Von Teppelin

"Greatness comes from people who have suffered. [...] I hope suffering happens to you"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtXo...

Racism is such brain-rot: people who go on and on about "Western Civ" and fail to get that Herodotus would think that the descendants of the Macrobians and Hyperboreans living side-by-side in the land of ten thousand lakes is the raddest thing ever.

Saddexdaas kee bay kula tahay inuu deris u ahaa kii tuugagga ku dhex dhacay?

Wuxuu ku yidhi, Kii u naxariistay. Markaasaa Ciise ku yidhi, Tag oo sidaas oo kale yeel.

Or in other words, it could well be that generative AI creates the world described by Marxist economic theory. Where the value of a thing is its socially necessary labor inputs.

Or maybe it creates an authoritarian surveillance-state dystopia. No one really knows!

But if expertise came out of the wall like electricity, then maybe that's not true anymore! Perhaps in the future the only thing that coffee shops, or law firms, or doctors offices can compete on is taste, and the human experience, because the cost of everything else goes to zero.

Why does the barista at Starbucks make $15 an hour, which is a fraction of what the franchise owner and Starbucks Corp. will make on an hour of their labor?

One reason is that it's non-trivial to set up an LLC that can accept credit card payments. Hard for the barista to set up their own shop.

And if we can automate business logic, this means that all of a sudden ordinary people can create and operate their own business concerns, without having to acquire specialized training in e.g. coding or accounting.

You want the withering away of the professional managerial class, here it is!

The theoretical implication of this is that it turns out that proving theorems and writing software are the same thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E...

Given how much of a modern information-age economy relies on software, automating theorem proving means we can automate business logic

YouTube video by Terence Tao Formalizing a proof in Lean using Claude and o4

If you're curious about this, here's the world's most famous mathematician using a genAI to prove theorems: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZr5...

This was 8 months ago too, current models are way better at this

You know, this is a comment that is almost proximate to insight - perhaps even a "key insight!" ;-)

In many contexts, it is easier to validate solutions to problems than to generate solutions.

So you can hook genAI up to a source of truth like a type-checker and get both speed and correctness.

On November 10th, 2011, Weird Twitter user Dril [1] posted a tweet that read "'i'm not owned! im not owned!!', i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob" (shown below). The tweet gained over 5,300 retweets and 10,000 likes. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/corn-cobbed

> As between you and Anthropic, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you retain any right, title, and interest that you have in the Inputs you submit. Subject to your compliance with our Terms, we assign to you all of our right, title, and interest—if any—in Outputs.

I read the fine print

He said "while I don't! believe in phrenology". An exclamation mark is a common notation for logical negation so the way to read this is:

"while I don't NOT believe in Phrenology, I now do..."

Claude wrote this short about what it would do if it had the power to do something about Grok. Just thought it was an interesting generation.

an enterprising flyposter in Great Barrington, MA references the town's history as the site of the first open resistance to British rule in the colonies

Excerpt from Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd Highlighted section reads "A soldier who stood by and heard the Mother tell this story exclaimed in the fervent patriotism of his feelings By G-d I'll fight till bell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on"

"By G-d I'll fight till bell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on"

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

Jeff Wheeler, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Minnesotans are showing the soul of the United States to the world.

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

[tos violation] customs enforcement in 1774, [tos violation]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN7J...

Wise words from WEB DuBois to gird us today: "It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists & gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources."

the word "understand" is, appropriately for a cognate of ῐ̔́στημῐ, irregular

Copies of these should be put up immediately on state/city property with this added: “The enslaved people memorialized here mean more to us than the president who tried to erase them. It is our patriotic duty to read every word on these signs.”

3. The narrative that Law is good is crucial to its operation. Rule of Law and Justice are abstract concepts (fairy tales) that hold meaning socially only if people believe in it.

Also, re localizing evil: It's not that evil people happen to be powerful, power brings out the evil within everyone

2. The historical origins of law and the state are a great example of its robustness in this sense, of turning evil intent to productive pro-social ends. I.e. we move up the value chain from Chaotic Evil -> Lawful Evil -> Lawful Good -> Chaotic Good, as people internalize moral principles.

To your specific points:

1. We're using different notions of robust. Evil things of course happen under the Law and against the Law. Those are the problems of politics and justice, respectively. Stable equilibria are possible here.

IMO liberal democracy with rule of law is a good example, but YMMV

Law is necessarily a structure of coercive power. It is the coordination point around which competing powers agree to constrain their own action for mutual benefit.

This minimizes individual caprice, enabling individual planning.

It's impossible to overstate how big an improvement this is

This goes to the OP about Law. We have the physical tech. to produce 3000 calories per day for 8 billion people. We do not yet have the social technology to ensure everyone is fed

That's not because the powerful are evil. They mostly are. The hard problem is building systems that are robust to evil

That's an aesthetic posture that is easy for the comfortable, and much harder for the hungry, sick or poor.

There is so much chaos in the world (cf. current events). What little predictability there is, is the result of generations of bitter collective struggle.

You underrate the difficulty.