This sounds irrelevant but it isn't: I just tried to unsubscribe to marketing emails from some Meta property, and got:

Please confirm that you want to unsubscribe. Unsupported request - method type: post

That's how careful this company is. Who knows how long that flow has been broken for, no one in the company is motivated to care, because what impact can that possibly give? How could that look good on your PSC? No company has a worse history with user privacy and no company is less deserving of the sort of trust using Muse requires.

Its actually a bit funny. A lot of privacy initiatives were actually part of deprecating code and data that became liability issues post cambridge analytica and covid(think location data, if no one goes anywhere no need for that org right?).

I think the only way meta can care about privacy, if any, is if it becomes socially taboo (lawsuit, WSJ/NYTimes report etc).

The clearest quantitative evidence of this is their P/E, its lower than others relative to its forecast earnings because of all the legal risks that need to accounted for.

I, and I'm pretty sure I share this impression with many of you, would feel a whole lot more optimistic about AI for software engineering (which truly has been transformational) if it didn't come with layoffs or the promise of layoffs.

Aren't bankers charging the same prices they were _before computerization_?

the value from bankers comes from relationships, sales, and their weight in doing a good IPO. its not about hours worked

Are we not still paying to “build out” the payment networks for Visa and Mastercard?

Subscriptions do seem to continue to go _up_, too. The proof of the productivity pudding is lower prices, which means the proof of all this AI hype is not so much Millennium Prizes being solved than subscriptions actually getting cheaper. If AI is already having a huge effect, inflation should be going down... if AI will have the effects OpenAI et al are currently selling, prices should plumet. I mean, I'm waiting...

I was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...

At one point reading this I thought of Molly's Soliloquy: "...frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless...". You probably don't want to recall Joyce if you want to get people to understand what you're doing.

Fun story: at my previous aaaawful company CC was discovered as a thing to care about at about the same time as PMs and managers were encouraged to land code changes using the _then_ quite terrible AI tooling (this was a year or two ago). Cue an avalanche of completely unreviewable diffs.

I think this is a counter (a cynical, scary counter to be sure) to the charge that OpenAI/Anthropic etc are unsustainable and will run out of money and it's all going to fall down. These companies have amazing, unprecedented power.

Not everyone who isn't wearing pants is playing bagpipes, but almost everyone who is playing bagpipes isn't wearing pants.

I mean, nuclear weapons _plus_ rogue AI is a) the stuff of quite a bit of science fiction and b) not nearly science-fiction enough these days.