Butters

*||

ergodic

[Butters @ergodjc]

if it’s good enough for Stan Druckenmiller, it’s good enough for me.

[Butters @ergodjc]

Grok what will models do now that they can’t make money from modeling

[Yishan @yishan]

We should celebrate the fact that AI will soon free mankind from the drudgery of being models, who endure constant dieting, weight management, enforced exercise, many resort of cocaine to keep weight off, and are often exploited by the industry at a young age.

[Butters @ergodjc]

The end result of this is of course no one gets to go to court bc there are years long logjams of dead / misfiled AI cases

[Rusty Jordan @RustyOnLife]

This is an amazing use case for Muse or any other competent AI bot, just make sure everything is on the up and up since it could go to court.

[Butters @ergodjc]

I’m sure they mean well
But direct government stakes seem Trumpian and out Trumping Trump is now passe

[Butters @ergodjc]

It’s going to be hilarious when the collapsing AI bubble takes out the current Canadian government

[Charles Lammam @CharlesLammam]

Ottawa is taking an equity stake of up to $1.6B in Cohere, a company with no shortage of private investors.

It follows a $1.75B venture capital plan that entrepreneur groups applauded.

When our entrepreneurs cheer for handouts, 🇨🇦 has a problem

Latest https://t.co/swXd9U8Hqv

[Butters @ergodjc]

Tenet is the only movie I’ve ever seen that was so unwatchable I had to turn it off.

[Butters @ergodjc]

This has all the feeling of the Darien Scheme

[🦀 @ZoomerTechlead]

For Canadians wondering how good a use of 1.6 Billion in tax dollars this was, here's the top rated insider review of Cohere on Blind:

[Butters @ergodjc]

The story of Picard and Data is the story about Humanity (the father) and AI (the son)

[Butters @ergodjc]

RIP

[UtterlyInteresting @UtterlyInterest]

Sir Patrick Stewart describes his first experience of a Hamburger in America. (You’ll read this in his voice)

[Butters @ergodjc]

I can feel that people are getting rage bait fatigued.

[Butters @ergodjc]

George Lucas, the Seneca of our time

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

The Empire in "Star Wars" is bad because they created a weapon entirely for the purpose of annihilating entire populated planets and killing billions of people. The original trilogy has a very black and white Saturday-morning cartoon morality.

It was only when Lucas came back to it as an older man and actually started thinking about the question of why Anakin Skywalker would abandon the Jedi to join the Dark Side that he really began to add complexity to it.

And considering the OT was made by a boomer white guy lefty who was slyly suggesting in the 1970s that the Vietcong were the good guys, the prequels function as a pretty sharp critique of democracy.

The Republic is completely paralyzed by competing factions trying to extract rents for their constituents at everyone else's expense, and anyone trying to get anything productive done has to do complex horse-trading involving paying wasteful graft to these interests in order to build a coalition for their policies. This is what all the Trade Federation nonsense in Phantom Menace is about.

And while the Republic was trying to keep all these disparate interests united by paying off special interests, its entire structure got turned inside out by Palpatine.

And the Jedi were too preoccupied with running nonsense errands on behalf of the Republic Senate and being sent around the galaxy like rent-a-cops to solve problems for the various factions that they didn't notice any of this happening.

And the reason that Anakin was susceptible to corruption by Palpatine is that the Jedi and the Republic didn't offer him any possibility of a good life. They bound him to a code of celibacy and service to these grubby little factions and their dysfunctional, wasteful, corrupt government. And that's supposed to be good, because, what, democracy?

Honestly I can see how a politician like Palpatine who spent his career in Republic institutions might reasonably decide that fascism enforced with a planet-destroying space laser would be a superior system.

Of course, Palpatine sucked too. Anakin didn't get anything he was promised in exchange for betraying the Jedi. He still lost his family and he got turned into a cyborg terminator, and it didn't even work out that well for Palpatine, whose engagement with the dark side of the Force turned him into a cryptkeeper.

But things didn't go much better for Obi Wan, who spent the rest of his life squatting in a hut in the desert.

And even the sequel trilogy (if you consider that canon), the galaxy immediately turned into a mess after the Empire fell, the new Republic had all the same problems the old one did and Luke's commitment to the Jedi ideals got him the same crappy life Obi Wan had.

"Star Wars" ended up being about how everything is terrible no matter what you do.

[Butters @ergodjc]

Oh is this what the warnings are about

[Zack Kanter @zackkanter]

The next 12-24 months will be a fascinating string of seemingly-pointless cyberattacks as nation states face use-it-or-lose-it decisions for the zero days they'd otherwise have saved for a strategic moment.

[Butters @ergodjc]

Elon’s gift is his bs detector when it comes to engineers

[Butters @ergodjc]

Why Hong Kong is and will continue to be Asia’s preeminent business city.

[Butters @ergodjc]

Legard video is weird. She didn’t have to do it. Seems like a protest resignation. Something fishy.

[Butters @ergodjc]

What is the modern equivalent of this?

[陈东成 @fncischen]

Yep.

They had a political reason to fund Buddhist temples, grottos at the time.

There was a lot of internal tension among the elite regarding what Confucianism and Daoism should be during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period.

The Xianbei came by and was like “yo, Buddhism is this new foreign religion, let’s give this a try, it has all this new art forms we can play with” to keep society together

[Butters @ergodjc]

Warning shot to Jensen Huang

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. https://t.co/0WLYYhR47a

[Butters @ergodjc]

Apple is now spiritually Chinese

[Till Maessen @tillmatthis]

100%

Very well said.

Apple was and is supposed to be the king of saying NO.
Saying no is one of the most important things in good product design.

And they increasingly seem to become yes-people.

[Butters @ergodjc]

Aliens exist

[Mauthe Doog 👁️ @mauthe_doog]

You're telling me humans could have learned how to make a nuclear fission reactor from a NATURALLY OCCURRING one in Oklo?
Alright this one really is just God having a laugh.

[Butters @ergodjc]

I get it now.

This MacBook Pro is for old people who instinctively touch their Mac screens.

HomeView is another device for old boomers

[Carolina Milanesi @caro_milanesi]

.@Apple put touch on the MacBook Pro, and the timing finally makes sense. AI is changing how we interact with our devices, a whole generation grew up tapping screens, and OLED makes for a lighter machine. The gestures mirror the track pad, so apps are ready on day one.

[Butters @ergodjc]

2 iPhone Air is better than 1 iPhone Duo.