Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.

Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

You could make an argument that some of them are "classical liberal" or "neoliberal", but that was the center in the US and everywhere else it is center-right.

Definitions are helpful here.

"Classical liberal" is what the US was founded as. It was a liberal Republic. Classical liberals value political freedoms, civil rights, and free markets. They are anti-monarchy and anti-authoritarian. Most of the revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s were driven by Classical Liberals seeking political freedom

In the origination of "left" and "right", Classical Liberals were "center left". "Center right" were the moderate constitutional monarchists. In the US where we have zero interest in constitutional monarchy, Classical Liberalism was always the center.

Since World War II, that center became a settled question in much of the western world. The answers are "Yes, constitutions", "Yes, political freedoms", and "Yes, civil rights". Though in many places, civil rights were incompletely extended and so much of the argument has been about extending them fully.

The other side of the argument is "the social question" which got rebranded as "economics". It boils down to how much do we allow power and wealth to concentrate. This became more and more of an element of the revolutions starting in the 1850s -- the revolutions of 1848 were the first to really feature a true left as it is understood today: socialist, communist, and anarchist. (At the time, it was just socialist. Communism as a theory didn't exist yet and anarchism was nascent.). And just to be clear, the "left" refers to Classical Liberals as "Bourgeoisie liberals" -- capitalists and capitalist defenders -- and does not consider them to be part of the left.

The center in the US since the 70s has been a neoliberal consensus which argues for allowing the Capitalist markets to do their thing with minimal intervention. And most of the debate has been about how much that minimal invention should be -- with the two sides mostly arguing between "almost none" and "minimal".

Neoliberalism is more or less a form of libertarianism (US Libertarianism edges into Anarcho-capitalism).

For all of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Neoliberalism was the center and was the entirety of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The "left" vs "right" argument was focused on things like foreign policy and whether we complete the extension of civil rights to everyone.

For most of those decades, all of those sources you just named arranged themselves squarely around that center. They were all Neoliberal. They all took rotating positions on foreign policy, aligning with each party based on the political winds of the moment. Many of them did include arguments in favor of the continued extension of civil rights, but many of them also included arguments against it. Few of them whole-heartedly endorsed that extension until after the fact.

We've never had much of a truly left mass media to speak of.

In the last decade and a half, authoritarianism, fascism, and neo-Nazism have seen a resurgence world wide. And in the US an explicitly fascist movement with Nazi elements captured the Republican party and then the government. Anyone with a political science background taking an honest, empirical look at the MAGA movement will identify it thus. That movement directly pulled from the Nazi playbook in their rise to power. Trump has often cribbed directly from Hitler's speeches, barely even paraphrasing them.

During that movements rise to power, we have seen large elements of the wealthy elite that controls much of the media align with that movement.

At this point, most social media sites are controlled by actors who either have explicitly aligned with the US fascist movement or have effectively acquiesced to it.

Meta has added fascist aligned members to its board and put fascist aligned people in executive positions through the company. They've also voluntarily acquiesced to the regime's requests to silence anti-regime activists.

Twitter is explicitly fascist. Elon Musk is a core member of that movement.

TikTok has been captured by that movement through an orchestrated buyout.

Most of our media is social media, and right there you now have the biggest source of news and information for the vast majority of people fully captured by the fascist movement.

As for traditional media, CBS has been captured. Bari Weiss is a part of the fascist movement and her elevation was part of their pressure campaign.

The Washington Post is owned by Bezos who has aligned with that movement and is explicitly exerting editorial control.

News Corp (Fox News and the WSJ) is aligned with the fascist movement and is arguably one of its originators. Sinclair group, which owns most local TV stations, is also aligned with that movement.

And to be clear, I watched this happen. I've long made a habit of subscribing to sources from across the spectrum and made a hobby study of political science and trying to identify source's biases by political taxonomy vs the frustratingly simplistic left / right spectrum. I used to subscribe to The National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, the Weekly Standard, and others. I've largely tried to avoid those that are blatant, ingenuine propaganda (which Fox News has always been) in favor of those making earnest well founded arguments. And one by one, I've watched them fall to the fascist movement over the last decade. Reason is the last hold out, truly committed to civil liberties and libertarianism -- though it hasn't yet recognized the fascist movement for what it is (or hadn't last I checked in on them -- I haven't had the time to read as much lately).

It's pretty clear that you're in the fascist propaganda bubble, based on your posts and where you put things, and that is badly skewing your perception of where the center is.

I would strongly encourage you to get out of that bubble.

What happened is that the far-right -- and, lets not use euphemisms like "the far right" here, we're talking about fascists and literal Nazis (ethno-fascism is Nazism) -- have successfully taken control of much of our mass media. They've also more or less captured the government of one of the world's super powers. Those two things put together have allowed them to make their views appear mainstream.

This is exactly what happened during the 1920s and 1930s prior to World War II. And similarly, you were finding Nazi views expressed openly and proudly and being given a veneer of respectability. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...)

But they are no less extreme now than they were then. They are still fascist and Nazi views. And they still ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves a decent human being.

And to be clear, I'm talking about the push back towards protocols and decentralization as the solution to enshittification and lock in. I fully believe decentralized protocols and the ability for us to run federated instances for our communities is valuable in and of itself. What I'm arguing against here is the degree to which the pro-social tech community has coalesced around this push as the one and only solution to the problems of enshittification.

And in that context, the average user is everything. And the push fundamentally misunderstands both how enshittification works (email is fully decentralized but still enshittified to a large degree) and the capabilities of the average user (not just their technical capabilities but their cognitive load capacity).

If you want, s/relay/pds/ and my point may become clearer. Or, even, s/relay+pds/app/. The point is pds+relay+app functions as instance for the average user. And the average user doesn't have the time, energy, or cognitive capacity to pick an instance that would be the right fit for them. Which means these decentralized networks are still heavily centralized. And if they remain heavily centralized, those central players still exercise an enormous amount of power over the network.

Including the power to enshittify it.

We can't solve enshittification if we're not cognizant of what the average user is capable of. And that capability extends to more than just "technical understanding". So far, I don't think the protocols push, in so far as it is being pushed as the solution to enshittification, is grappling with that adequately.

> Alarmingly, this mistrial order is just the latest example of attacks on the Prairieland Defendants’ constitutional rights to access to counsel, a fair and impartial jury, an adequate defense, a public trial, and more. Judge Pittman has made highly unusual moves that suppress defense teams and which federal lawyers have not seen during their entire careers:

[...]

> NLG remains extremely concerned about these cases. Defendants’ First Amendment rights to free expression, assembly, and association; their Sixth Amendment rights to counsel; their Fifth Amendment rights to a public trial; and their Second Amendment rights to bear arms are under attack in North Texas. If unchecked and ignored, this case and the judicial decisions coming from it will set a very dark precedent for the rest of the country.

https://www.nlg.org/all-eyes-on-north-texas/

And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first place.

Take me, for instance. I am not only capable of running my own Mastodon or Atproto data server+relay -- I'm technically capable of writing my own ActivityPub or Atproto app.

But I'm currently sitting with accounts on bsky.app and mastodon.social -- the biggest most centralized "instances" (yes, I know, but it reasonably describes the problem). This is because I do not have the time or mental bandwidth to even pick an "instance" that would be better suited to me and migrate, let alone run my own.

And this is doubly and triply true for the average person who doesn't have the technical abilities I have.

As a result, both Mastodon and Bluesky are still practically centralized to a large degree. An overwhelming majority (more than 90% last I found data) of Bluesky users are hosted by bsky.app. Similarly on Mastodon, a large plurality of users (~20%) are on Mastodon.social. Mastodon's obviously doing better than Bluesky in this regard, but it also has about a quarter of the overall traction, and I'd honestly put that down to Bluesky's apparent centralization which makes it a lot easier for people to join and wrap their heads around it.

If you force me to guess, then I'm going to guess. Not only does that give me a 25% chance of getting it right at random, but as others have pointed out, it is very hard to make a multiple choice question that isn't guessable by an astute enough test taker. I think I knew 80 - 85 of those words, but I scored 97, because those questions were very guessable.

Also, reiterating everyone else's comments with respect to the UX needing fewer clicks, and also the definitions not being exact or precise in many cases.

With both small and medium, you can just strafe back and forth in front of your opponent if you're faster than them. With medium and large, you can just circle them and absorb more punishment than them when you're larger than them.

Multi-player would solve the AI problem -- especially if it was more than 1v1 -- and then it would be more challenging.

But I would still request realistic wind and sailing dynamics. That strafing maneuver isn't really possible with real wind dynamics, because you slow down as you swing around and that allows the opponent to catch up to you and return fire. You could have a little arrow in a corner of the screen that shows the wind direction. You don't even have to make the sails movable, you could just have your speed be proportional to how orthongal your sails are to the wind direction in the simplest implementation.

It would add a whole new element to it that would make it much more challenging! :)

It's too easy to win as the small boat. You just stay ahead of your opponent and then turn back and strafe periodically.

It would be much more challenging if you added wind and realistic sailing dynamics. If wind direction vs sail orientation mattered to your speed and boat characteristics weren't as simple as smaller = faster then I think it would be much better balanced and way more fun/challenging!

And we're still not to a point where you can fully delegate coding tasks to a model like you would a human. I'm just using Claude for code review so far and while it's definitely valuable as a reviewer and catching real issues, it's still making pretty critical mistakes. Mistakes a junior might make, but a mid probably wouldn't.

Which makes me feel like I can't fully delegate to it. Whenever I try, I end up spending more time reviewing (and rewriting) its code and testing it than I would have spent writing the code myself and asking Claude to review it.

Given that we're starting to see the real costs of AI, and that the economics of it do not actually work, and those costs are still increasing substantially (the cost increase of Fable over Opus is no joke), this makes me feel all the more that we're headed for a bubble pop.

And by a lot of money, I mean that being forced to unexpectedly spend that would be anywhere from stressful to very stressful to blowing away savings and impacting health, housing, and safety. (Remember, half the US has no savings and/or no ability to absorb an unexpected expense greater than $500.)

It's extremely hard, because there's (almost) no infrastructure for it and funding is all but impossible to come by. The evidence is pretty strong that once cooperatives get going they are more resilient and far more pro-social than capital funded businesses. They are that structure your book seems to be alluding to that resists corruption.

There are two main reasons there aren't more of them: lack of awareness and lack of capital to fund them. If we want a truly pro-social economy, we should really work on fixing those two problems!

Basically, you appear to be focusing on investor owned companies and missing the entire class of worker cooperatives where the financial gravity you're talking about isn't merely resisted -- it doesn't exist. These companies have other challenges, to be sure, but if you're going to write a book called "Incorruptible" talking about businesses, not including these seems a significant oversight (at the least).

Do you address these in the book and just fail to highlight them here or is this really something you missed entirely?

I just flipped your own rhetorical devices back on you. If you don't think they left much room for conversation, then that's a chance for you to look at yourself in the mirror and examine your own behavior ;)

To honestly answer your question in good faith, it's not about years, it's about results. I don't see AI improving exponentially or even linearly. I see it's capability gains logarithmically flattening out. And it's still a ways out from actually writing maintainable code.

I honestly don't believe we are going to reach this point you are saying is "a few years out" with the current architecture. We're throwing an obscene amount of resources at it and we're just not getting there.

And all of this is just about the practical "does it work?" question. We're not even touching on the ethical, environmental, resource use, or societal impact questions at work here.

And people have been saying this exact thing for years now. Someone said this very thing two years ago. And we're still at the "maintenance dead end" stage. So let me flip it back on you: how many years are we going to pour an obscene amount of resources into this thing that is always going to be able to clean up its own messes "in a year or two" before we realize its a dead end (at best) and we need to be using those resources elsewhere? And, similarly, what happens to you when the SOTA AI in two years can't clean up the code it wrote for you two years ago, but people are depending on it and your still on the hook for maintaining it?

And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.

With the latter no longer a thing, and with so many other people building on Github's innovations, I'm starting to seriously consider alternatives. Not something I would have said in the past, but when Github's outages start to seriously affect my ability to do my own work, I can no longer justify continuing to use them.

Github needs to get its shit together. You can draw a pretty clear line between Microsoft deciding it was all in on AI and the decline in Github's service quality. So I would argue that for Github to gets its shit back together, it needs to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.

Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.

It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.

The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.

So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.

Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.

The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.