I’m reminded of Dan Wang’s commentary on US-China relations:

> Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. … That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.

https://danwang.co/ (2025 Annual letter)

The future is not predetermined by trends today. So it’s entirely possible that the dinosaur companies of today can’t figure out how to automate effectively, but get outcompeted by a nimble team of engineers using these tools tomorrow. As a concrete example, a lot of SaaS companies like Salesforce are at risk of this.

I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid.

Much like there is a premium for handmade clothing, and from scratch food. Automation does nothing but lower the value of your product (unless its absolutely required like electronics perhaps), when there is an alternative, the one made with human input/intention is always worth more.

And the idea that small nimble teams are going to outpace larger corporations is such a psyop. You really mostly hear CEOs saying these things on podcast. This is to appease the working class, to give them hope that they too one day can be a billionaire...

Also, the vast majority of people who occupy computer i/o focused jobs, whos jobs will be replaced, need to work to eat and they don't all want to go form nimble automated SaaS companies lmao, this is such a farce.. Bad things to come all around.

The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.

I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.

There is a book “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible” which you might want to consider before deciding truth doesn’t matter anymore. It describes an explicit strategy by the Kremlin to poison the information landscape with lies, half truths, and conspiracies. And amplify conflicting narratives.

Eventually people stop caring about what is true anymore.

> It describes an explicit strategy by the Kremlin to poison the information landscape with lies, half truths, and conspiracies. And amplify conflicting narratives.

For someone who wants an intro to the subject, this 2016 paper by RAND is pretty good; 'The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model':

> The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. High volume can deliver other benefits that are relevant in the Russian propaganda context. First, high volume can consume the attention and other available bandwidth of potential audiences, drowning out competing messages. Second, high volume can overwhelm competing messages in a flood of disagreement. Third, multiple channels increase the chances that target audiences are exposed to the message. Fourth, receiving a message via multiple modes and from multiple sources increases the message's perceived credibility, especially if a disseminating source is one with which an audience member identifies.

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

See also Steve Bannon's 'flood the zone' technique:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

Bannon seems to have connections with Epstein (who is may have links to Russia):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Connection_to_Jef...

“Flood the zone” is the speech version of what the Kremlin does.

If it came out that some anti-Trump terrorists were actually backed by MAGA, it would be analogous to what the Kremlin does.

> Eventually people stop caring about what is true anymore.

In the age of easy to fake video, photos, audio, etc, who wouldn't be?

nixosbestos’s comment was in response to a post about how an arbitrary brand new conspiracy theory didn’t have compelling evidence in the emails. It seems like saying “who cares” to what kind of reads like “technically there’s an infinite amount of conspiracy theories that aren’t proven in the emails” is saying the opposite of “truth doesn’t matter”

Fuck the Kremlin. Corporate America calls the same damn thing marketing, advertising, sales, and public relations respectively.

Kind of. Corporate propaganda (ads) are very much still in the old Bush-era paradigm of “repeating a lie until it becomes true”. Coke and Pepsi don’t want you to believe “nothing is true”. They want you to believe their cola is superior. Coke isn’t going to waste money creating confusion about that topic.

The Kremlin will amplify conflicting opinions. Even critics of the government. Later it will come out that those critics were sponsored by Putin, undermining any critics by association.

Thank you.

Except you and everyone you agree with I'm sure

The term “model” is one of those super overloaded terms. Depending on the conversation it can mean:

- a product (most accurate here imo)

- a specific set of weights in a neural net

- a general architecture or family of architectures (BERT models)

So while you could argue this is a “model” in the broadest sense of the term, it’s probably more descriptive to call it a product. Similarly we call LLMs “language” models even if they can do a lot more than that, for example draw images.

I'm pretty sure only the second is properly called a model, and "BERT models" are simply models with the BERT architecture.

If someone says something is a BERT “model” I’m not going to assume they are serving the original BERT weights (definition 2).

I probably won’t even assume it’s the OG BERT. It could be ModernBERT or RoBERTa or one of any number of other variants, and simply saying it’s a BERT model is usually the right level of detail for the conversation.

It depends on time. 5 years ago it was quite well defined that it’s the last one, maybe the second one in some context. Especially when distinction was important, it was always the last one. In our case it was. We trained models to have weights. We even stored models and weights separately, because models change slower than weights. You could choose a model and a set of weights, and run them. You could change weights any time.

Then marketing, and huge amount of capital came.

It seems unlikely "model" was ever equivalent in meaning to "architecture". Otherwise there would be just one "CNN model" or just one "transformer model" insofar there is a single architecture involved.

First of all, hyperparameters. Second, organization, or connections. 3rd, cost function. 4th, activation function. 5th type of learning. Etc.

These are not weights. These were parts of models.

“Lunar New Year” is vague when referring to the holiday as observed by Chinese labs in China. Chinese people don’t call it Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year anyways. They call it Spring Festival (春节).

As it turns out, people in China don’t name their holidays based off of what the laws of New York or California say.

Since Congress never authorized it, it was technically an “authorized use of military force” against Christmas.

Can we be certain that this study they are repeating with GPT5 was not in its training set?

I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.

To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.

The point is to maintain pressure so that even when the law becomes unjust, people aren't immediately harmed.

Selective enforcement has always been the law of the land.

I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

There are places with even less safety and more “freedom” than the US so people who take an absolutist view towards freedom also need to justify why the freedoms that the US does not grant are not valuable.

> I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

Sometimes. But freedom and security are not always opposed.

It’s possible to trade freedom for security but it’s also possible that freedom creates security. Both can be true at the same time. Surveillance, not security, is what opposes freedom. Surveillance simply trades one form of insecurity for another at the cost of freedom.

> For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

2A seems to make the case that the freedom to bear arms creates security. Given how history played out it’s hard to argue against. I’m not arguing we should be able to take guns on planes but 2A is an example of freedom creating security.

In general, text isn’t a great medium for transmitting spatial info. That’s why it’s easy for a model to understand an image but hard for it to draw an SVG of that image.

This is a big reason why SOTA models are trained multimodal these days. Even when you're using them for text, the knowledge they gain from images and video improves their world models.