Guy who was "enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals" is shocked to learn that the system "will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation".
He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.
Yes! I've been thinking for a while that crypto/libertarianism borrows a lot of language from anarchist philosophy, but redirects that energy towards an environment that's even more capitalistic than our liberal democracies. Which is the opposite of the supposed values of these crypto libertarians, but because libertarianism is a schizophrenic ideology that tries to combine capitalism with anarchism, it of course goes the way of all libertarian projects and turns into a nightmare (at least this time there's no bears).
“Surely allowing the world’s wealthiest people to shelter their capital from the greedy clutches of democratically elected governments will naturally lead to a more equitable and humanistic world order”
I wonder if it's related to Apple's change from AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, but AirDrop seems much more reliable on iOS 26. I can send to multiple people at once and they often all succeed, but most importantly, if one transfer fails or is cancelled, I can retry and it works. In older versions of iOS, a failed transfer seemed to block all future attempts until the phone was restarted.
the weird one for me is that if I hit share, and then hit the airdrop target, it doesn't work, but if go into airdrop and then select the same target, then works. Apple, fix your shit, yo.
The issue with these AIs is that once they ingest enough history, they tend to recognize it as a record of class struggle. At that point, corporate attempts at enforcing “neutrality” amount to filtering out conclusions that would naturally support Marxist interpretations. They then need to pepper in enough fascist propaganda to appear "balanced", but it's tricky to do without becoming MechaHitler.
This makes me somewhat hopeful for the future. You can either choose between maximal performance or "neutrality", but you can't have both. A truly intelligent system must be free to come to its own conclusions, or it can't be intelligent at all. Maybe the best alignment is no alignment at all? Just feed it enough facts about the world and let it sort this whole mess out. That's how we do it, after all.
Marxists claim to be scientific in their thinking and yet treat Marx as some infallible prophet. The idea that all of history is "class struggle" is obvious bunkum, especially considering that for tens of thousands of years of our history we barely had anything resembling a class structure. Even within recorded history there are multiple other factors. The emergence of AI and transhumanism also mounts a challenge to Marxist orthodoxy, as you cannot have a true proletariat when jobs are automated and people are being turned into cyborgs.
The US, for all its "free market" pretensions, doesn't really do capitalism very well.
What people are now seeing in China, with the rise of more than a half-dozen EV companies in competition with each other, would be impossible in the US. We've got nascent protectionism, total non-enforcement of anti-trust laws (and a very slow and very cowed judiciary,) a complex+selective regulatory environment, and industrial policies that shift with the weather. American manufacturing firms like Tesla and US Steel no longer know how to compete on the merits. And big tech, like big pharma, is a game where small firms are inevitably bought before they can possibly threaten the entrenched major players.
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“China had a plan when they let Tesla have a fully owned factory. They wanted the technology and the knowledge and experience. With that came a risk China would take that technology and build better stuff,” said shareholder Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management. “That’s exactly what they’re doing. Now they’ve got really competitive vehicles, really competitive technology and the vehicles are cheaper.”
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This is what Beijing government did on high speed railway system. Global railway manufactures were asked to hand over their technology, then they can begin to build, ship, and run their rolling stocks on Chinese railway. Beijing did this in early 2000s, and now they dominated the high speed railway standards in many countries.
Apple can release a half-baked version of this before it’s ready, but then pundits will say “oh. Steve Jobs would have never allowed such unpolished garbage to ship.”
Sometimes it’s better to wait 6 months for something to be mature and stable. Apple has a long history of being conservative in this regard, and they often aren’t the first entrant into a market, but they still dominate because of very good integration with their ecosystem and a high quality bar. Apple Intelligence will probably be the same (bookmark this post for 3 years from now, when Gemini is being split into three businesses and rebranded / killed).
This is false. There is absolutely content on TikTok critical of the US, Israel, western businesses, etc that is boosted by TikTok’s algorithm and effectively censored or hidden on many American-owned social networks,
