Red retweeted
It's immoral to participate in a discourse without having done the reading. That's why I tore through Abundance so fast. The discourse was so magnetic, but to have posted about it without having read it would have been a sin.
Red retweeted
And so it begins: ©-maximalism breaking AI: Seedance 2 refused the following prompt, blaming concerns about copyright. Hey ©-maximalists: Where do I go to license the right to create a cartoon "in the style of a 1960s cartoon"?
"A cartoon character in the style of a 1960s cartoon approaches a soda machine; he puts twenty-five cents into the machine and presses a button; the machine shakes a bit but then does nothing; the character gets angry and shakes the machine, but nothing happens."
Red retweeted
Compare contrast, the extremely lax and forgiving personal and business bankruptcy laws in the United States
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Intellectual property laws are usually used strictly to prohibit other parties from using the IP. Theoretically the idea is to issue licenses, but the owner can set whatever terms they like, or commonly just say “no”.
The “mechanical license” for song compositions is an interesting counterpoint. Anyone can cover a song without negotiating or even asking, they just have to pay a fixed fee to the composer for each copy sold.
That is a big contrast with the iron grip of control that IP usually provides. Someone that an artist personally despises can freely cover their song and potentially get rich doing it. You can’t decide that your composition is any more valuable than something you consider obvious trash.
Music IP has tons of messy aspects, but this narrow, somewhat outdated (focused on sales vs streaming) area seems pretty good.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechan…
The fundamental idea of IP is that the government enforces a somewhat unnatural bargain because society benefits on net from playing the game that way – more creative and innovative works will be produced if the creators can control and exploit their work for a time period.
That is not a law of the universe, it is a hypothesis, and it should always be under evaluation. Out of self interest, the owners of IP will always want more power, but letting them control lawmaking is generally exploiting the rest of society.
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Coding is basically the pinnacle of what you could reasonably automate with AI, and yet we still need human engineers to oversee agents for them to be effective.
The AI models are trained on an incredible amount of sophisticated code. The users are highly technical and can use the latest tools quickly. The work is “verifiable” because you can test an app. The outcomes are often removed from the quality of the code (you can have sloppy code but the app can still work). And the context for the agent is often already digitized and sitting in the codebase.
That’s an incredible amount of benefits that AI coding agents get to work with. Some of those apply to knowledge work, but most don’t in areas where the work needs to be fully reviewed to be useful, or where data isn’t as abundantly digitized. This makes the job for agents in knowledge work more complicated.
So if with all of that, engineers still remain in very high demand, the risks are going to be less than what’s perceived for other areas of knowledge work. Agents will let people do far more than they did before, but the people don’t go away.
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The two reasons that coding strikes me as qualitatively distinct:
A very large public corpus of information on how to do the job.
Instant feedback for the model once it’s taken a wrong turn (the ability to try lots of things or in quick succession and see what “works”).
Red retweeted
flipside of the popularity of LitRPGs, wherein the world works the way it is claimed to and effort is materially rewarded
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My wife mentioned a nice private school over dinner this week
She said the campus was beautiful
I asked what's the tuition
She said we should look at it as an investment in him not a cost
I made a note
She said don't make a note
I said I always make notes
She said this isn't a deal
I said everything is a deal
She closed her eyes
She said we'd discuss it Saturday
I agreed
Saturday 7:02am
She came downstairs in her Saturday robe
Coffee in hand
I had my cargo shorts on
The dining room had been cleared
The projector was on
The analyst was at the head of the table
Quarter zip on, three iced coffees, a legal pad, and two laptops
He had been there since 6:44am
I texted him at 11:14pm Friday
The text said dining room 6:45am bring the model
He sent a thumbs up
My wife stopped in the doorway
She said what is this
I said you said you wanted to discuss it
She said this is not a discussion
I did not respond
She sat down anyway
The analyst stood
He said good morning ma'am
She did not respond
He sat back down
A printed deck in front of each seat
A fourth copy in case
Slide 1 Tuition Schedule
$38,500 per year
Thirteen years
$500,500 nominal
Before escalators
The school has raised tuition 4.2% per year for a decade
With escalators $648,000
My wife said okay
I said I'm not done
Slide 2 Opportunity Cost
Even before escalators
$38,500 invested annually
10% nominal return
S&P long-run average since 1928
By his eighteenth birthday $944,000
My wife said we can afford it
I said I know that's not the slide
Slide 3 Terminal Value at Age 65
$83 million
She was quiet
The analyst slid the sensitivity tables across the table
8% return $31 million
10% return $83 million
12% return $222 million
She did not look
She said this isn't about money
I said it's always about money
She said no it isn't
I said then what is it about
She did not answer
She said you can't put a dollar value on his teachers his classmates his environment
I said I can the analyst already did slide 6
He flipped to slide 6
She did not look
She said the school is the best in the city
I said best is a feeling
She said it produces the best students
I said the students were already the best before they got there
She said our son deserves it
I said our son deserves $83 million
My son walked in
He is five
Dinosaur pajamas
He looked at the projector
He looked at the open deck on the table
He looked at slide 3
He said are we modeling pre-tax or after-tax
The analyst opened a new tab
My wife looked at the ceiling
He said what's the discount rate
The analyst set down his pen
She closed her eyes
He said is this the same return assumption from the 529 conversation
The analyst stopped typing
He looked at me
I did not say anything
She stood up
Sat back down
He said dad can I help
I said yes
He pulled up a chair
The analyst handed him a printout
He started reading
My wife watched him read
She watched him for a long time
She said his name
He looked up
She said do you like school
He said the work is too easy and the kids don't ask questions
She did not respond
She looked at the ceiling
She walked out of the room
The analyst started packing up
He said should I follow up Monday sir
I said no follow up needed
He'll be fine
Sent from my iPhone
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My father learned rocket chemistry on a subsistence farm using stump remover and sugar. No kits. No experts. Just trial, error, and the stubborn belief that if it's broken, you fix it with what you have.
He went on to have his name engraved on hardware that flew in orbit. Then he spent decades in our garage with a green chalkboard and his slide rule, trying to make sure I understood concepts like orbital decay, thrust, specific impulse, the rocket equation, and more, because he was convinced we were forgetting how to go to the moon.
He was right. And we're doing it again.
unmitigatedrisk.com/?p=1227
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Apple is the only company with a great proposal here: let parents, who buy the devices used by kids, set up kids accounts and decide what they're allowed to do, then pass those decisions to apps through parental controls -- without demanding anyone's identity papers.
Reddit and Discord are both in trouble over controversial age verification service 9to5mac.com/2026/02/24/reddi… by @benlovejoy
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Quarterbacks are judged on what they do in the biggest games, and there’s no bigger game than the Super Bowl. So @theStevenRuiz ranked all the 50 Super Bowl QB performances of the 21st century, from worst to … guess who.
theringer.com/2026/02/03/nfl…
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Russia supplied the hardware.
China published the playbook.
Iran just proved it works.
Starlink: 80% packet loss.
Expert monitoring Iranian internet for 20 years: “I have never seen such a thing in my life.”
The “LEO satellites are unjammable” consensus?
Dead.
Wall Street modeled Starlink as immune because satellites hop frequencies and move constantly. SpaceX patched SOFTWARE against Russian jamming in Ukraine.
This is HARDWARE.
Murmansk-BN. Krasukha-4. Delivered via IL-76 transports. 5,000 kilometer jamming range.
Two months ago, Chinese researchers published exactly how to black out Starlink over Taiwan: 935 coordinated ground-based jammers blanketing Ku-band frequencies.
Tehran was the field test.
40,000 terminals. Near-total degradation. Regime now executing anyone caught with a dish as “enemies of God.”
This is not about Iranian protests.
This is the authoritarian electronic warfare axis proving concept for Taiwan.
The $280 billion satellite communications market is repricing a risk that consensus said didn’t exist.
Defense stocks are about to enter a new cycle.
And somewhere in Beijing, someone is taking very detailed notes on what worked.
🚨🇮🇷 STARLINK VS. IRAN’S INTERNET BLACKOUT
Iran cut the internet on Thursday, plunging 90M people into digital darkness as protests hit all 31 provinces, the regime even cut landlines in some areas, but then Starlink pushed through.
Starlink's low-Earth-orbit satellites can't be blocked like traditional internet, so videos are now leaking out showing continued protests.
People would still need ground terminals that Iran's actively policing, so only a small number have access and it's degrading, but even degraded connectivity beats total blackout.
When governments shut down the internet to silence protests, Starlink becomes the lifeline that keeps the truth alive.
Source: @AlinejadMasih, @starlink, @elonmusk
Red retweeted
This is frightening
Only 29% can answer all three of these financial literacy questions correctly! ifdm.stanford.edu/bigthree. Source: FINRA Foundation's 2021 National Financial Capability Study