Coffee. Cliché, I know, and I’m not even talking about the watching-James-Hoffman-videos-before-prepping-my-4000-dollar-espresso-machine type of habit. Just the few minutes of preparing a cup the way I like it, and finding a quiet couple of minutes to drink it.

They tell me that you can read in German

Yep, I have a dramatic oversimplification problem. But it’s hard to describe 50,000+ years of economic proclivities in a tweet :)

Maybe bartering as the primary system, but there are definitely historically and currently many examples of “real” bartering (like in-kind work, or even the nonsense going on with trading out datacenter capacity right now, I’d argue)

The prominent anthropologist Dave Graeber studied this extensively and concluded (most accessibly in his book Debt) that the kind of barter economy that we were taught about in elementary school probably never really existed like that, and that there have always been means of exchange (like money). So even if there was a societal collapse, you might barter individual things with neighbors once in a while, but even in a modestly sized group or one they regularly trades with others you’d almost immediately implement a better system.

Looking forward to? You’re already living in it.

Tech company stock prices are buoyed by future growth prospects. If your competitors are all building shittons of compute capacity and you are not, that’s like signaling that you don’t plan to grow (at least in the current insane climate)

I think about this a lot, and have been vacillating between AI-driven cultural and technical stagnation due to it being so much easier to generate derivative slop rather than make something new from-scratch, and an age of cultural/technical acceleration because so many people have interesting but latent thoughts and now there are great tools to help get them out into the world much more easily.

how did I never think to do this!?

Is it even “hacking” when you’re just asking the computer politely?

The “could” in the title is doing some heavy lifting.

In good faith? No, I don’t think so. But I have a friend who worked at Facebook with the specific intent of dealing damage by delaying or stopping projects and generally slowing things down. It was a drop in the bucket, but she lasted 4 or 5 years before they realized she was adding literally nothing of value.

30 Rock did it first. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sSYzhd3iepo

In poorer countries this is used to provide interior lighting (via refracted sunlight)

As predicted in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.

Gasp! Now other companies will be able to produce rounded, silver rectangles!

To a non-religious person I think that is the exact definition of a faith-based mindset.

Even back then they knew AI wouldn’t sit idly by and serve humanity.

Matt Gaetz?

iliterally