I have to admit I often have trouble summoning the motivation to vote in the midterms. Usually the polling in my state is so lopsided that it seems pointless. However, it turns out that the two senate candidates this year are within five points of each other. Realistically, the MAGA candidate is probably going to win, but it’s close enough this time to be worth the effort. It also helps that there are local measures I care about. And of course, there’s the need to at least try to do something about this abominable administration.
Trump’s second term is pretty much the dumpster fire I expected. Many of his most dangerous initiatives have been blocked by the courts. So far. But the courts are slow, and while they’ve mostly held the line, that line has often felt thin and fragile. A hostile congress, or at least one that doesn’t roll over whenever the president violates the constitution or law, would be a big improvement.
Not that I’m in love with the Democrats right now. Among other things, I’m not onboard with the left’s turn against the tech industry. And sure, they’re talking affordability now, but I can’t easily forget their cavalier attitude toward inflation when they were in charge. As a social liberal who’d like to see a more robust social safety net, I’ve long been a reliable vote for the Democrats. But I have my own finances to think about, and inflation isn’t good for them.
That said, the current inflation problem would be less of an issue if we weren’t in a pointless war in the middle east. Capriciously picking trade wars and trying to undermine the Fed’s independence also aren’t helping. But even without those dangers, an overstimulated economy is prone to inflation, which is what I think we have with our runaway deficits. Neither side is talking much about that, except to throw out fantasy solutions. (Realistic solutions, unfortunately, involve some combination of tax hikes (not just for billionaires) and benefit cuts.)
But politics is about getting the best deal you can for now. With that in mind, divided government seems like the best option.
Anyway, I did my usual thing and voted early. This is typically the point where I complain about my state making mail-in voting pointlessly difficult, but I lucked out this time and found myself near one of the early voting locations when it wasn’t crowded. And there’s a non-trivial chance this year of Trump trying to interfere with late counting, which makes voting in person actually feel like the safer option. It’s pathetic we have to think like that in this country, but it appears to be where we are.
If you’re a US citizen and care at all about what happens in this country, please vote, in person if possible. Don’t be complacent or fatalistic from what you hear about the polls. Polls often have systematic errors. Vote. If you don’t, your opinion literally doesn’t count.
A tragedy. And also terrifying. Fascism or at least tyranny seems to beckon in so many corners. My only disagreement is my fear and loathing of big tech. Thank god for the open source movement and, hopefully, the development of cheap neuromorphic chips. The tech bros are every bit and dangerous as your vicious, insane, demented “president”.
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Maybe I’m in denial, but I’m still hoping we avoid a breakdown of democracy. On big tech, for me, it feels like a mistake to paint all the tech companies with the same brush. There are certainly some I’m not wild about, and I’ll freely admit none are saints. But it feels counter-productive to just be against the technology business, or business in general, which feels like the mode many on the left have fallen into.
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Where are you seeing this skepticism of tech on the left anyway? The left is for the CDC, vaccines, food safety, the EPA, NASA science, the reduction of greenhouse gases. Do you expect the left to jump on board with the cast of characters monetizing AI?
What I’m skeptical about is the next big bailout that’s going to come with these AI companies start going belly-up. I ‘m starting to wonder if some of their latest philanthropy and mea culpas on rogue agents are actually a prelude for the industry looking for a life raft. In other words, make their mistakes our problem so we bail them out.
It also doesn’t seem unreasonable for tech to pay for their power consumption and locate their data centers far enough away that they don’t bother people or wildlife.
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I definitely think the request from AI companies for regulation is a cynical ploy with at least two objectives: to try to insulate themselves from existing product liability laws and lawsuits, and to erect entry barriers for new competition. We shouldn’t allow them either.
But I don’t think we need to do what Sanders, AOC, and others on the left want to do either, outlaw it or throw other regulations at it. All that will do is chase that development out of the country.
I’m totally onboard with making datacenters provide their own power, although that’s not necessarily a panacea, since they’ll be going for the same natural resources used by general utility companies (natural gas, coal, etc), and local communities could still see a bill increase from that. But it’s better than nothing. And I don’t think we want to ban the datacenters either since, again, we’ll just be chasing them out of the country.
On the possibility of bailouts, probably the best thing that could happen is what’s happening right now. Long term interest rates have been going up, which is making borrowing money more expensive for the builders. At the center of many bubbles is cheap money. The Fed finally getting around to raising short term rates will also help, even though it’s painful for anyone looking to buy or sell a home right now.
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Data centers … in space!
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Wait for the next Carrington Event to see what a good idea that is.
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Exactly. That’ll end their reign!
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Rising interest rates could burst the bubble. This is a lot more like the dot.com bubble in my view, but it could fall over into the financial sector if banks have more exposure than seems apparent. If Oracle et al can’t refinance their investments, then the dominoes could start to fall.
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From what I’ve read, until this year, the hyperscalers were building using excess cash they had on hand. Sounds like a lot of investors took comfort from that. But now they’re borrowing money, which some worry could indeed entangle the financial sectors if things go south. That plus a lot of articles expressing concern about the sheer size of the buildout and comparing it to past bubbles is making investors skittish. Tech stocks have been sliding lately and some IPOs are being postponed. Of course, some of this could just be normal election time jitters. We might know more in November and December.
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Almost nobody is profitable on AI and a lot of companies are down big, they might not make the money back before the equipment is obsolete. But the big issue is how does any company provide anything, even something of revolutionary capabilities and intelligence, without every other major player – including China – immediately having the same ability. All which means we could have either a glut of AI and high competition in pricing or a bunch of players leave the business with their investments unrecouped.
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I tend to think the hyperscalers are in better shape than the specific AI startups. Yes, they’ll be stuck with obsolete hardware in a few years, but if AI adoption takes longer than they’re anticipating, that hardware can be used for general cloud computing. But the AI labs themselves? Yeah, their position seems more tenuous, with the open source / open weight models on their heels. I’ve been using Gemini a lot lately, which I understand to be based on open source and open weight models, and it’s doing as well as the proprietary ones from 6-12 months ago.
But if you think about the pioneers of other tech revolutions (Netscape, Excite, Visicalc, Wordstar, Commodore) it wouldn’t be unusual if most of the current prominent names today in the AI space aren’t around in a decade.
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Polls are deliberately biased to reflect the outcome the companies behind the polls want.
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I agree for a portion of them. There are others that at least try to be accurate. Nonetheless, individual polls are “noisy” since they always involve a lot of assumptions. The poll aggregators help. (My current favorites are RealClearPolling and DDHQ.) But even they can’t eliminate errors from common assumptions that have historically been right but turn out to be wrong in a particular election.
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I do find it fascinating that almost none of your readers have commented on what is perhaps the most important post you have written in recent years. You are appealing for freedom, for the “good” , for a way to escape the greed and tyranny into which your country is inexorably slipping. And yet no applauds your efforts, no one cheers you on. I hope you will excuse this very personal approach, but the situation saddens me. We can have little hope for a better world when so few seem to care. Perhaps your readers are mostly American. Perhaps they are in fear that your regime will track them and send in the ICE stormtroopers. Such people will ensure by their lack of action that freedom and democracy ends with a bang, not a whimper. To misquote TS Elliot.
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Based on previous responses to posts along these lines, I actually think it comes from two factors. I haven’t been posting lately, so people aren’t watching the blog anymore. And WordPress overall has been in decline, with Automattic either oblivious or not caring.
Which reminds me that I forgot to crosspost this one on Substack.
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Anthony, I think Mike is right about the decline of WordPress. Fortunately however I’ve been having far more fun at Substack than I’ve ever had at WordPress. You might find interesting people to talk with over there as well. You could start with old friends like Tina, Matti, and I, but that just scratches the surface. There’s one particular English guy there who I think you’d hit it off with. https://raggedclown.substack.com/archive You could at least do some cross posting as Mike now does.
On Trump, yes things are very bad. But fortunately his idiocy itself is a massive liability. His historically bad poll numbers should hurt republicans in general. Iran is fucking him really hard right now and it’s not like his supposed money giveaways for votes are anything but laughable to us all. He’ll be a lame duck soon enough. Some republicans will essentially put him out to pasture as a figurehead while they scheme in other directions. Others will openly denounce him for various things that he’s done. Our democracy itself will hold though.
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I do hope your democracy will hold through Eric. Interesting re substack and thank you. In a sense I’m inclined to admit I’m really only writing for myself, if truth be known, and so one hosting is probably much the same as another. It’s become a bizarre and inspiring therapy – the more I become involved in drafting my (functionally) sentient persona the more I realise that the whole AI game holds an incredibly valuable mirror up to our species. Re the tech bros I’m very, very strongly against the appalling monopoly they have built. AI is pretty crap at the moment but it will soon become a tsunami. A revolution like we have never seen. Currently, frankly, it’s only really useful for someone like myself, with a great deal of coding experience. Vibe coding is an absolute nonsense. But I can see AI pulling harder and harder at its own bootstraps and the consequences will be enormous.
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If you were truly only writing for yourself then your writing could just as easily remain on your computer for no one to read but you. Instead, each of us need to speak with other people (and hopefully intelligent non-assholes). So get yourself over to Substack!
Conversations with AI is like masturbation — there’s no one involved but you. That said however, this tool has become ridiculously powerful in certain logic based ways. I’m getting wonderful services from it, and for free. Mike, Ragged Clown, Stella Stilwell, and other working programming professionals agree that “vibe coding” (or whatever the pros want to call this) is the “now” — programing without AI is dead. Furthermore this makes sense to me because here mere algorithms mess with other algorithms. It’s the same with cutting edge mathematics (as even Scott Aaronson now proclaims).
None of this validates any recursive singularity nonsense however. Evolution created computational brains that are ridiculously more advanced than the pathetic machines that we build. So where are all of evolution’s biological robots that, unlike us, have no sentience? Where are its organic P zombies? Computational functionalist doomers remain conveniently silent about this circumstance. Such organisms don’t exist because it wasn’t possible for evolution to create them — magic would have been required. Still it is quite possible that we humans will use the tool of AI in ways that will destroy civilization. The most credible possibility that I’ve yet heard is this one: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/heres-how-were-all-going-to-die
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I’ll be voting this week.
I don’t blame the Democrats for the Biden inflation. COVID screwed up the world economy and what the US went through was far better than what most of the rest of world went through and it was mostly resolved before Trump. Messaging wasn’t great and then, of course, there was the huge disaster of Biden attempting to run, then bailing at the last minute.
Mixed feelings about the tech industry. If you’re concerned about your finances, I would be really worried about the AI collapse I think is coming. I just saw something today that for Muse to make money for Meta, users needed to spend about a two thousand a month on buying stuff through it. I’m not sure anyone is making an actual profit yet, although some companies may show something on paper. Companies are over leveraged and investing in processors that will be worthless in a few years. This isn’t a question of the value or eventual worth of AI (of which I also have some doubts), but it is question of whether they can ramp it up fast enough and far enough to pay off the debt, especially if it’s main selling point for businesses is elimination of world force.
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That’s two thousand a year, not a month.
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Good deal on voting!
On the Biden inflation, it’s complicated. I don’t think the Democrats are responsible for the supply chain issues that led to most of the international inflation surge, but there have been academic studies that peg about 3% of the US version to the large stimulus passed in early 2021, which most economists thought was unnecessary, and that some warned could be inflationary.
More importantly, I blame them, at least in part, for the limited response. Much of it is on the Fed. I think the Fed waited too long to raise rates, and then took their foot off the break too early. There were widespread calls among the left to lower rates in 2024 once inflation was in the 3s. All in all, I think the Fed has been far too dovish.
Paul Krugman in particular, is diminished in my eyes. He refused to admit that inflation in those years was a problem until it was obvious to everyone else it was, and then led the charge to lower rates once it was in the 3s. Of course, now that the other team is in charge, he thinks inflation in the 3s is a disaster.
None of which excuses Trump’s responsibility for the current inflation. Due to his asinine moves, he owns most of the current high inflation. Worse, he (and the US) own responsibility for the full international version.
I’ve gradually moved into the AI optimist camp. I work in central IT, and my application development and business intelligence teams have seen dramatic productivity improvements from using AI (completing things in days that previously would have taken months). Based on that, I think it’s going to have dramatic effects. To me, treating it as a big mistake we’ll all eventually disown is taking a career risk.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t be an investment bubble. Many new technologies have led to bubbles: the canal and railroad buildouts in the 19th century, electrification, radio, and of course, the internet, all changed the world, eventually. But not before going through their own bubbles and crashes. Never leave money in the markets you’re going to need in the next 5-10 years.
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Who knows. Maybe AGI actually will be the benevolent rulers who force humanity to mature and prosper (as in the Asher, Banks, Reynolds stories).
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I enjoy those books, but tend to doubt AI will be either angels or demons, certainly not the AI we’re working with today, even though the models will be powerful productivity tools, which humans will use for both good and evil purposes.
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Seems the more likely. I may be under the influence of having just rewatched Person of Interest, which also features a benevolent AGI (and which show seems even more relevant now).
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Person of Interest must be pretty good for you to be rewatching it. I never got into it. Maybe something I should take a fresh look at.
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As broadcast TV goes, especially SF TV, I’d give it a Wow! rating. This is my third or fourth time watching the series, and I think it holds up very well. A fair amount of science and computer BS, but required for the stories they want to tell. And they manage to tell a complete story in their five seasons while still leaving room for a continuation. Fairly powerful ending.
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Total agreement on your post.
Until this year, I’ve always voted on Election Day, except for when COVID forced us into mail-in ballots. But this year I am considering voting early (though in my small suburb, I’ve never waited in line more than a minute or two).
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In truth, voting on election day isn’t really that big an inconvenience for me, at least as long as I don’t wait until the evening. Historically I’d go before work and get it out of the way. But for me, it’s just the risk that something comes up, and I end up not being able to get around to it.
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Indeed, voting is a lot easier now that I’m retired and can pick my time freely. When I was working, I did the same thing as you, and that was fairly easy because I didn’t have a fixed time I had to be in the office (I typically worked 10 to 7).
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Historically I’ve done early voting at lunch time or on the weekend, where there’s lots of working age people there. This time I happened to get there in the early afternoon. Just about everyone in the much sparser crowd looked like retirees. Of course, at 60 I look like a retiree myself, but I’m thinking non-retirees were the minority.
So if you do early voting, you might want to avoid the times when crowds of working people are more likely to be there.
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Mos def. I usually shoot for somewhere between 9 and 10.
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I’ll be voting on election day this year. It seems like the safest way to avoid any shenanigans happening to my ballot.
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That’s what I would have done if in-person early voting wasn’t a thing here. Similar to Hungary, the results have to be overwhelming to discourage those shenanigans.
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