Isn’t this what World Coin is? Definitively not a fan of the project but I think the general goal is to get people to verify they are human and then somehow “waves hands blockchain” that can be carried with them on the internet.

Grifting is about as American as apple pie honestly. Melville is of course know for Moby Dick where he delves into the psyche of the Great American Man but he also wrote The Confidence Man. Mark Twain’s work is full of con men and grifters. Ponzi laid the groundwork for more complex schemes in the 20s. Pyramid schemes were all the rage in the 40/50s, Tupperware parties as an example, and of course still are huge today.

It seems like whenever American society is changing very rapidly or has changed very rapidly con men become the powerful ones of the time. Maybe this is true everywhere but as an American I don’t know the history of cons in other countries.

I’m still waiting for someone to build a good lisp harness. Stick an agent in a lisp repl and they can change literally anything they want easily.

I've been thinking of doing the exact same thing. Preserve context as images and die. Expose a single tool called "eval". You could have a extremely tight editor integration using something like SLIME.

My guess is that this time even if there’s a TACO you can’t turn back the clock on everything that’s happened. The tariffs are mostly an on/off switch. You can’t unbomb infrastructure.

Or easily un-convince people who've been bombed that they need to hold nearby trade hostage for retribution/protection.

This is a great reminder that the line drawn by Anthropic is already too far and that if you’ve been driven to cancel your OpenAI account by their behavior you should also cancel your Anthropic account.

The other pattern that’s a bit less explicit here is that these technologies try to win over the public by theorizing on their incredible peace time use. While many genuinely have great use in peacetime we should not allow that to blind ourselves to their wartime potential. Many of us have little power to direct the future but for those who care doing what you can do is always more than nothing and when done in concert with others does have an impact.

I didn’t cancel my ChatGPT subscription because OpenAI were willing to accept different terms of use for their AI tools than Anthropic. I canceled my subscription because they were willing to negotiate with a government that was engaged in an unlawful attempt to coerce and extort a competitor.

How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.

EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...

There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.

In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.

In Atlanta in 2000, I was making $52K a year working for a medium size company that printed bills. By 2002 I was making $65K at the same company.

For context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house built that year for $175K.

The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering

Housing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.

Damn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.

Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.

Housing (which is actually land in the school district you want to be in)

Healthcare

Education (not just for learning, but for signaling).

Everything else is inconsequential in my budget.

I don't understand why. People spend money on other things besides housing. Because people spend money on multiple things, it doesn't really make that much sense to say that our index of inflation should track be one thing. I mean, if the price of food and healthcare tripled, I think you would probably say that the inflation metrics should go up.

Ofc, focusing on just one thing is very convenient for people who want to tell a particular story. (inflation is so bad! look at housing! there's so much deflation! look at food and TVs!)

I think it's because housing is the biggest expenditure for my family. Like I said, you should build your own index, not using the CPI or other people's index. Similarly, change in life can increase expenditures, too, e.g. getting a child prompts the family to buy a house instead of staying in a condo.

For my family, housing is easily the primary expenditure -- around 6,000 CAD while (food + vehicle) amount to less than 2,500 CAD monthly. For a similar family in the same area with on vehicle, I estimate that housing probably takes at least half of their expenditure.

Thats the issue with CPI, it tells a skewed story because it makes presumptions about volumes of things people buy.

If Eggs go up 0% and Rent goes up 50%, CPI indicates a “25% growth” which is stupid.

Yes, that would be stupid, which is why it doesn't work that way. The basket is weighted according to how much people spend on each item. Eggs are not weighted the same as rent.

The CPI does have a problem with not updating the basket as frequently as it could, which means it doesn't catch substitution effects and tends to overstate inflation.

did we just invent that or does housing-based cpi exist ?

It'll never happen because it shines a light on uncomfortable facts that would risk far too much cognitive dissonance across the political spectrum. Please keep the discourse to identity politics, culture wars, the Epstein files, and large-scale, unprovoked acts of international warfare; those will all be much easier for us to talk about as a nation than what we should do about housing prices.

Yeah you forgot the aliens ;)

Not even close, not when all things are considered. $50/hour is 100k/year, which is still considered a decent salary. 24k/year in 2000-2002 was definitely not considered a decent salary. $12/hour for sw engineers was evil. I hung up on that recruiter and cursed for a while, cold-called my way to a transitional $20/hr job, and then finally landed somewhere at $55/hr which is when things started to feel normal again. $55/hr back then is not the same as $230/hr now.

I think when you go up from 55 to 230 it is different from 12 to 50. But yeah, somehow I thought that was 20, not 12...

I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.

Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.

I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster.

I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash

This is absolutely spot on. The thing that surprises me the most is why so many software engineers don’t seem to understand this intuitively. Your job does not end when the pr is merged. What you just merged becomes part of a system it is also your job to ensure continuous successful function of. Even if you’ve got a large devops/sysadmin org it’s still on you to understand how everything plugs together and what context your code is running in.

Maybe the LLMs will get there. I do suspect it’s less of a capabilities problem and more of a harness problem.

We don’t need agi or superintelligence for these things to be dangerous. We just need to be willing to hand over our decision making to a machine.

And of course a human can make a wrong call too. In this scenario that’s what is happening. And of course we should bring all of our tools to bear when it comes to evaluating nuclear threats.

But that doesn’t make it less concerning that we’ve now got machines capable of linguistic persuasion in that toolset.

"hand over" is a misnomer - what actually happens is that there's an interaction with a machine and people either trust it too much, or forget that it's a machine (i.e. handed from one person to another and the "AI warning" label is accidentally or intentionally ripped off)