netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Yeah, it screams KPI to me.
We’re techy enough that our investors want to see it, so by God, we’re going to pay someone for their model. Then you’ve got to show that you’re actually using it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Judging by the report, the main vector is “wouldn’t it be cool if we could achieve 10% more with the same personnel?” That’s more realistic than blockchain, but it’s not explosive. It’s not overcoming a longstanding cliff in the same way as, say, telecom.
Well. Maybe in fields like digital art and voice acting. It’s not a coincidence that those are seeing the most Luddics concerned citizens. But how many companies can directly turn voice synth into revenue?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
What’s the base rate?
If I saw “rapid revenue acceleration” on a mass email from my upper management, I’d expect roughly zero change in my day to day experience. 95% “little to no impact” is right there in Lizardman territory.
Press releases have the same incentives whether or not a technology (or policy, or reorg, or consent decree, or…) is actually going to benefit me. Companies compete on hype, and so long as AI is a Schelling point, we are basically obligated to mention it. That’s not evidence that the hype is real, or even that management believes it’s real. Just that it’s an accepted signal of agility and awareness.
The article points out a number of stumbling blocks. Centralizing adoption. Funding marketing instead of back-office optimizations. Rolling your own AI. Companies which avoided these were a lot more likely to see actual revenue improvements.
I can say that my company probably stalled out on the second one. I’m in a building full of programmers, but the even the most AI-motivated are doing more with Copilot at home than with the company’s GPT wrapper. There’s no pipeline for integrated programming tools. Given industry-specific concerns about data, there might never be!
But that means we haven’t reached the top of an adoption curve. If the state of the art never advanced, we could still get value just from catching up. That leaves me reluctant to wave away the underlying technology.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Why not?
Authors include non-terminal values all the time. The most popular reason has to be giving the good guys something to punch. The second is probably verisimilitude. How do you know these elements are indispensable, terminal, rather than artistic decisions?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Care to tell the old joke? I’m not sure how I’d google it…
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
If those principles were enough to gracefully preempt censorship, we’d never have had the original Comstock Act. Puritanical book-bannings. Witch hunts for communists and anarchists. Acting as if our elders had it all figured out is the laziest sort of rose-tinted glasses.
I find myself curious. Are there any cases where your principles haven’t guided you to agree with whatever Fox News has most recently said?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Given that somebody has waited a whole year longing, nonstop, for death, he should be allowed to die. If he must die, it should minimize the harm done to those who survive him. Therefore, he should be allowed to seek assistance.
I understand the perverse incentives for his caretakers, his beneficiaries, his insurer, and the welfare state. A random nonprofit in a foreign country does not have these same incentives.
I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to.
Naturally.
In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas.
This is certainly not true. It’s not even true for your examples. Some of them didn’t make any sense before modern technology. Others are playing games with definitions—how much immigration is “mass” immigration, exactly? And the others are laughable. Do you seriously think censorship laws were held at bay by “traditional arguments”?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Can you, uh, rely on the most miserable, desperate portion of the population to make optimal decisions? Optimal for the rest of us, that is. It’s not like they’re going to be around to clean up.
In the best case, that’s first responders removing a body. I think most cases are messier, more personal, or otherwise worse. They’re externalities to the suicide. Mitigating those is worth something.
incentivizing profits
Okay, but that’s a fully general argument against doing stuff. Plenty of companies are naturally incentivized towards collateral damage. We generally handle this by regulating them instead of banning their industry outright.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Do they not?
The women who are getting IUDs obviously prefer them to abortions. Providers like Planned Parenthood seem happy to offer them. What more do you expect?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.
Firearms are a different story. People certainly make the argument. But I suspect causation goes the other way, and they’re using the suicide statistics as a motte for policies they want anyway. Ex. Prevent Firearm Suicide.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Heh.
I always just thought of it as the Napoleon diagram.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Were the other guns designed or made wrong?
No. They’re awaiting the opportune moment. Kind of like a SIG.
In all seriousness, the purpose of a thing can be divorced from its usage statistics. The vast majority of nuclear weapons have never killed anyone. Instead they work via the threat of fulfilling their purpose.
Guns are an effective threat against almost anyone. That makes them useful whether or not they actual kill.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Concealed carry isn’t about freaking people out.
It got popular in the 70s and 80s as part of the broader political struggle. Liberal, urban states adopted stricter policies and rural ones looked for ways to signal their opposition. Revoking old concealed-carry bans was one option.
Arguments about “not marking yourself as a target” or “strategic ambiguity” are secondary.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I would naively expect it to help, if only by making charging and sentencing easier.
Oregon tried that decriminalization experiment with drug possession. But it was hideously confounded by fentanyl, and I didn’t find any studies from the recriminalization last year.
Maybe there’s something in gang violence stats? Police have a longstanding interest in disarming gangs. It should be possible to tell whether changes in general gun policy, or even in enforcement, actually reduce gang shootings.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
But how much do they want that?
Saying “I think St. Thomas was pretty admirable” isn’t the same as putting on the hairshirt yourself.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
We ask that top-level posts in the main thread get a little more substance. If you don’t want to elaborate, you could try the Sunday thread.
The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.
I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
It’s adapting a quote from Goebbels. Using a nominally-accurate term as an insult is the point.
In Turok’s model, mottizens neoreactionaries are strivers in denial. They want to be comfortable, educated, well-connected arbiters of taste, but admitting such would give the outgroup too much credit. So they try to construct a rival hierarchy which puts their class markers at the top.
If this is true, then the most vicious thing Turok can do is point it out, revealing the neoreactionary’s class interest. That’s why Turok assumes that he’ll get banned. “They hated Him because He told the truth.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Uh, no?
Would you care to explain exactly how you think being Haitian is comparable to Down’s?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I don’t know that I’d call it “virtue-signaling,” but…what did you think “pro-life” meant?
67% aborted means 33% carried.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I have Godmakers somewhere but never got around to it. Not familiar with the others. Would you say they’re worth it?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Agreed on all counts.
You get this pre-leftist strain of environmentalism combined with such a feudal, reactionary setting.
Prescient indeed.
Since most (successful?) adopters get their tools by licensing from GPT or Claude, I would guess it’s an attempt to show return on that investment.
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