I think we should hold the individuals accountable directly. But we can't. The system is skewing further and further from the point where we could. Look at the Epstein files - everyone on the planet knows that there is a mountain of evidence condemning someone rich and powerful, and nothing will be done about it.

In the meantime, I want to stop handing weapons to the powerful people that we can't hold to account. I don't think we should stop all R&D - but I think "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes" are uniquely dangerous. I also used to think the "AI" companies were full of shit, until my work handed me a bottomless anthropic API key to use for claude code. They can successfully navigate novel situations using tools to interact with the world. Tasks like "find me 20 puritanical whitehouse staffers who are cheating on their spouses, using credit card / location history" are now costly only in terms of api tokens. Going the other direction - "Find the organizers of this protest. Using all the information collected by big tech, find an unrelated criminal offence they have committed".

They've claimed the term, this is not a useful objection to make at this point. And everyone was fine with calling our shitty little computer vision handwriting parsers "AI algorithms" before LLMs.

> We've somehow been able to do this for nuclear weapons which can literally obliterate civilization at the press of a button

Knowing what you know about nuclear weapons, if you ran into the Manhattan Project scientists, would you still be cheering them on? "Thanks guys, our democracies are so stable these will literally never be used for a nuclear holocaust, and they might have useful mining applications!"

Can you not think of any exceptionally nasty things the US government could do with the "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes"? Do you think maybe it might be a good idea to develop that technology after you have made sure that the government serves the peoples interest?

Well Zuck has that big scary hedge, and I’m sure people have been going after him for ages.

> I despise Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t want to firebomb his house: I want his company neutered and/or broken up, I want him stripped of his ill-gotten wealth, and ideally I want him to face criminal prosecution and incarceration.

Great! Is the plan to wait until after the billionaires have their AI controlled military drone swarms to have this revolution? Because they already control your government - I don’t think you will achieve anything like this through legal means

I also vigorously dislike the industry, but your stance 'I'm on the skeptic side of "AI"' is something you need to address - saying this in the friendliest way possible, you are wrong.

AI needs to be opposed, because the billionaires are going to use it to turn the world into shit, but if the best the AI opposition can muster is "AI isn't useful", we are fucked. It's extremely powerful and can do bizzaro things when you rig it up with tools - the kinds of things we need to prevent companies like Google from doing with it, no one is paying attention to.

[1] double-tapped: a phrase referring to the practice of firing a second missile after the first to kill any rescuers or surviving schoolgirls

2 Million a ship seems like a pretty cheap price to pay for the damage the us and Israel have inflicted on Iran - they cannot be made to pay it though, so I suppose the rest of us will have to (through marginally higher oil prices in the long term - much less than the spectacularly high oil prices the US war will cause in the short term)

They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket, and are discovering that their payments haven't bought much.

I'm not saying the tech job situation in America isn't bad - but the world dances to America's fiddle, and its frustrating hearing Americans complain about how hard their situation is while their boot is firmly planted on my neck

That's fair, sorry for that.

> considering how much more dangerous a government's mass spying is to its own citizens living in it 24/7, it's not unreasonable for that to be the focus

The US government is actively trying to influence politics in my country and spending huge amounts of money to do it. The US government is a much larger threat to us than our own government.

All of our tech is owned and operated by US companies, which means the US government has read/write access to all of our data. If we attempt to incentivize domestic software production (e.g. by taxing imported software, or by stipulating where our data can be stored and who can access it), the US government will destroy our economy. This has played out a few times recently.

I can't believe we were so foolish as to let this situation grow. Its going to be a painful few decades.

I review all the code Claude writes and I don't accept it unless I'm happy with it. My coworkers review it too, so there is real social pressure to make sure it doesn't suck. I still make all the important decisions (IO, consistency, style) - the difference is I can try it out 5 different ways and pick whichever one I like best, rather than spending hours on my first thought, realizing I should have done it differently once I can see the finished product, but shipping it anyways because the tickets must flow.

The vibe coding stuff still seems pretty niche to me though - AI is still too dumb to vibe code anything that has consequences, unless you can cheat with a massive externally defined test suite, or an oracle you know is correct

E.g., you could do what World of Warcraft does - Gold can be earned/exchanged in game, and can also interact with the real world in nebulous ways. Using the hyper advanced technologies of relational databases and ignoring financial legislation, they have enabled ultra-high-throughput microtransactions, with the added benefit of not spraying the public ledger on to the desk of every law enforcement agency on the planet.

The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it