I’ve been missing the local Fry’s and recently learned that MicroCenter has opened a store in Santa Clara. It felt like heaven! It was pure fun to meet all fellow enthusiasts who would swarm the demo DGX Spark to figure out if a couple of those would be better than a Blackwell. That’s my happy place now and I didn’t even spend a dime on the first visit.
Found out they opened a Microcenter recently here in Phoenix, so nice to have a brick and mortar electronics store again now that Fry's is no longer around.
This needs to include life-changing false positive rates. Imagine being given a diagnosis like this - people around you who know and any corporations who can sniff it out by snooping on your communications can lead to much rejection early in life. What happens when the diagnosis is as positive when it shouldn’t have been?
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03622-w this is the paper they're basing the research on. So in primary care, the accuracy rates are in the 80s. So that's something like a 17% false positive rate. That's still like 5 to 1 odds of getting a correct result though. It's much better than nothing.
If you fly to US, Singapore, and many other countries these days, your face will be photographed and the photo will be matched to your passport photo via facial recognition (the machine tells you that outright, and does the action on the spot). They also take your right hand fingerprints.
I think flying to a country is a whole lot different than a little tickmark on a website, sorry.
Don't forget that if you fly to a country you are also bound by their laws. They can do anything to you as long as they can make it stick under their laws. It's one thing that people often don't realise when flying somewhere, you are basically giving a blanket submission to their laws!
For this reason I have a long blacklist of countries I won't visit because they have laws I do not accept.
I don’t say it to justify what linkedin is doing - there is no justification for that. I say it to warn those who are conscious of it that there are more places that will harvest the data and use it.
The well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks.
The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.
I had this conspiratorial thought, would a model really just spit out some money-making scheme, or would it be blocked. Made me think to run the model myself on my own GPUs but still a black box, at least you control your prompts/data flow locally.
Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
> Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
Both of those are anemic views of "freedom".
The most robust understanding of freedom is and must be rooted in morality and thus human nature:
Freedom is the ability to do what is *good*, or what one *ought*.
Because we're talking about human agency, "good" and "ought" here are normative and thus moral in nature. But morality itself is determined and underpinned by human nature. What makes a human act "good" depends on what it means to be human. There is no other basis for morality. Everything else is arbitrary, circular, or ultimately a tacit appeal to human nature.
And human nature has a direction. Good acts further human beings along that general axis (neutral acts at least do not retreat or deviate). Eating lead is unhealthy, but doing so intentionally, knowing fully well that lead is harmful, is evil, because a choice was made in light of knowledge to do what one should not.
women are just as status driven as men, and the poor men and women are even more so. when need is taken away the status race will be intense
living in the third world i have seen absurd stuff: early 20s women living in slums that own the latest iphone pro max on a 5 year term loan is a common theme
in london the children of the UHNW (net worth >EUR100m) compete for scholarships and academic achievements, or to create unicorn startups, because the only way they can differentiate themselves from UHNW peers is the academic arena where money doesnt matter. they also tend to make shitty films or own vineyards, or try to become authors, or try to make scientific discoveries, and get sucked in to Mystical Gurus like Mr Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes/Thanos
I grew up in that world. People making 150 per month would have kids carrying 600 phones just to put something on the table. In eastern europe, an adidas track suit seemed like Armani, when advertising just started after the fall of communism and people thought that made them feel sophisticated for wearing western brands. When you can’t brag with an expensive house or car, you brag with expensive accessories on yourself (gold chains, phones, watches).
It’s no different than a national geographic video where the loudest frog signals it can be bold enough to broadcast its location, even though it can be eaten. Wearing gold chains and bragging you have crypto is akin to yelling “come and rob me” in a less safe world.
The reality is that status is just a way to “encourage/compel” voluntary submission of services from other people, who may think they will benefit from your status rubbing on them in some way.
Strangers don’t support you for what you do, but for what you can do for them in the future.
After interacting with some Asian elephants with handlers recently this makes a lot more sense. Even if he used North African elephants - they can hike up and down mountains and rough terrain easily with stability. I’m assuming they could pull equipment and even potentially be armed and armored. They are incredible creatures.
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