Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.

> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.

So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.

> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".

I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.

Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".

> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.

Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".

If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?

It's like sure yea you can access the Internet and tinker around or whatever, and with some old LLM model you can have it do fun things, but on a scale of absolute usefulness and if we include what people actually pay money for and what is highly adopted, your laptop and model are severely outdated and by and large irrelevant. That's why the iPhone sells like hotcakes all day every day and twice on Sunday and Apple is a $5 trillion company. Society disagrees with your measure of usefulness.

Sorry I'm rate limited since Dang thinks I'm arguing to much on political topics (he's probably right), but to answer a couple of questions regarding "my old technology does this one thing" you are conflating your personal and nostalgic uses for old hardware/software with what is useful for society or business. If the old hardware was still just as useful as the new hardware it would be used instead of the new hardware.

There could be, they can actually come from open American companies too. Ask yourself why we aren't seeing a thousand or more American AI startups spring into life overnight to build "open" models. Follow the economics.

> What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?

> And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.

What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs. Maybe in the future it can be much easier, but in that case you run into a sort of tautology where it becomes easier but the leading companies continue to lead and do so by a significant margin because they're the ones that have the most talent and access to capital.

The premise seemed to be "an open China" versus a "closed USA". I'm not sure that's a great premise. If China can create open-weight models so can the US. If the US can close their models (as clearly evidenced by the article) so can the Chinese.

Besides...

"If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.

They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information. "

So pretty soon they won't even "do it".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/world/asia/china-exports-...

What specifically could have been faked? "The whole thing"? In that case you're wrong because the whole thing happened.

But if you want to be specific you can enumerate each thing you believe could have been faked and we can prove or disprove each one individually.

Either. You can check major sources (WSJ, Financial Times, &c.)

> because the official ones are very questionable?

I trust the institution regardless of what party is in power.

I see no evidence that it was "faked". Tesla and SpaceX both employee world-class engineers who can as far as I'm aware build machines or systems that can do things like this.

What does fake even mean in this context? Why don't you specifically call out the very things you think are fake and explain in detail and with factual evidence why they are fake instead of "Elon could have faked the demo". Someone can just say "Elon couldn't have faked the demo". Both are just asinine opinions, not arguments.

> I can see you want to create a firewall between Elon and Tesla but it's ridiculous. He calls the shots. He is famous for calling the shots.

I'm not though. I won't buy a Tesla because of Elon. I dislike him. Telsa still builds cars and SpaceX still sends rockets in to space. No amount of my or your personal distaste for Elon Musk changes the work that engineers who are not Elon Musk do.

If you think that it does, then you prove it. Otherwise, all of my points just continue to stand as they have been.

That’s a strawman

Don’t know and don’t really care as it applies to whether this car was actually built by engineers and then did the things that were widely reported on it doing.

> What on earth causes someone to be a bootlicker for someone that horrible. It's mind blowing.

I’m not though. I’m just anti-bad argument which is what you are presenting here.

Now yea of course as an obvious foreigner nobody really cares because lol foreigner and even more so in super busy touristy areas but my understanding is it really isn’t done. Same with walking and eating.