believing ridiculous, harmful things.

An effective form of rationalism would be very good at preventing and reversing irrational and harmful beliefs.

There is zero evidence that the Rationalists have done that.

Is it perhaps possible one of these is not like the others?

Between climate change, AI, economic instability, political catastrophes, various actual and impending wars, social media bot farms and trad media content farms, and entire industries that exist to lie about what's happening and pressure everyone to work and consume and live an ideal lifestyle with ideal productive values - there's quite a lot going on.

I'm sure everyone in Ukraine is delighted that the nightly air raids are a mere narrative device, and they can choose to opt out of them by pretending hard.