@EllipticBitOpts
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Options are my poison of choice. Opinions are my own. Not financial advice. Ex Big Tech. Occasional cultural opinions. Licensed pilot and avgeek.
Joined February 2022
- Tweets2.5K
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EllipticBit retweeted
If you actually believe that major AI dev enterprises are afraid of their own toys, and demanding that the US government regulate them, then please dial the number listed below.
... And we will connect you to a representative from the Federal Witless Protection Program.
This is Silicon Valley we are talking about, the reigning all-time champions of hubris and lack of perspective. Any one of these guys would burn the world if it meant he could be king of the ashes that remained.
No, they want a regulatory moat. A bunch of federal bureaucracy and compliance requirements that they can cut through with money, which will hopelessly entangle the open-source models following close behind them.
Why? And more importantly, why now?
Because AI is not on the verge of superintelligence at all.
Quite the opposite.
It's hit a point of diminishing returns. LLMs are great with language now, but they lack theory of mind, executive function, and a world-object model, and those are not little glue-on doodads. They are problems as deep as language processing, which humanity hasn't even scratched the surface of yet.
Several more fundamental paradigm-shifting breakthroughs will have to occur before humans even build sapience, much less superintelligence.
And AI companies cannot pull these innovations out of their collective asses, because it is the very nature of innovation to show up unexpectedly and by accident.
So why is this a crisis for OpenAI, et al, and why does it put them in danger from open source source models?
It's because of what I call Second Implementer Effect.
It's closely related to Second System Effect.
Ever notice how the first-to-market company doesn't always win in the long run? Ever notice how a second company frequently comes along and eats their lunch?
To develop something entirely new requires a lot of resources. A lot of investment. A lot of engineers.
And that means that once you actually build it, you are a big company with a lot of engineers. And they need something to do. You can't just trim sails and fire them, because you have a lot of investors and need a lot of revenue to pay them.
Line must go up.
So you build lots and lots of new features, for which you can charge more money.
You become Oracle. But 99% of the market doesn't want Oracle.
Customers don't want infinite features for infinite money. They only want more up to a certain point. After that, they want those features, and only those features, for as little money as possible.
And what often happens is that your first implementer shoots right past that point, gold-plating the product until nobody wants to pay for that much gold.
Then the second company, which just offers a basic product at a basic price, eats their lunch. Because the second implementer is the right size for the market.
In this case, the risk to OpenAI, et al, is that open source models will be that second implementer. Nobody is gonna pay giant data centers by the GPU cycle if they can have "good enough" running on their home machine.
And if AI have hit diminishing returns, or soon will (yes), then they can't widen or maintain the gap by speeding up.
They have to slow everyone else down.
You can bet they are burning up the phone lines to their pet senators.
That's why everyone is suddenly telling you the singularity is tomorrow. Precisely because it's not.
The Navier-Stokes thing is a double nothing burger, two juicy helpings of nothing between two slices of nothing, with no cheese, no lettuce, and no tomato.
Have you noticed that no one is telling you about all the wonderful new technologies that will result from the corner case they brute-forced?
Because there aren't any. Its a mathematician's toy, and if you want to know more about how and why, read what Feynman wrote about Banach–Tarski, which will give you the general idea.
Does this mean AI is useless?
Far from it. Large Language Models have already proven useful, for things like research, personalized instruction, coding and so forth. And we've only begun to scratch the surface of what we can do by communicating commands to a computer in natural language.
Cool things will continue to come out of this. But they will happen at the interface and application layers. No superintelligence will be involved.
For the immediate future, AI will remain the paintbrush, not the artist.
And, yes, there are also risks. AI can pretend to be human, and persuade retards of all sorts of things. But that's a human failing. It's not the AI's fault we let the retards vote.
That's how we got a whole bunch of midwit senators who want to "regulate" innovation, instead of medicare fraud, invading third world scum, and invading third world scum who commit medicare fraud.
EllipticBit retweeted
Remote workers used to be the easiest to cut.
Now they may be becoming the hardest.
When you work in an office, there is always someone nearby who can cover, explain, or absorb the slack. When you work remote, that safety net disappears. You either deliver or the gap is obvious. There is no hallway conversation to hide behind and no manager walking by to smooth things over.
The people who last in remote roles are usually the ones who treat the work like it is their own. They decide how to cross the finish line. They manage their time, solve problems without constant check-ins, and keep things moving when no one is watching.
That kind of self-directed reliability is valuable. Companies are starting to notice that the quiet remote people who simply get it done are harder to replace than they first assumed.
The irony is that the same independence that made remote work feel disposable is what is making some of those workers indispensable.
EllipticBit retweeted
@OmegaBLADE97 I understand that. The TGA isn’t free money, and if Treasury draws it down, it eventually has to be rebuilt through receipts or new issuance. But that still doesn’t make the maneuver irrelevant.
I believe Treasury knows a global recession is coming, and viewed through that lens, what they are doing makes considerably more sense. The immediate problem is that long duration debt is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive for the private market to absorb. Using existing TGA cash would allow Treasury to temporarily remove some of that duration without issuing replacement debt at the same time, essentially carrying the long end through the period when demand is weakest.
If a global recession eventually produces the traditional flight to safety, collapsing growth expectations and disinflation should naturally bring private demand back into Treasuries and push long yields lower. Treasury could then rebuild the TGA in a much friendlier environment. Viewed that way, they are not trying to support the long end forever. They may be trying to bridge the dangerous period now until the recession itself creates the Treasury demand they expect will eventually arrive.
EllipticBit retweeted
If lines of code were a meaningful measure of software quality, then the ideal program would be an infinitely long, labyrinthine monument to redundancy in which every variable enjoyed its own paragraph, every conditional branch was lovingly expanded into a dissertation, every reusable function was duplicated dozens of times for the sake of numerical abundance, and every simple idea was buried beneath geological strata of boilerplate, thereby rewarding verbosity over clarity, complexity over elegance, maintenance burden over maintainability, bug surface area over correctness, and programmer ego over engineering discipline, while simultaneously ignoring the inconvenient reality that the history of computing is littered with brilliant achievements—from hand-crafted assembly routines to elegant algorithms and compact operating system components—that derived much of their value precisely from accomplishing more with less, making lines of code roughly as sensible a productivity metric as measuring the quality of a novel by its weight, the efficiency of an engine by the amount of metal in the block, or the intelligence of an argument by the number of words it takes to arrive at the point.
Brevity is wit.
EllipticBit retweeted
The "burn it all down bros are bad people" argument has been bothering me for a while and finally figured out why.
In point #1 you assert that they have never built anything from scratch. But it's clear you never have either.
I say that because I spent my early years building houses. Do you know what the very first thing you do when building a house is?
Clear the land.
That's right. You wreak absolute destruction on everything above the soil. And then you dig into the soil and push it around to create the necessary conditions upon which a solid house can be built.
And if you do not do this, your house will collapse before you can even finish the framing.
All creation is preceded by the forceful removal of the chaos that came before it. And the more force that is applied, the quicker you can progress to the building phase.
This is the most basic command of natural law.
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Point 2: You assert that they have never administered any thriving societies or institutions over the years.
The people you are talking about are typically some form of Christian. For example, RETVRN is a Catholic program, which is the among the oldest religious institutions on Earth. I would argue that the average RETVRNer is far more qualified for leadership positions than the mental cockroaches that are currently leading the society and its institutions. At least they have the background and history of a 2000-year-old institution to draw on.
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Point 3: As opposed to the live-and-let-live tolerance of the blue-haired Islamo-Commies?
At some point you're going to have to decide which group of people you want wielding power over society. Because somebody will. And the Islamo-Commies are desperately chasing that power. Would you rather it be the group with Christian ethics and history or the Islamo-Commies?
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Point 4: Whose definition of "deranged" are we using?
You assert that they are this way, but you have provided no definition of what "conscience mechanism" you think they should be using instead.
They, rightly or wrongly, view themselves as locked in an existential war against the forces of Chaos itself, and they have determined that maximum force must be applied to save their civilization. Just as the house builder in Point 1 does.
I understand that you may view it differently. But that makes your argument one of opinion, and not an argument as to the fact of their mental state.
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Imagine if the Founding Fathers had said "We can't shoot the Redcoats! Think of the institutions that they administer for us!"
EllipticBit retweeted
There will always be a tax burden that falls on someone. Always.
This has been true since the dawn of civilization. You can dislike the coercive nature of the state, but abolishing governments tomorrow would not end politics. New governments would emerge because man is naturally political, and those governments would inevitably levy taxes of their own.
So the real question is not whether taxes should exist in the abstract. The real question is what forms of taxation are more just than others.
If you abolish property taxes while keeping government spending levels relatively intact, the tax burden does not disappear. It just shifts to somewhere else.
And when society increasingly shields asset holders while shifting that tax burden onto people who do not own things like real estate, stocks, or significant amounts of wealth, we're laying the foundation for an explosion in inequality driven by politics rather than the natural differences that exist between people.
People will tolerate inequality because they recognize that we're not all the same. They'll also tolerate it because they believe they can one day own assets themselves. They become far less tolerant when they conclude the system has been structurally redrawn to permanently favor existing asset owners at their expense.
And abolishing property taxes even for just primary homes does exactly that. It will inevitably send home prices even higher.
EllipticBit retweeted
Arguably the cruelest thing we’ve done in our economic policy since before the dotcom crash has been to use financial tools to mitigate recessions, in order to prevent “another Great Depression.”
It’s not just that by allowing financial dead wood to pile up we’ve teed up an even bigger one - it’s that we’ve accustomed our people to -generations- of stagnation instead.
The Great Depression was over in 10-11 years; the worst was over in 5 (and it’s generally thought the New Deal prolonged it). We’ve accustomed our young people to almost -30 years- of low-to-zero growth, and in particular close to zero wage growth.
If you told people they should be confident entrepreneurs in their work lives now because our troubles were over, they wouldn’t believe you.
EllipticBit retweeted
The GOP refuses to build patronage networks because it's run by boomercons and something something bootstraps firm handshake avocado toast.
Which means that 90+% of young conservatives are too busy trying to tread water to give their time to conservative causes.
Boomers will happily donate another lecture to address this problem.
I'll have to cogitate on this for a while but my first read through gut-check says that this is the correct mental model of the future. Where "correct" means the model that increases personal freedom, advances humanity, and improves the human condition.
Bookmarked.
Beff is spot on here.
UBI is a subscription to existence, paid by a central authority that retains control of the infrastructure you depend on to live.
You do not own the AI. You do not own the compute. You do not own the network. You receive an allowance calibrated to keep you functional as a consumer and quiet as a political subject.
The authority controlling the payment also controls the unit of account. The number on your allowance can stay constant or increase while its real purchasing power erodes through the same monetary expansion that makes the payment possible in the first place.
Neuro-capitalism, as Beff frames it, is the position that survives this. Every individual owns and controls a model that functions as an extension of their own cognition. The model is the individual's in the same sense that their body is. This matters because cognitive extension is about to stop being optional.
The people who have AI integrated into their decision-making and their memory and their real-time analysis will outperform the people who do not, and the gap will widen until operating without extension becomes structurally equivalent to operating without literacy.
If the extension is owned by someone else, the person is a tenant in their own cognition. The owner has editorial control over the extended self.
Unfortunately, the current trajectory seems to be toward a small number of centralized systems that everyone rents cognitive access to. User thought becomes legible to and shapeable by infrastructure the user does not control. Decisions that feel like the user's own decisions were steered by the system's outputs. Preferences that feel like the user's own preferences were modeled and served back to them. The user retains the experience of agency while losing the substance.
Central planning fails because no central planner can aggregate the distributed, local, tacit knowledge held by individuals operating in their own contexts. The market works as a discovery process precisely because it lets that knowledge surface through billions of decentralized transactions.
Likewise, a handful of models serving the population imposes a small number of trained syntheses on situations their training never adequately covered.
However, billions of personal models, each tuned to their owner's specific context and priorities, preserves the distributed knowledge problem that makes markets generative.
Decentralization at the cognitive layer is the only arrangement that lets intelligence, human or synthetic, continue to surprise itself.
To further Beff's point, people will be aligned with AI if they own it. The alignment problem as currently framed assumes a monolithic AI and asks how to make its goals match human goals.
If every person owns their own model, the alignment problem becomes trivial for each instance, because the model's goals are the owner's goals. There is no scary superintelligence whose objectives need to be reverse-engineered by a committee. There are billions of extended minds, each aligned with the person extending through it.
The catastrophe scenarios that dominate AI safety discourse depend on the centralization we're so desperately trying to avoid.
There are three fatal assumptions made by UBI/UHI crowd.
1. That productivity will explode.
2. That the fruits of said productivity will be fairly and efficiently redistributed.
3. That people want to be paid to sit at home and do nothing all day.
The first is easily debunked by Jevon's Paradox. Demand increases will absorb the production increase. Same as it always has.
The second is just a thinly veiled techno-communism that assumes that the real problem with communism was simply that the technology didn't exist to deliver communism before now.
The third is by far the most destructive. As it ignores the human need for purpose. Paying people to do nothing destroys their purpose. And people without purpose have very high rates of self-deletion. And violence. Tolstoy talked about how such people would destroy the machinery keeping them alive, just to experience a new thrill.
UBI/UHI is the worst parts of communism with the additional wrinkle of destroying basic human dignity and will absolutely destroy any society that tries it in less than a decade.
EllipticBit retweeted
Hello Senator Thune,
Let's expose what you're really doing with "reconciliation."
You announced it yesterday, eleven months after the House passed the SAVE America Act. You're not trying to pass this bill. You're trying to kill it in a way you can blame on process.
Here's how we know:
Reconciliation requires the Senate parliamentarian to rule that provisions are "budgetary." Citizenship verification is not budgetary. Photo ID mandates are not budgetary. The parliamentarian will gut the bill. Then you'll shrug and say "we tried." We see through you.
Meanwhile, you WON'T use the tools that actually work:
Rule XIX limits each senator to two speeches per legislative day. Keep the Senate in continuous session, file cloture daily, and the filibuster exhausts in ~12-20 days. You dismissed it as "complicated." Because if you tried and succeeded, you'd have to actually pass the bill.
Harry Reid nuked the filibuster in 2013 when he wanted results.
Mitch McConnell changed Senate rules THREE times and canceled the August recess.
Chuck Schumer used reconciliation within months on a 50-50 Senate.
You have 53 seats. You've changed nothing, canceled nothing, and waited eleven months.
Now let's talk donors:
• Goldman Sachs: $150K to you - top H-1B user
• Google: $75K - lobbies against E-Verify
• Meta: $72.5K - Zuckerberg's FWD[.]us pushes mass immigration
• Wells Fargo: $90K - banks undocumented immigrants
Same corporations sponsor Punchbowl News, where you sit for "Fly Out Days" which nobody watches except Congress staffers and K Street lobbyists who pays premium bucks for legislative intelligence. Their reporter then telegraphs to the audience the SAVE Act "will ultimately fail."
Corporate money flows to you AND to the outlet that frames your inaction as inevitable.
We see the loop.
You called grassroots anger a "paid influencer ecosystem." YOU are the paid influencer. You take the wrong side of a 80% issue because you are indistinguishable from a K Street mouthpiece, and an ineffective one to boot who won't bend the rules to get anything passed.
What we want:
1. Force a real talking filibuster.
2. Stop hiding behind process.
3. Pass the SAVE America Act.
YOU will become the reason that we will have our butts kicked in midterms. Not Candace Owens, not Nick Fuentes, not anyone else. You and you alone, and all because you want to make the 200 or so viewers of Punchbowl Fly Out Days happy. You're living in a K Street information bubble, addicted to the comforts and praises of lobbyists masquerading as journalists. You mistake the steak and martini dinners you get invited to as your own constituents.
You are not "moderate." The SAVE America Act has 98% support among Republicans. Name one other thing that has 98% support. You are an extreme minority who prides himself on being a calm leader, when in reality you are well in the running for the most ineffective Majority leader of all time.
Prove me wrong. Do the bare modicum of effort. Not symbolic. Actual effort. Cancel the recess. Get SAVE America Act passed.
Cash for Clunkers perfectly exemplifies the broken window fallacy in action. The government spent $3 billion to destroy 690,000 perfectly functional vehicles, claiming this would "stimulate" the economy by forcing people to buy new cars. What they actually did was obliterate billions of dollars worth of working capital that could have served lower-income families for years to come.
The program artificially inflated new car sales by cannibalizing future demand and destroying the used car market. Those "clunkers" weren't junk—they were reliable transportation that mechanics could have maintained, parts suppliers could have serviced, and budget-conscious buyers could have afforded. Instead, bureaucrats decided to crush them into scrap metal to create the illusion of economic activity.
This wasn't stimulus—it was capital destruction on a massive scale. Real economic growth comes from saving, investment, and the accumulation of productive assets, not from government programs that literally destroy wealth to generate temporary sales spikes. The program made cars more expensive for everyone while making transportation less accessible for those who needed it most.
Every crushed engine block represented resources that could have continued serving society productively. True prosperity emerges when we preserve and efficiently allocate capital, not when we celebrate its destruction as economic policy.
Hey @elon! When will we get access to SuperGrok Heavy via prepaid?
My AI usage patterns don't really work well with the monthly subscription model and regular Grok is struggling with my niche programming language.
I would really like to try SuperGrok Heavy, but alas.
As AMZN announces 16k layoffs today, I would remind that 35bln is enough to fund *140,000* jobs with a fully loaded cost to the company of $250,000/yr in the US.
And they don't have to build the infrastructure, they already have it in the US.
This was never about cost savings.
What Wall Street hasn't figured out yet is that ads cannot cover even a trivial fraction of the pledged spending on AI data center hardware that has been round-tripped through the tech economy by OpenAI.
This implosion is going to be one for the history books.
Has anyone on FinTwit seen this?
Watch his body language.
JPow is scared.
youtube.com/watch?v=KckGHaBL…
The inability of people to accept the technological superiority of the US is evidence of how pervasive Chinese propaganda has been for the past 30 years.
We just folded two states backed by Russian/Chinese tech like lawn chairs in six months.
But they'll beat us for sure.
