spero

[spero @emendationem]

@Aunindyo2023 An IT employees until the disruption of AI, even if he were making 15K a month would still be better off because of the future opportunities tech work opens up. The opportunity scalability potential for even average tech workers is far greater than the average plumber

[spero @emendationem]

@brankopetric00 Those are poorly designed microservices.

microservices via event buses exist where producers publish and consumers listen.

There is no dance involved.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

The entire point of the software industry was that the marginal cost was zero: one more install cost you nothing but you still charged for it. That justified the massive R&D investment required to produce said software.

If it's all artisanal software with an audience of one or few (with all marginal surplus flowing to model companies), then a lot more has to change here than the dev workflow.

[Tom ✝️ @CrossAndCaptial]

I laugh at feminists who actually think the handmaids tale is some living dystopia.

It is the complete opposite.

Let's imagine an alternate dystopia: women are fed hormone altering pills from teenage years to make them infertile through their prime fertility years, whilst they work to deliver profits for mostly male elite bosses. And if they accidentally get pregnant, the baby is killed so they can continue to generate profit.

It's a good plot. It is just real life. Not a work of fiction

[Nick DeJesus 🛒🎉 - Former Unpaid CTO @BTPipeline @Dayhaysoos]

I think the reason why people aren't happy about this is because we can all kinda sense it's about to pull us into a new trend of people trying to figure out how to run whatever he's doing.

We are so far away from figuring things out with AI that anyone from OpenAI or Anthropic can say whatever and we'll watch the entire industry try to make adjustments to adapt. Thariq can write an article on how doing backflips between prompts makes Claude more effective and now everyone is doing acrobatics.

If you're constantly online, reading about developments in AI, trying things out as they get released, trying to keep up, this whole experience is really exhausting.

[Dustin Ashe @DustinAshWrites]

You've got the arrow pointing the wrong way, and it's worth seeing why.

Jesus had no human father. His humanity came from one source only. Mary. Every bit of the flesh that died on the cross, she gave him.

So Mary didn't get her humanity from Jesus. Jesus got his humanity from Mary. That's not a Marian doctrine. That's the Incarnation.

Push the other way and it gets dangerous fast. If Jesus didn't take his flesh from Mary, where did it come from? "Seemed like flesh" is the oldest heresy there is.

That's the whole reason the Church called her Theotokos at Ephesus. Not to lift Mary up. To keep the Son from dissolving into a ghost. The title guards Him, not her.

[Bree Solstad @BreeSolstad]

You exist because God wanted you to exist.

You are here to know Him, love Him, serve Him, and become a saint.

Everything else—career, money, pleasure, status, even suffering—is secondary to that.

Life is preparation for eternity.

[Michael Brendan Dougherty @michaelbd]

That the work produced by AI is comprehensible to humans does not mean a machine “understands” it. These guys who want to dunk on theology should spend more time with basic computer science.

[EWTN Vatican @EWTNVatican]

Pope Leo XIV warned against making Christianity attractive by diluting its demands, stating that the faith is best transmitted through authentic and credible witness.
https://t.co/FioOWOggDm

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Sohrab Ahmari 🇺🇸 @SohrabAhmari]

All of the objections are tedious and literal-minded in the way one expects of a robot or a fundamentalist.

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

Matt Yglesias is a blogger. He is guy with a bachelor’s degree who posts his opinions about things on the internet. His standing is exactly the same as Roman Helmet Guy’s, which is: His writing is influential to the extent people find it persuasive.

We no longer live in a world where some people are arbitrarily designated as the good and important opinion-havers, and those people become the columnists and are real thinkers and intellectuals, while everyone else is just the schmucks on the “letters to the editor” page.

The walls of Old Twitter’s garden have been torn down. Vox has been sold for scrap to Rupert Murdoch’s second-favorite son. Anyone can put on a Roman helmet and build a platform now, and their opinions are just as good and can be just as influential as Matt Yglesias’s or Nick Kristof’s.

[htmx.org / CEO of #Schizophreniamaxxing (same) @htmx_org]

i tried to warn you

https://t.co/TSjP1Ahipw

[William M Briggs - Statistician to the Stars! @FamedCelebrity]

This Zendaya is plain, and even on the ugly side. Which is no fault of hers, and is a trait shared by billions. I myself have British-heritage teeth.

But you don't see me in toothpaste commercials. Though you will see Z in many, many films, because why?

Because, in part, for the same reason you keep hearing the same lousy songs by Big Names at Christmas, starring in the top slot "So This Is Christmas" by Big Name John Lennon, a song which is the purest form of aural torture, as hideous a fractured collection of plastic notes as you will ever have the displeasure to hear.

Nobody wants it, nobody asks for it, but it's played endlessly because everybody expects it should be played. Because it was big, and done by a Big Name.

Badness perpetuates itself by being familiar, and everybody likes the familiar, even the familiar they hate.

Now this Z was chosen, at first, because she was not of-no-color (and Hollywood has a DIE fetish). But after this choosing she became a Big Name. And thus, even though nobody particularly wants her, there being any number of actually attractive of-color women to choose from, we get Z.

She is far from alone. Once somebody who should not have becomes a Big Name they become like "So This Is Christmas". And we'll never stop hearing from them.

This also explains why we can't shake loose rotten politicians.

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it.

Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak.

Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people."

1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support.

2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade.

3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility.

4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing.

India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

[Shreya Shankar @sh_reya]

i'm restarting my blog! i want to kickstart productive conversations around: what should AI agents look like for hard, subjective knowledge work?

a lot of agent setups work well when tasks are objective and easy to verify. but many workflows (e.g., qualitative analysis, strategy, sensemaking) are messy and interpretive.

as a first post, i explore different ways of doing agent-assisted qualitative analysis on tweets, with varying levels of human feedback/intervention.

tldr: they all kinda sucked. turns out it’s hard to:
(a) stop agents from converging too quickly on shallow interpretations
(b) get agents to adapt to preferences that emerge gradually across many turns (i.e., evolving context)
(c) capture human judgment without making humans fatigued

[John A De Goes @jdegoes]

The modern cloud was built over the last 20 years, and under the rise of AI, it's showing SIGNS OF STRAIN that cannot be ignored! 👀

Traditionally, cloud computing has been server-centric: the stateless server as the fundamental entity of compute (powering HTTP/gRPC/db/etc. request handlers), with state pushed onto separate persistence and caching tiers. 💻

We describe our stateless servers with images, and deploy them as containers, running in pods (1:1), managed by Kubernetes or equivalent. Typically no more than dozens of pods per compute node in the cloud. ☁️

The server-centric computing model has worked GREAT for SaaS, but faces a new challenge in the era of AI: the fundamental unit of compute in AI is an agent, NOT a server, and it is STATEFUL! 😱

Agents continuously accumulate new state as they interact with their environment and perform tasks on behalf of users, frequently in secure sandboxes that expose custom environments and tools. Agents run for long periods of time, far longer than serverless technology can support. ⌛

Because agents combine both state and logic, they must run reliably and securely, and the hacks and shortcuts taken in the server-centric model (which is built for ephemeral computing) cause major problems. 😭

It's a new era for cloud computing -- the era of agentic computing -- and we're going to need NEW infrastructure tailor-built for this age. WHERE is it going to come from? 👀

There are three camps that might possibly build this AI-native infrastructure:

❌ AI Frameworks (@LangChain, etc.). The developers of AI frameworks know keenly the pains that agent-centric computing has, and they try to build layers atop server-centric computing to ease these pains. MY TAKE: Ultimately, these are a bandaid to problems that cannot be solved in a framework. AI Frameworks will NOT revinent the infrastructure of cloud computing.

❓ AI Sandboxes (@daytonaio, @e2b, etc.). The developers of AI sandboxes, powered by virtualization technology (VMs), are already building infrastructure for AI, albeit not exactly in the same space. MY TAKE: These guys CAN do it, but they're going to have to go beyond slow, bloated, and ephemeral VMs to meet the requirements of the next era.

❓ Durable Execution Engines (@temporalio, @restatedev, @DBOS_Inc , @inngest, @GolemCloud, @akka_io_). The developers of durable execution engines directly tackle the long-running, stateful, and reliable components required by agent-native infrastructure, but not necessarily sandboxing. MY TAKE: These guys CAN do it too, but they will have to develop a strong story around the isolation that is the defining feature of "AI Sandboxes".

We've got would-be solutions coming from three different directions! 🎉

What's your take on how we move from a SERVER-CENTRIC cloud to an AGENT-CENTRIC cloud? Comment below! 👇

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

I appreciate this sentiment, but I strongly disagree with it. What all research has shown is that there is a *HUGE* psychological difference in people's minds between paying $0 and just a small nominal amount. When you don't pay anything for something, you end up not valuing it at all. As long as we collect revenue for the public services through individual taxation, paying even a small nominal amount by everyone gives everyone a sense of the stake in the system.

[Jeff Park @dgt10011]

A surprisingly (rare) bad take.

If half the population doesn't pay tax because "it's very meaningful to that person" while its only "3% of the total tax revenue" it means you've built a patronage state that monetizes suffrage/political legitimacy through fiscal non-participation. As Mises clearly articulated, once you establish any precedence that the state may exempt any classes of citizens from any contribution on moral grounds, you have dissolved the "principle of generality" which in fact makes taxation indistinguishable from theft

In other words, the democratic system will have been completely captured, thus completely failed.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

I agree that the bottom half of earners should pay zero federal income tax. My reason for it is different: it's about clarifying who pays.

Right now you have tens of millions of people paying painful taxes, and they're under the impression that their taxes make a difference. They assume that the government budget is funded by taxpayers exactly like them, they've been told that the rich aren't paying their fair share, and so forth.

The reality is different: the income taxes paid by these people are negligible (~1.6% of total federal tax revenue). It doesn't really matter. But it has an enormous political impact: they believe that by paying these dollars, they are core contributors, and the outrage press has them believe they're getting short-changed for their contributions. The reality is the opposite, they are net beneficiaries by a long shot.

As usual, there is a huge difference between "almost zero" and "zero" -- taking their contributions down to zero would make it abundantly clear that they are net beneficiaries, pure recipients, not payers. The value that this provides in terms of restoring some sanity to political discourse will probably outweigh the equivalent loss of tax revenue.