Ang-zigh-uh-tee!

Doot doo doodoodoo

Has anyone done anything yet with ‘agentic ai’ that couldn’t be done better/faster/easier in other ways? So far, I’ve mostly seen ‘I spun up 20 agents to google how to make a tuna casserole on twenty search engines and one more to summarize the results. Please, ignore that this burns as much compute power as our entire office does on a random Tuesday and produces pretty much the same result as if I had just searched once and read the free AI summary, which in turn is slightly worse than if I had searched it with no AI involved and just read the first link.’

Poe’s Law hitting hard on this one.

Yup. You are probably healthier now than you ever will be. Might get smarter, though. That won’t make you happier, though.

Monkey’s paw finger curls: This just in, approximately 1% of the human population has suddenly died.

The horny parts of the internet can help you with that, temporarily.

Mocha. I can take or leave most things but mocha is mandatory.

It really doesn’t (union workers get ~10-20% more, which can be ~5-15% on overall expenses for a business, vs ~$100/month for ‘teambuilding’ with pizza and dollar store soda) but you know what does? A bazillion hours of OT, training time, opportunity costs, and HR time spent on hiring and firing churn because no one wants to work under shitty management.

His own son… HIS OWN SON!

Such savagery.

Vintage Story is a slowburn survival game with a Linux version from the developers, not a compat layer. It’s focused on realism.

Ranch Sim is a game in which you design your own ranch.

Starship Evo, formerly Sky Wanderers, is still in development but has reached a very playable stage. You build bases and ships out of predefined shapes but with highly variable scaling, as in ranging from 12.5cm grid up to 1m with all the standard slopes, panels, etc. It has logic systems, inventory and production systems, and control systems for space ships, hovercraft, mech walkers, and space stations, all using that heavily customisable building system. Then you can fly around doing little missions, trading, space ship combat, etc.

Archean is similar building but with more realism and programming but more sandboxy with no NPCs.

I’ve heard some good things about Steamworld Build.

I have heard someone say Icarus was like Ark but better.

7 Days to Die ticks much of those boxes as well.

Stationeers is another struggle, survive, thrive game with very realistic mechanisms.

Foundry is Factorio in 3D. Satisfactory is Foundry without a Gödel grid.

The rest of it is just as silly, albeit differently. The point is not that AI is useless, but that it is being used and will be used in ways that make things worse. You, as a person who seems like they have more than two braincells, can tell AI can be used by smart people to do smart things. But that’s not how they’re used. Most people are stupid. Many of them are staggeringly stupid. They will also use the AI, and they will use it to do staggeringly stupid things. They will replace humans with LLMs where they can because they are stupid and don’t care when the eggheaded nerds tell them it’s a bad idea because it makes them feel smart. We are at the whims of idiots with money and power who now have automated even the position of sycophant who tells them they are right.

AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people.

I gotta pull you up on this one. Realistically, they’re not in the same ballpark. The mistakes made by people are so minor and infrequent they can be trusted to perform brain surgery, and the kinds of mistakes made are things like ‘we miscounted the sponges on 1 out of 1000 surgeries,’ or ‘I took too little tissue and didn’t get all the red cancer out of the identically red tissue because I was trying to conserve quality of life,’ while LLMs are doing the equivalent of hallucinating a spleen inside someone’s head or ignoring the cancer to look for cankers. You can’t even rightly call of a mistake because the LLM isn’t ‘trying to do something and failing.’ It’s just producing probabilities and we’re hoping they’re useful.

When it’s really important to get something right, we have a person double check the work of the first person, which they can do, because they are grounded in reality. When you want to check the output of AI, you use a person for the same reason. AI has no grounding in reality, only words, which are famously not the same thing as reality if you have an intellectual age greater than seven.

If murderers can feel no remorse for violently ending people’s lives, corporate employees can certainly feel clean. Given the old ‘there is no ethical consumption’ there’s arguably no one who should feel clean but most people think they are, on a basic level, good.

You think they think it makes them morally superior to other people? Or that it’s a method of protest? I think you might be overthinking this. People like free games they might play at some point. They do it for the free games, not to feel superior. If you think they are belittling you for not getting the free games, your parents really did a number on your self-esteem.

not fixed [amount]

… to quantify… seems a fraught endeavor

And yet people have calculated it in the past and do so regularly. It’s their job. We aren’t qualified or trained to do it but they are, so they do.

adequate funding of medical care for seniors

This is where the moral arguments come in and society either taxes corporations more than the productivity gain because people are more important than company profits, or denies service to the elderly because company profits are more important than people. It would be a twisted ideological view that the tax has to be precisely equal to the value given to the companies, regardless of outcome.

Hmm. Insane is probably the best bet, rather than good or bad. The AI bubble is set to pop, but no one knows when it will because most thought it was going to repeatedly over the last year but it didn’t. The big tech IPOs are going to be devastating to anyone with a 401k. The possibility of a ‘super el nino’ year could be very damaging for North Americans. The shipping crisis has only begun to really hit so energy crises are going to be likely to hit important industries like food, possibly at the same time they are dealing with the input shortages.

Of course, the tech bros insist AI is going to make everything super easy and cheap to make at some point super-super-soon, so there’s always hope they aren’t full of shit, right?

If you’re five? Hmm.

You know money? Well, almost everybody has very little of it because it’s being horded. This means people want ways to get more of it. One way people get money is to make bets.

Bets are an agreement to pay a given amount of money if a certain event takes place, like your big brother winning his sports game. You could bet me a cookie that he’ll win, and I could bet he’d lose. If he wins, I give you a cookie. If he loses, you give me a cookie.

Now, because your big brother is so cool, I might think it’s really unlikely he’d lose, so to make it fairer, I might want you to give me ten cookies if he loses, while I still only give you one if he wins. With such a cool big brother who’s so good at sports, you might still think it’s worth the small risk to get a cookie.

Now, because someone can get lucky and make lots of money from a small bet by guessing the unlikely thing is going to happen, a lot of people REALLY like betting.

However, people around the betting people also see many of those people betting and losing everything, which is really bad for that person and usually bad for everyone around them too. To try to prevent this, people create rules that say ‘no betting.’

Now, as you probably have experienced, a rule against something doesn’t mean people don’t want to do it. You don’t suddenly NOT want to play games because the rules say you have to go to class. The people who want to make bets, still want to make bets.

So, a group of people built a website where you can enter ‘contracts,’ where, based on an event in the world, people can agree to have paid each other. You could offer a contract that says you’ll put 50 pennies into a bag, and anyone who wants to can put another 50 pennies into the bag, and then you both will seal the bag and whoever correctly predicted the result gets to take the bag home. If you think no one would want to take that contract, you can also offer to put in more and let the other person put in less so you and they feel like it’s fair.

Now, the people who made the website made this process easier and faster by making the bags and pennies digital. This means you can set up 100 bags or 1000 or even more without having to carry all those coins. They also help you find people who want to take the other side of the contract, tell you what amounts of pennies people are putting into similar bags for their contracts, and act as a mostly neutral outsider to hold the bag until the contract is done. This is technically work, even if the works is mostly done by their computers, so they take a handful of pennies from each bag before handing it to the person who made the correct prediction. Those people are polymarket/kalshi/etc.

Now, you might be thinking, ‘That just sounds like betting.’ The important distinction is that it’s not called betting. Because ‘entering contracts’ is not against the rules, people are free to risk their money in a very similar way to betting without technically breaking the rules because the rules say ‘no betting.’

The rising wages of NHS healthcare workers are only a problem if the taxes are not being levied to cover it from the profits the care enables. Without medical care, companies would have more lost productivity, which is the non-moral/economic motivation for an NHS. If the extra productivity were reclaimed in the form of corporate taxes, there would be no budgeting shortfall.