I haven’t driven at night in a while until recently and I was wondering if it was just me losing my ability to distinguish cars but when I looked into my rearview at night, especially on multilane highways, it just looked like a disorienting constellation of stars. I don’t remember trying to figure out wtf is happening behind me being so hard.

Am I just getting bad at driving or is this a universal experience?

Only if you dip them in “cheese” sauce to get protein, that’s what’s called a balanced diet.

It’s not just the Saudis, in fact they’re one of the few who haven’t signed on to the abraham accords, it’s the entire ruling class of the Arab world who would rather get US money and weapons then confront the terrorist state destabilizing the region.

Sacrificial lamb to the almighty stock market to stop the stock from hemorrhaging value.

I’m having trouble understanding you’re objection to it then. If the purpose of art is to make you feel something and this AI media is accomplishing that, why do you need to distinguish between the two?

Do you not trust what’s happening in those higher dimensions?

Do you want to preserve a walter benjamin-esque aura in human art?

According to the article it’s going into long term treasuries

In the bond market, Treasury yields continued to tumble. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.84% from 4.90% late Wednesday. It had been at 4.95% on election night and above 5.30% last month. That could be a signal that investors are herding into U.S. Treasury bonds in search of something that’s safer to own as stock prices tumble.

For those who don’t know how bonds work, a bonds yield going down means its price has gone up. Say a bond pays $2 a year. If that bond is priced at $100 then it’s yield is 2% , if that bonds price goes up to $200 then it’s yield is now only 1%.

Fuck the billionaires who’ve hijacked my city.

Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.

you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI

You don’t have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.

You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it’s an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It’s fine to have those objections, but you can’t say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that’s just taking away the enjoyment of others.

Sounds nice but how much of campaign funding these days is done by “artificial persons”?

At least here we have disclosure laws where we see the top 3 donors to an ad and most of the time it’s a real person who’s just very rich, eg. Sergey brin donating $100 million to stop the billionaire tax. The one weird exception this time was open AI and anthropic supporting the local transit measure.

Idk about disciplining billionaires, I’m no lawyer but it seems they’re only prohibiting “artificial persons” from donating to political campaigns. Elon musk a “real person” can still donate all he wants.

I live in San Francisco and my new rep had his campaign funded by a cohort of tech billionaires. I could call him every day and it won’t matter, this election has shown billionaires run the politics in this city.

Same goes for almost every other dem, they’re going to be afraid of AI companies funding their opponents so they won’t do anything. Look at crypto, it’s an obvious scam defrauding millions of normal people but no legislation has ever been passed because they have money.

Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere?

Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.

For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.

The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.

If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.

There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.

People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.

Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.

Serious danger?

You think the corporate Dems who just got elected are going to do anything to curtail big tech?

Washington passed a similar referendum too, even blue states are falling for the transphobic agenda.

Yes, but the big glow creates those bugs instead of keeping them away

Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.

It’s nice to see people turning on trump but this doesn’t really mean anything. Almost everything trump has done ( ICE raids, Iran war, Tariffs) has been done through executive power which he still has. He’s never gotten congressional approval for any of it, nor does he need to as long as the supreme court is still stacked with GOP

The one positive is that senate seats are held for 6 years, so it’ll be easier for a dem administration that replaces trump in 2028 to pass stuff.

How are they gonna do that?

Pretty much everything trumps done (ICE goons, Iran war, tariffs) he’s done through executive power. He hasn’t gotten congressional approval for any of it and the only ones who can make him do that is the supreme court which is still GOP controlled.

The only thing he got passed was the big beautiful bill and congress can’t repeal that while trump still has the veto.

but they couldn’t even be fucking bothered to vote for the progressive in the primary for Pelosi’s seat.

Connie chan and Saikat chakrabati were both running on a progressive platform and Chan won the primary because she had more local connections, not because Saikat was more progressive. If anything Connie had more working class bona fides being backed by the working families party and not being a centi-millionaire.

Even Scott wiener, the moderate poised to win, supports Medicare for all, Pro act, abolishing ICE, anti-AI, and even calling Gaza a genocide (after he was forced to) . By most measures he will be on the far left of the house.