As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.

How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?

I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.

For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.

I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.

I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.

Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!

If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.

It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.

They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.

This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.

Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.

As a society we can't place excess faith in the orthodox positions of institutions. We all know they can be rigid, wrong, and lock out dissenting views. But society today seems to embrace heterodoxy for its own sake the way perhaps in the past orthodoxy was just accepted on pure faith and there is a vast media ecosystem happy to promote (ie monetize) this worldview. Just because something is heterodox doesn't make it right.

Have a wonderful weekend all.

Let me try to rephrase where I am coming from. I'm going to accept there is a good argument that some science funding should be redirected towards theoretical physicists pursuing alternate approaches.

1. The focus towards this matter in online media circles is vastly disproportionate to the relative impact this has on anyone's life compared to the multitude of other intra-silo disputes across the federal budget. It's not irrelevant to the conversation or at least my subsection of the conversation. It is interesting to me what debates burst through the noise and get traction outside of their own little world. Maybe 1% of the people debating string theory online actually understand a micro-fraction of this stuff. To be clear, I don't claim to be in that 1%. I'm interested in how that happened and the cultural+platform reasons for it. I'm interested in why alongside those genuinely interested in alternative approaches to theoretical physics this topic attracts tons of people who just lump it in with their "they are all lying to you" worldview. Nothing this obscure, incomprehensible, and yes irrelevant to most peoples lives should have organically reached such breakout status. I can ask some of the 22 year old bros at my jiu jitsu gym what they think of string theory and they will tell me it's all part of the omni-conspiracy. It's literally the only science thing they know. It's not like they understand a word of the debate or know of/care about a single other intra-discipline debate about the allocation of resources. 2. No small part of this is the unfortunate emergence of the online narcissist huckster and nothing plays better in online circles than "they" don't want you to know the truth that "I" have the true answer but "Big X" won't admit it. This clown show distracts from the real merits of the relative positions. But it does get the charismatic narcissist a slot on general interest "they are all always lying to you" podcasts. 3. Obviously this doesn't apply to legit physicists and good faith normies who simply disagree with the existing dogma. That's not who I'm talking about. That said, theoretical physics is bargain basement cheap. I don't need to build a supercollider the size of Mars. I don't need to sequence a trillion genomes. I need a laptop, a whiteboard, some time to think, and a bit of ancillary budget. Surely there are enough allied tech/crypto heterodox rich dudes at this point to fund a Center for Heterodox ToEs and staff it with 50 bright people to prove they have something to add. I can't pretend to have the chops to analyze Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity vs String Theory. I do know if I really thought I had the answer to the universe and his bankroll/connections I'd just fund a real research effort to prove it vs. doing the podcast circuit ad infinitum.

Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork.

But only string theory impinges on a generation of cranks who are convinced they alone have the insight into the true ToE and would be recognized as the new Einstein were it not for some entrenched cabal. Maybe I shouldn’t reflexively trust “big science” or something but it’s also not great to evaluate science by who is more charismatically narcissistic on a podcast.

Again, I don’t have a big axe to grind on the merits here. But it’s hilarious that folks with zero science background past middle school hear some of these cranks on YouTube and feel worthy to decry Witten as an enemy of the people. Between the podcast bro who was just told his ToE was right by ChatGPT and Witten I’ll take Witten.