Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Sam Altman, reading your comment, hissing in agony three times like someone poured holy water on him…

It’s not the end. I’d eat a random street hat if he doesn’t run for president. Pretty sure ego and ambition are secreted from his scalp and create his natural hair gel.

Also, it would be peak mom if it was all just a trick to get a phone call.

"Poll Question 5:

Do you support an evil, vindictive tax an the innocent leaders of this great state -nay, world, the people who keep food on your table and provide you with your sole sanctuary from the vicious lashings of the eternal storm of life, without whom this country, to say nothing of its fragile soul, would collapse like a pillar of dust?

A. No (select this option to receive $5 and a voucher for a free hot dog).

B. Yes (select this option to enroll as a volunteer for the No on 40 Campaign)."

“You idiot! Empathy is still polling too high!”

It can’t come soon enough. See this Reuters story about China’s bubble popping:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/

The longer we wait, the more catastrophic and destabilizing the pop will be.

That said, despite Google’s massive stock drop, I don’t think we’re there yet in the US. Google never expected the AI Overview to be a money maker. They just needed it to answer users’ questions more readily than a trip to ChatGPT or Claude. And they probably count that as a success. To Google, they are more than willing to cannibalize their own ad revenue if it means having the largest seat at the trough for AI later, because they think it will be a single funnel to capture all revenue for practically every industry.

So AI has become an almost mythical final form of capitalistic value capture. It’s like a poker game and every tech giant just continues to raise the bet because even if they’re bluffing, they think whoever holds out longest wins all the money. They’re still in that mindset. But in fact, AI is more like a poker game where to play, you incinerate your bet in a burning dumpster in the middle. That’s the thing that, once they realize it, will cause the bubble to pop.

Not there yet, unfortunately.

I can respect that you have thoughtful opinion. We strongly disagree, which is a bummer, but at least you obviously care. I do, too.

I still rail against so many who really do NOT have a plan and just want to gripe about “somebody needs to do something” which is useless - I mean the people complaining who may or may not even bother to vote in the general election, much less do anything else.

You’ve got my upvote there! But yeah, all good and thanks for an interesting discussion.

Politics is inherently about convincing people to move to your position. Another reference point is the difference between “strategy” and “tactics.”

Democrats are both extremely confident in the power of strategy and extremely inept in the concept of tactics. Strategy tells them that they should not take the first step until they have a path charted for the journey. Tactics tells them that they can take the best available first step and use new information gained from that step to plot the second step, and so on.

Your casual disregard for impeachment, likening it to “lifting skyscrapers off their foundation,” reveals that you cannot imagine a tactical approach, which epitomizes the problem with traditional democratic thinking. You think because two impeachments failed, it’s moronic to try a third without some incredible game-changing development.

Instead of that, I’d invite you to think about impeachment as a first step that we should take because it’s morally required, and because not doing so makes impeachment dead letter under the Constitution. An impeachment hearing reminds the public what standards are, what standards they should be following, and is an opportunity to sway the public to themselves pressure their senators to convict.

Putin understands tactics, and it’s why he now has control of Crimea (and arguably the United States). He has no master plan. But making the best available move to inch toward a target means often you get there, even if unexpectedly.

I’d recommend: Don’t be resigned and defeatist, and certainly don’t spread defeatism to others who may do what you have decided you can’t.

Ah, so you’re in the “we don’t have enough votes so why try” camp?

“Investigate” is a necessary first step to gather evidence, even if it is obvious. But no, I did read the article and I do stand by what I said, because it’s right there in the quote you used:

“I think that going in the direction of impeachment is not a good idea, just to be honest with you,”

She is suggesting doing what every politic-playing traditional democrat or republican does when they want to appear to take action without taking action: Start an investigation. The next step? “Nothing.”

I don’t need to guess this. Because the quote, again, has Kamala expressly saying that investigation “shouldn’t go in the direction of” impeachment. Where then? She says two paragraphs later: “…maintain accountability when it comes to cuts to healthcare and oversight on the Iran war.” These are totally consistent with not pursuing impeachment, if it’s holding a bunch of showy hearings where they drag Pete Hegseth to answer for the Iran war, and Russel Vought for his Project 2025 stuff.

Which, to be clear, should happen. But Kamala’s quotes make clear, she thinks that is an excuse not to pursue impeachment. My point, which I already made above, is that it is a false dichotomy. They should do both.

That’s how I read [past tense] the article.

Yup, totally. AI outputs also killed my confidence using hyphens mid-sentence (but I still do it because it’s just how I think). But thanks, I’ll actually make a note to stop using that AI-hijacked phrasing…

Some choice quotes:

“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.

I think it’s important to use the term “AI psychosis” until it becomes mainstream. There’s power in simplifying, in two words, the mental illness that has spread to nearly every major-company CEO and C-suite MBA hump. And until it becomes a meme, until they know the general public sees them and knows they are blindly confident in something they don’t understand, that we know they are conning themselves and us, they won’t spare a moment of introspection to reconsider.

“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”

Let’s unpack this. The programmers are concerned about Proton’s push for security, and they push back on objectively unmaintainable AI code - to say nothing of Yen’s bullying to push to live before it’s even tested - and this is Yen’s response. In essence: Security does not matter more than the perception of speed.

This is demonstrably idiotic, because security issues are the “truth” being undermined here, and when someone hacks or compromises key parts of your service, that will be far more damaging some CEO-naval-gazing version of “look how fast we are.”

In all, the many quotes from engineers really do the job convincing that this guy is not just a bad CEO, but a bad person. I’m sure to Board members or billionaires, this type of psychopathy and lack of empathy looks like a feature and not a bug. This probably won’t change that, but every moment spent holding up a mirror helps.

treating him like a public utility with a podcast

Elon Musk has a podcast? What does this mean?

Not investigating and prosecuting Trump and his criminal appointees is not acceptable. Only prosecuting Trump and his criminal employees and ignoring everyday crises like healthcare and cost of living and wage disparity is also not acceptable.

This is the problem with old-school Democrats like Harris. They don’t understand that we expect them to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

They are adults, ostensibly smart, and there will be roughly 300 of them in both houses of Congress if the polls pan out. The only successful path is to organize themselves and get it all done. It’s a false dichotomy to say you can only do one or the other.

Your job, Dems, is to repair the dam that has multiple huge leaks. If you seal one hole and the other is left open, the town below still floods. You fix them all or the dam breaks. Yes, it’s unfair. No, there is no other option.

Semi-relatedly: I don’t have personal experience in the DSA, but a friend heavily into political party activism gave up going to DSA meetings because the leadership and structure was completely disorganized, ineffectual and instead concerned with infighting and power-struggles. It did not seem like an organization built to run a successful presidential campaign.

So reading statements like this seems in line with those stories. If they’re ready to preliminarily sabotage their best candidate for failing to be a specific flavor of faction, they clearly are not going to be productive at election time.

AOC, however, seems like a great candidate and one that would run a great campaign with the resources and organization of the Democratic party (assuming the traditional neoliberal factions remain not in charge).

I understand this and go back-and-forth sometimes internally. But there’s a lot of women-only or women-leading statewide seats, governorships, Senate seats even in conservative states.

I think right-wingers who wouldn’t vote for her anyway are a lot of duplication with sexist voters, and sexism may just be the lowest-hanging excuse they’ll have for hating her. And it will definitely bleed into sexist propaganda in right echo chambers. But I’m not sure it would be enough to stop a good candidate, which I think she’d be.

I think most of us can smell an astroturf post when we see one, and your posts ain’t that. You are sharing things that clearly are things you’re interested in, and that are informative and interesting to the reader.

Unlike bad self-promo posts, you care about the reader and sharing your genuine interests, so the fact that you make them is a bonus, not a liability.

Exactly - which is why going public is generally not in the interests of any sustainable company or their customers.

It is, however, in the interests of (1) company insiders that want a huge payout, (2) companies that are not sustainable pre-IPO and need to transition their business model or practice and set the IPO as a ticking clock where they fund or fail, and (3) companies and CEOs who borrow cancer’s business model and are dissatisfied by anything except infinite expansion.

None of those benefit the customer and it makes it rational to expect an IPO to destroy what’s good about a company and its products.

Well, now we have an exact valuation on what Ted Cruz thinks his wife is worth.