HeisenShop sounds like a great app idea for shopaholics -- automatically don't buy / cancel random or exceeding-monthly-budget items without telling the user.

> Ugh I hate this new-age woo slant the tech industry has these days.

As opposed to the Macintosh era? ;)

The only reason the early web hype didn't have woo was because it's hard to wax poetic about a bunch of gray pizza boxes spinning in a closet.

> randomness felt more like a skin - not affecting gameplay much.

DF is a great comparison, because it speaks to the composability of properties and systems as a key requirement.

2,000+ variants that still funnel through one predesigned interaction system is not variety.

The variants need to actually compose with each other into meaningfully unique experiences / systems for the player, which is much harder to align.

Weird. It's almost like synthetic content is less fulfilling to humans than friendship.

> To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.

The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.

Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.

Smaller companies are far less likely to, as their owner is happy with their profit and actually likes running the company.

One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.

> 1. Robotics begin rolling out more broadly across the world.

To borrow the Strangelove quip, this is not only necessary but essential.

Broader physical robotic deployments are the glue that connects {cheap synthetic intelligence} to {physical outcomes}.

The former is a newer phenomenon, in the LLMs-can-approximate-higher-intelligence-well sense, so robotics deployments haven't caught up yet (outside of the highest ROI dark factory scenarios).

But it's too economically-valuable not to come.

They'd also have to be self-assembling from the ground up or rely on human slaves. They'd need to understand the world much better. And they'd have to be incredibly more power efficient. These all remain hard problems right now. That said, you could swarm people with cheap drones (the predicted slaughterbots) that were assembled by robots that eventually break down I guess, but how is that any worse than a crazy human with a gun or what nation states do to people they deem enemies already? The worst these things seem capable of is an attack on the infrastructure and shutting down the Internet. Perhaps this is a great time to insure that our infrastructure is capable of operating autonomously indefinitely and hardening it against attack? But unfortunately, no VC or politician will touch that until something bad happens.

So broadly, a better educated Blake Lemoine IMO. What's disturbing to me is how fast and far some junior minion from the frontier labs was platformed all the way to the Wall Street Journal over a tweet that sounds exactly like every other anti-AI tweet. I share concerns about irresponsible deployments of AI, and we need technological literacy in the leadership, but America hates technocracy and prefers populism so buckle up.

> They'd also have to be self-assembling from the ground up or rely on human slaves. They'd need to understand the world much better. And they'd have to be incredibly more power efficient.

All robotics needs to drive deployment at scale is (1) useful intelligence & (2) performing novel valuable functions.

Both of these are satisfied by current tech (LLM + sensors + robotics) and the existing simplest use cases (assembly lines and repetitive tasks).

LLMs get you a moderately-intelligent, mostly-reliable orchestration layer of intelligence on top of deterministic hard robotics.

And that's enough for a lot of failure-tolerant, feedback-looped cases. E.g. reading 20 dials in a factory throughout the day or monitoring a production line visually, then figuring out what to do about a problem, then effecting that plan.

It'll be deployed in heavily utilized spaces at first, but will eventually trickle down throughout the economy.

And that will be when 'control over robots' starts to be an existential threat, for denial of critical services at the minimum.

And all of this will inevitably roll out as long as ROI is positive, because that's the way the world works.

> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism

So much this.

People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree.

Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)

To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism.

And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society.

Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.

In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.

> You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you.

Which they always could, given the vastly different economic starting positions.

This has frequently been true in American history though.

Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?

Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.

Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.

The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:

   1. Complain loudly about weaponization of institutions
   2. Use public support to "reform" those institutions
   3. Weaponize those institutions against opponents
   4. (Implied) Everyone forgets those institutions were previously less corrupt

The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.

That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.