I would be fascinated to hear what value you think JP Morgan created rather than moved around. His company continues to do so long after his death.

If you don't think underwriting and lending (and extended universe of financial services) are legitimate forms of value creation, I'm afraid that a hackernews comment thread won't be up to the task of demonstrating otherwise.

Theres a reason American capital markets and tech go hand in hand after all. Just read the recent Mistral thread about the lack of capital in Europe and why Mistral seems largely third rate in the AI frontiers.

... Aren't we back to a definition, then, that includes tech companies adding value too? All the free services I use every day I would consider value for me. Instant free search, fast home delivery, insightful educational content (90s educational TV had no competition over modern educational YouTube). Etc etc. I see fewer ads than I did in the 90s, too.

I certainly didn't argue that tech companies don't add value.

one doesn't go to a gallery to watch the painting get made. Creative coding can still be enjoyed by appreciating the output.

The immediate rebuttal to that might be that "AI could just do it" but that's not entirely true - the sort of art that you (typically) see in a gallery isn't "an accurate representation of the world as viewed" just as a lot of "code as art" isn't "a problem solved with code". The camera captures (mostly accurate) images, and AI is usually writing "code that does a thing".

The expressiveness (can) come from a place that's deeply human, and can yield a product that is tangibly diifferent from what an efficient coding process would normally produce.

A few of us played a game when I was in batch at the Recurse Center - we called it Monstrosity. The game was to build a string in the absolutely least efficient way possible - using the largest stack, the most network hops, the most obfuscatory and difficult methods to create a character (bit-shifting algorithms to make ASCII, anyone?). It was beautiful, and it was the kind of thing that AI would never think to do (at least, not without significant cajoling and even then you'd be missing the point).

"We believe these representations are not serious, they're just really good friends."

That does kind of make it sound like think tanks are normally either straightforward or fundamentally honest about their agendas, which they pretty much never are. Even the ones that register and have DBAs fund reports that end up in scientific journals and publish articles through chains of obfuscatory intermediaries.

Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.

Their purpose is to oppose/defend and research an opinion.

IMO this is a good thing. How else would society organize resources to investigate political opinions? It's certainly a very partisan job and doesn't fit well into nonpartisan organizations.

This is deliberately missing the point.

Everyone knows think tanks are opinionated.

This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.

Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.

Have you served? Because I have. Still have friends in the service and they are pretty cheesed that they've been roped into this mess. Go ask a lifer what they really think about Smegsbreath some time - I think it will be enlightening.

This line of reason is one I find appealing but somewhat untimely. If I'm grokking the deeper message it's that "limiting licensed use in these creative ways opens the door to potentially evil chicanery" -- i.e. you start limiting licenses to non-police activities and then some corporation goes "great! now that we can do that our licenses now limit usage to only endeavors that boil your firstborn and undermine our competition".

Problem is in era de la grift we've sort of realized that they never needed permission - there's no precedent to set anymore.

Call that "deeper message" A1. He's got arguments A1 and A2, and goes "if P, then A1(P) implies C; and if ¬P, then A2(¬P) implies C; therefore C". But we can just as easily go "if ¬P, then A1(¬P) implies ¬C" (as you did); "and if P, then A2(P) implies ¬C; therefore ¬C". Logical arguments don't let you do this: the arguments are pure rhetoric.

Quite a lot of Richard Stallman's arguments are pure rhetoric, actually. And, I mean, I guess it worked, in that the GPL and FSF ended up being quite influential; but the trouble with building a philosophy on rhetoric is that people start to believe that rhetoric – including you –, and it erodes and replaces the foundations of their beliefs, so it'll all come crashing down sooner or later.

I don't really think we need to engage with the rhetoric on an intellectual level, since it's obviously wrong: far better to read philosophers whose reasoning is sound, or to come up with your own ideas.

Sorry, but you must be way smarter than me or something because that made no sense. Not that I don't understand what that notation is supposed to mean, but that I'm not seeing the connective tissue here. It's also a little weird to come at me based on the 'erosion of my foundation of beliefs', considering how orthogonal that is to the topic of legal precedent and contracts.

For what it's worth, what I do believe is that our system of law was a good idea at one point but is totally ineffectual in the current context - that's my point about an era of grifters. Didn't get that one from stallman, measured that on the eyeball mark I.

This is the first time my poor communication skills have been interpreted as a sign of my superior intelligence. I think I'm ready to become a professional expert consultant!

I was abstracting Richard Stallman's argument to its (il)logical structure: P and ¬P are whether the license restriction is enforceable, etcetera. "Erosion" was talking about people who, seeing free software as a good idea, begin to adhere to Stallmanite orthodoxy (which is, largely, philosophically-unsound): that was not aimed at you, but at Richard Stallman himself (the Ur-Stallmanite, we could say). I saw this as generalising your criticism. I didn't notice you were making a broader point about the law, so this was somewhat of a super­cali­fragilistic­expiali­docious non-sequitur; thanks for clarifying your point.

Ah! Sincere apologies for being defensive. Yeah, I share your eye when it comes to orthodoxy in most if not all areas - wary. The problem with any orthodoxy is that it's dumb - not as in 'stupid' but as in 'doesn't think or adapt to changing circumstances'.

Being the most correct 20 years ago is fairly meaningless today - not making a judgement on whether D-Stall is, was, or wasn't. But it's important I think to deal with reality. Thanks for your clarification!

Oh, that's lovely. So, if you don't know what the cause is, you can't really say you've mitigated it, can you? C'mere, I wanna honk your big red nose.

Recontextualized: *A person who chooses a career centered around the use of force is more likely to use force in their personal life*.

Ahdunno, where's the lie?

> where's the lie

Don't know, right there? I did martial arts and beat many people up, I even enjoyed it on many occasions. Doesn't mean I beat people in other contexts. It's called compartmentalizing.

For your compartmentalization efforts, did you get a bastardized American flag with a special thin colored line through it?

Cop culture nationwide is toxic as fuck. Can’t say the same about martial arts culture.

out of curiosity - what scheme do you suggest? I've always been of the mind that 'one thing to remember and secure, but secure it well' was the best option - 2factor and a 15+character passphrase meaning that nearly everything else gets it's own discretized blast radius.

Always open to better security, though.

Have a different password for every account, and don't store them on your computer.

Real question; what are we supposed to do about that information delay when it directly enables corruption and usury? This is an ongoing issue with historical precedent; the repeal of glass-steagall, MKULTRA and COINTELPRO, Iran-contra, watergate, the list is indefinably long.

All of these all surfed in on that very temporal ambiguity, and the fact that we have zero recourse in a plurality of cases - a situation that has eroded over time, not gotten better, and could feasibly be credited with a large part of the palpable social decay that real people are suffering from every day right now.

So what do we do about it? "Indulging in plausible conspiracy theories" could also be read here as "trying to get out ahead of this imminent yet undclear threat"

There's nothing wrong with pattern recognition. I'm just cautioning against a knee-jerk reaction based on the current information, which is limited, and will become more clear over the next few days.

I don't think the outcome will be particularly unexpected (I assume that Anthropic will have to kiss the ring), but it's not yet clear what the outcome is. I mostly take issue with uninformed people claiming with ignorant confidence that they KNOW exactly what is happening in this scenario, which they, in all likelihood, do not.

So yeah, we all probably know how this will shake out to some degree, but those who claim they KNOW it's a "shakedown like with Tylenol" are just guessing, a.k.a making shit up. This may be part of the usual playbook, but it will likely have its own twists and turns, or could turn out to be something different altogether.

I'm with you on the uninformed / confident vector in general, but you do seem fairly level-headed so I still want your take on the question: what do we do about it? How do we approach the problem of "most of our problems stem from an intractable information asymmetry, and this could be existential"?