Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that.

You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.

Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.

> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt

There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)?

Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.

you don't need AI to deal drugs, plenty of people with little education do it all the time

*Formal education

xAI is a dead company; you don't sell compute if you're growing.

More promising is that cursor is training a model using it.

Internal trade barriers are a real problem, Canada is a country with a small population and vast resource wealth, so its odd that there are barriers between provinces.

id rather use the thinking models so the voice mode isnt' useful, i do use voice-to-text more and more just to speed things up though

Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.

its inevitable if you do nothing to organize politically against it.

This makes for nice political slogans but Hank Asher had the entire state of Florida DMV records in the early 90s and we did nothing. Then we did nothing after 9/11 and the patriot act. We did nothing between 9/11 and Snowden. We did nothing after Snowden. We have literally done nothing in 35 years but now is the time to start? Snowden is probably in political office in a society that had the will to do something about this.

At a deeper level, I think people would need to care more about the outcomes and higher order effects of political decisions and not just the emotional weight of political slogans. The fundamental problem is that is not the society we live in.

>"if you do nothing to organize politically against it"

how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?

they do whatever they want and we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.

> how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?

You're mixing the places of horse and cart here - the ruling class is ruling because it's organized. Organization comes first, the presence of other organizations, be them ruling or not, has little bearing on the process.

> we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.

That's what you do without organization. It still helps though, getting to the truth isn't easy these days.

Many other reasons to do it too.

prescription amphetamines don't do this if you are taking the prescribed dose (and you're not getting enough prescribed to get anywhere near high)

Yeah, well, lots of people aren't doing that.

This is instantly recognizable as the work of someone who's been up for a couple days on Adderall.

Of course, there may be other explanations, including other drugs. But if I was one to bet...

The writing doesn't feel particularly out of character for Yegge, who has always been at least a bit like this. (Though I don't know if that's just him, or drugs as well.)

New Deal-era regulations on financial flows made it painful tax-wise to remove cash from a company. So you either had to pay it as dividends, or you invest it in R&D, wages, or benefits for employees (this is why companies used to have very plush benefits even for lower level managers). When combined with pretty aggressive anti-trust, it also funneled cash into business expansion via conglomerates.

Companies were asset rich (which is the seam of valuable companies that private equity has been strip mining for 40 years, but even those are running out now).

Share buybacks are more symbolic that the Reagan era made it easy to take cash out of companies, which led to a race to the bottom of extracting as much cash as possible while leaving little for operations, wages, or expansion.