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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 5th, 2025

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  • There’s all kinds of power and influence of people through the press is a very traditional kind of indirect power for people to wield. When I talk about money as power it definitely includes the power to influence how people think and vote and act without putting an actual gun to their heads. Twitter is the new TV and TV was the new radio and the radio was the new newspaper… All kinds of wealthy and powerful people in the past sought control of the press, not only for their own desires, but also as a bargaining chip with other people with power: “do this for me and I’ll make you look good on my platform…”




  • a system to eliminate, not support and elevate the poor here

    If you look at human population growth and resource consumption over the past 500 years, the curve can’t continue - we’ll need thousands of Earths within the next 1000 years, and Warp drive just isn’t ready yet.

    If “being poor” means living like the bottom 20% of the U.S., then, yes, the poor must be eliminated somehow. Pesky thing about the poor, they still have children, often at higher than replacement rates. It’s good for happiness from relative circumstances: lots of people “born poor” can work their way into a better condition for them and their children, but it’s an unsustainable model. Just like capitalism in general.











  • Our IT department and leadership are more schizophrenic than usual around AI. Top leadership wants it bad, pushing big initiatives. Risk management layer, predictably, is more cautious - requiring analysis and approvals and so forth - this is driven into IT with things like redirects from open internet AI services to internally hosted alternatives (sensible), but the internal services aren’t completely up-to-speed with tools like Cursor. So, I have approval for Cursor, and IT is helping me make it work around their filters, but then again - once in a while the Cursor software magically uninstalls itself overnight. Luckily, the work in progress is still there and when I re-install Cursor it picks up where it left off.

    We clearly have conflicting interests at work behind our company computers.


  • If you ask an AI agent (like the one on Google search) how to disable the prompt dialogue it will usually tell you something that works. This is actually nothing new, back in Windows ME days I spent 8 hours with search engines figuring out how to de-feature Windows ME until it worked like Windows 98SE, that was actually a pretty good computer/OS for the day - after I turned off all the ME garbage.