Suppose you’re a RAM maker. You’re raking in fat profits from this maybe-a-bubble situation. Your market forecasts show there’s a risk the bubble might pop. Or that new Chinese sources of your commodity are about to become widely available in the West, cratering your beautiful margin. What do you do?

One thing you might do is: encourage the public to buy now, while prices are still high.

It means that some people are trying that – now.

…the whole point of Fight Club was the narrator realizing he was a terrible person…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say a character is a flawed human being without writing them off entirely like this? Narrator is stunted, broken, looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places. He’s isolated, he’s disconnected, there is no one in his life for him to care for, or who cares for him. How good a person should anyone expect him to be?

…the film starts with him exploiting dying people so they will listen to him. Not recognizing that the only people open to listen are those dying, and he’s exploiting their openness to lie to them and get the “crying” he needs.

Narrator angrily explains pretty much exactly this to Marla. Refers to himself a “faker.” I think he recognizes.

He does explain “When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you,” but he could very well be referring to himself as the listener. He isn’t depicted speaking at the meetings he crashes. “If I didn’t say anything, people always assumed the worst.”

But what are the long-term health effects of our modern pedant-heavy diet?

No I mean the “stable jobs” meme. Only one of the characters pictured there had a stable job, and his was so morally corrosive and isolating that he really did go insane. And then he lost the stable job.

I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.

What directive is that?

In an interview with U.S. broadcaster ABC that aired over the weekend, Trump was asked about Putin’s presence in Ukraine.

He replied: “He’s not going to go into Ukraine, alright? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.” To which the puzzled interviewer asked: “Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” referring to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for separatists in Ukraine’s east.

“OK, well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He take, takes Crimea.”

– Donald Trump: If I’m Elected, Vladimir Putin Is Not Going Into Ukraine (2016)

…contextually appropriate responses that reflect the character’s personality…

Can any of the chatbots really emulate a fictional character’s personality? Not just some catch-phrases or word choices, but attitudes about concepts outside the source material?

It could be (I’m not saying I know this to be true) that the version of “economics” that makes it onto the TV news is the one that capital finds the most useful, not the version that’s the most scholarly or serious. Or interesting.

53% vs 40% is a pretty striking difference, should we ignore that?

Would the survey have been better if the organizers had collected zero demographic information on respondents, instead of “bringing gender into the conversation?”

I must have missed the part where they said “men bad.” Isn’t that a conclusion you’re drawing?

My initial reaction was “Stephen … Crowder? Do I know that name?”

Maybe this is a bid to stay relevant, as much as it is anything else.

If you’re spending $1K per month on LLMs – putting aside whether this is productive or ethical for a moment – wouldn’t it make more sense to just pony up the $5K-$10K or so that it would cost to provision a private, local model? Might that not actually be superior in terms of corporate security?

I just want to put “$29 per month” into perspective:

Imagine a white collar employee earning $100K per year. $100K / 250 working days is $400 per day. Payroll tax and benefits can easily add +50% to that, so it’s not a stretch to guess that our hypothetical employee costs the employer $600 per day.

$29 per 20 working days is about 1/4 of 1% of that cost.

Because corporations are people, my friend.

So the VHS version of DOOM is something like Dragon’s Lair, but way more seamless. That’s amazing.

It’s almost nothing like using a cassette drive to store your BASIC game code.

Yes. I believe I’ve seen some people say “scare quotes” to refer to actual quotations which are highlighted specifically because they are alarming. Which is understandable, I guess.

I wonder what the insiders would say the reason was? A poor showing in fox news interviews?

There’s no way they care about the not-really-a-lawyer thing, is there? Or about just being terrible at the job itself? I would have guessed those were assets.

I see it this way: Yes, a lot of our local rural and suburban infrastructure is spread-out and car-centric, but that was a result of our choices and policies. (Which does indeed include a big helping of cloaked racial segregation.) It’s not the case that we were forced by geography to do this to ourselves.

“America is just so spread out” can be read as “We just didn’t plan this too well.”

There are many lists of “most popular vehicles” out there. The F-150 tops some of those lists and doesn’t even appear on others. There are a lot of games one can play with specificity to make something more prominent (“Ford F-series”) or less prominent (“Ram 1500 Rumble Bee”) in a list like that.

But the point – that we have more pickup trucks than can reasonably be justified – stands.