Exactly.

People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.

Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is “impulse” or “deriving a momentary pleasure from buying” are the latter kind of thing.

So best change your investment strategy, then.

If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.

Agreed.

One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.

My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.

Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless “instant gratification” impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.

Not the other things, though.

Wasn’t that just in the UK?

Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.

That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.

I’ve pieced together a lot of knowledge I read about with understanding I gained from the inside of the Finance Industry (such as their way of valuing future money as well as things like fair value and fundamentals when it comes to markets), but the assembled thing as a whole is my own theory.

That said, my money is were my mouth is, and I’ve been highly invested in Gold (known as the ultimate safe asset) since 2012, and that has so far returned 500% on the original investment during that period, thus so far I seem to be at least partially right about the direction things are going (some kind over overall devaluation of traditional strong currencies and near-stagflation getting worse as the inherent disfunctionalities of the current value allocation system make it harder and harder for it to keep going as is), though that doesn’t mean I’m right on the Why.

PS: Recommended books to read - “This Time is Different” for an Historical perspective on Economic Crashes and “Freakonomics” for a look of on human decision making in an Economics context (which turns out to be very different from the homo economicus human behaviour model that underpins Free Market Economics theories) from Behaviour Economics which is the only part of Economics that actually conducts experiments.

Mainly the poorer owe that to the richer.

Also the richer owe that to each other.

The last part could sorta be unwound in a more or less peaceful way (though very interventionist and the amounts involved are so large that we would see an explosion of corruption as the wealthy tried to extract gains from it by hook and by crook), but the first part would require a Revolution that tore down all existing ownership structures.

Just remember that every year the World’s Economy has to grow enough to cover the interest rate payments in all outstanding debt (or money itself has to inflate away fast enough to offset it, and since interest rates are naturally set up to be above inflation - otherwise Financial Institutions would be losing money - that’s unlikely)

There are two ways to offset this:

• Reduce the amount of outstanding debt.
• Lower interest rates (which is what was done after the 2008 Crash, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash in at least a century) so that for the same amount of debt there is less interest to pay.

Overall debt is increasing as per the article.

Interest rates are below historical average since what was done after 2008 which was supposed to be temporary wasn’t fully wound back, so there’s a lot less room there for central banks to do something about it.

Actually solving the underlying problems behind the 2008 Crash was pushed to the Future with some interest rate engineering, and it looks a lot like The Future Is Today, and this time around rather than just an over-indebtness plus Finance overextension problem, we seem to have over-indebtness, a massive Tech bubble (like in 2000) AND asset price bubbles in all manner of asset classes, from economically peripheral things like crypto to core things like housing.

I’ve been expecting a massive crash since I saw what passed for a “solution” back in 2009-12, but shit is turning up to be way worse than I expected due to all the additional resource malallocation and mispriceing in the Economy.

“Computer says” is a pretty standard excuse for doing fucked up shit as it adds a complex form of indirection and obfuscation between the will of a human and the actual actions that result from that will.

Doesn’t work as an excuse with people who actually make the software that makes the computer “say” something (because the complexity of what us used is far less for them and thus they know what’s behind it and that the software is just an agent of somebody’s will), but it seems to work with even non-expert (technology fan) techies, more so with non-techies.

With AI the people using the computer as an excuse just doubled down on this because in this case the software wasn’t even explicitly crafted to do what it does, it was trained (though in practice you can sorta guide it in some direction or other by chosing what you train it with) further obscuring the link between the will of a human which has decided what it does (or at least, decided which of the things it ended up doing after training are acceptable and which require changes to training) and the output of a computer system.

Considering that just about the entirety of the Justice System. Legislative System and Regulatory System are technically ignorant, using the “computer says” as an excuse often results in profit enhancing outcomes, incentivising “greed above all” people to use it to confuse, block or manipulate such systems.

Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.

Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.

What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner’s Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!

Even the LLM part might be considered Plagiarism.

Basically, unlike humans it cannot assemble an output based on logical principles (i.e. assembled a logical model of the flows in a piece of code and then translate it to code), it can only produce text based on an N-space of probabilities derived from the works of others it has “read” (i.e. fed to it during training).

That text assembling could be the machine equivalent of Inspiration (such as how most programmers will include elements they’ve seen from others in their code) but it could also be Plagiarism.

Ultimately it boils down to were the boundary between Inspiration and Plagiarism stands.

As I see it, if for specific tasks there is overwhelming dominance of trained weights from a handful of works (which, one would expect, would probably be the case for a C-compiler coded in Rust), then that’s a lot more towards the Plagiarism side than the Inspiration side.

Granted, it’s not the verbatim copying of an entire codebase that would legally been deemed Plagiarism, but if it’s almost entirely a montage made up of pieces from a handful of codebases, could it not be considered a variant of Plagiarism that is incredibly hard for humans to pull off but not so for an automated system?

Note that obviously the LLM has no “intention to copy”, since it has no will or cognition at all, what I’m saying is that the people who made it have intentionally made an automated system that copies elements of existing works, which normally assembles the results from very small textual elements (same as a person who has learned how letters and words work can create a unique work from letters and words) but with the awareness that in some situations that automated system they created can produce output based on an amount of sources which is very low to the point that even though it’s assembling the output token by token, it’s pretty much just copying whole blocks from those sources same as a human manually copying a text from a document to a different document would.

In summary, IMHO LLMs don’t always plagiarize, but can sometimes do it when the number of sources that ended up creating the volume of the N-dimensional probabilistic space the LLM is following for that output is very low.

It’s even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can “solve” simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.

And this is just State surveillance.

When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.

That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.

What “global backlash”?

If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist Everywhere.

For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).

In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.

Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.