I’m not trying to dismiss the investments she made (both time and money), but more point out that she was not driven by the same corrupting motivations you get with typical billionaires. If she was, she’d have taken her wealth and done more capitalism with it.
She is an outlier in the sense that she is both “new money” and also “old money” (she did the equivalent of inheriting money in her settlement with Bezos).
She was, at one time, a normal person, with normal friends and normal parents. However unlike most other “new money” billionaires she acquired her wealth without the corrupting influence of being a master of the universe business person where everyone in your circle is falling over themselves to gas up your ego.
What does it matter if the zoning laws are local or national? You're OK with the feds telling you what you can and can't do with your land, but not local governments? Seems like a distinction without a difference.
There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
A hungry tick is much more likely to make your life miserable because you’re significantly more likely to encounter one in ecosystems with both species.
This is false, they’re called “Land Use Zones” in Japan. It’s a national system, unlike in the west which is largely implemented piecemeal by municipality.
This may come as a surprise to you, but people like living in pleasant surroundings.
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.
Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.
We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.
However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.
Feels like they’re hedging their bets. If Republicans stay in power they’re going to keep doing whatever they want; it’s not like they’re making data driven policy decisions today. If they are ousted then the incoming administration has bad data they can’t act on, and Republicans can go back to banging their old drum of “government is useless and dysfunctional”.
The way people keep describing Google, at least from the outside, sounds like a jobs program for developers funded by ad revenue.
So many of their products oscillate around the bar of profitability but so few reach the level of materially affecting Google’s bottom line that they can continually pop in and out of existence like subatomic particles.
Meanwhile the developers on these projects work towards their products brief moment in the sun so they can leverage it to move up and out, leaving it to die on the vine.
It’s a chaotic way to run a company, a decent way to make a living as a developer, and a shit way to build any kind of legacy, either as a company or as an individual.
From the POV of your employer your compute is powered by your decent salary, not bananas and coffee. If that goes away you’d be a fool to keep pointing your brain at your employer’s problems.
Thus, your compute is significantly more expensive than AI. Thankfully your taste is also part of your package deal, and is where you deliver real the value over an LLM.
The AI CEOs have been screaming for years now about how AI is scary, you should be afraid of it and it’s going to take your job.
“Mythos is too dangerous to release.”
“OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.”
“Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone”
This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand.
It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.
If a cop says your problems go away for $100, you pay it, because the downside is huge by comparison. The problem is the cop getting away with it, not that you paid the bribe.