If this is being published in the Wall Street Journal, you can rewrite the headline in your head this way:
“To extract increasing returns from real estate, property prices and rent must be priced out of reach for people whose parents read the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article you can quote to your friends at cocktail parties to feel good about yourself when your kid moves home.”
Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.
Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.
Something I find really confusing from this post is the MLX versions of the model running much slower. As I understand it, these model versions are meant to take advantage of Apple Silicon and MacOS APIs, and should produce better/faster results. Any insight into what’s happening here?
That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.
> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:
Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.
Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
There is no reason we should accept the enclosure of the digital commons represented by AI. The data these models are trained on amounts to the total intellectual and artistic output of human kind through recorded history. It belongs to all of us, and accordingly, so should the models and weights produced by it.
In general I agree with the 3D printing and open source community that bills like these are bad ideas. However, I want to ask this question in the spirit of helping craft better arguments:
Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?
I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.
Don’t listen to the daily news == Don’t worry about the massive program of deprivation, destruction and death carried out on your behalf to secure the aforementioned “unprecedented wealth”
“All you have to do is have a good enough idea and someone will fund it!”
This is a myth. To access capital, in Silicon Valley and anywhere else, you have to engage in elaborate court protocol and social climbing. You have to have the right kind of idea, in a niche that is interesting among the capital-owning class.
Look at what’s getting funded in Silicon Valley right now. Nobody wants any of this AI shit. There is no issue in America that is more unifying across all of our usual dividing lines than opposition to AI.
It’s getting funded because AI is interesting in the social universe of people with billions of dollars to invest.
You can’t “earn” a billion dollars doing the thing that the vast majority of people do for money, which is selling your labor.
No one can argue with this.
We all understand that if people who own a lot of capital give a lot of it to you, you can grow that capital into more than a billion dollars.
Most people do not have access to the kind of capital required to do this. Most people never will. The avenues open to the vast majority of people on Earth cannot lead to becoming a billionaire.
Paul Graham knows this, and he is being deliberately obtuse.
I respect Moxie a lot and it greatly diminishes my opinion of him that he agreed to be part of this. I hope he got paid a lot for this, and that he’s plowing the money back into something worthwhile.
I've worked in clean energy for about a decade, building analytics software for DER providers (solar, batteries) and EV companies, and I build large-scale portable battery and solar systems as a hobby. I keep up with the industry and the regulatory environment closely via podcasts, newsletters, and conferences.
It’s true, and the strategy of climate activists in the early 2000s and 2010s was to do everything they could to make coal and other fossil fuels as expensive as possible: by reducing access to capital, increasing the cost of legal and regulatory hurdles, sometime delaying projects through physical blockades, etc etc.
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.