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A mental model I was thinking about was - I remember when Travis Kalanick was talking about using the chatbot to discuss “vibe physics-ing” on the all-in podcast.

And like - I think there’s a presumption you could make that AI models could overfit to asymptote towards just the capabilities and knowledge we currently have.

And that would be amazing! And crazy useful. And there are probably a whole world of complex problems that remain unsolved because they’re adjacent to knowledge we have but they haven’t been invested in.

But can a human reliably tell the difference between “can do 99.999% of the things we currently know how to do which includes a small subset of things we didn’t know we had the capacity to do” and “super intelligent math and science research pushing the frontier of what we know”

A physicist that knows all the things we currently know in excruciating detail feels like it should be able to make the leap beyond the frontier.

But since these are computer models it might just be that it can ride that line extraordinarily well while the line remains firm.


The 70’s were arguably more Grim than today in life and film.

Having lived through them, I’m not sure that’s true

I’m trying to understand your position here. Resistance to datacenters is like wildly bipartisan popular the other two are inversely so. I assume you’re trying to make a satirical point, but what is it?


Trump ran against war, in fact, outright isolationism, and many on the right, albeit a minority, are sticking with isolationism. As more snafu's like the two Navy failures come to light, perhaps more. Nobody wants endless wars.

And who is in favor of higher prices?

Before there were data centers, these two sank many a presidency.


what GOP voter is in favor of higher prices?


None of them! That was my point. High prices is unpopular, and datacenters are unpopular, so I’m trying to figure out why 1 and 3 are written in the negative and 2 is written in the positive. I’m just confused that’s all.


Progressives have settled on affordability as the rallying cry, which is of course both necessary and effective messaging, so centrist Dems and Republicans have to fall in line or face existential peril.

TLDR "AI is pushing the cost of everything up. AI is not cared for by the majority. Oppose AI and the physical world impact or lose."

(more than a handful of politicians have lost their primary elections due to the AI support; Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, Lee Perry and Boyd Bingham [Box Elder County, Utah commissioners], two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers’ driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him “Data Center Geary.”)

AI data center outrage is showing up everywhere from ads to elections - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/20/ai-data-center-election-back... - August 20th, 2026

The rise of DSA is killing off Resistance 1.0 Democrats - https://www.axios.com/2026/08/20/dsa-impeachment-trump-vindm... - August 20th, 2026

Exclusive: GOP issues stark warning to AI companies - https://www.axios.com/2026/08/19/gop-data-center-memo-ai-ele... - August 19th, 2026

Voters Aren’t Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/technology/data-centers-v... | https://archive.today/24VSs - August 19th, 2026

Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/18/young-adu... - August 18th, 2026

Data centers take center stage in Wisconsin governor’s race - https://civicmedia.us/news/2026/08/07/data-centers-take-cent... - August 7th, 2026

Data center foes win big in Tuesday’s primaries - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/05/data-center-foes-wi... - August 5th, 2026

How data centers drove Utah's primaries - https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2026/06/25/data-c... - June 25th, 2026

How opinions and use of AI differ by age - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions... - June 17th, 2026

Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce... - May 13th, 2026


I’m curious if something akin to the Streisand effect is going to take place here. It’s not like you can stop them from knowing about the rest of the world and it sounds like current efforts are heavy handed.


I think it was Kara Swisher and guest who made the observation that the reasons social media as it currently exists may not be long for this world is that part of the reason these lawsuits and laws to restrict access to children are making traction is because adults realize that social media isn’t good for them either. But restricting access for adults is a longer more difficult process for first amendment reasons. The tobacco lawsuits took decades.


“ I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech.”

Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.


> “I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech.”

> Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.

Not commentating on this particular case (because I don't know the details), but it's amazing how many public statements from tech people are just absolute shameless lies. The public/PR statement is just whatever it is they think you want to hear, but behind the scenes they just do whatever they want. There's no connection between the two, except by coincidence.


The only thing David Sacks ever calls for is more money and power for David Sacks.


He called for a lot of questionable stuff about Ukraine. (https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1643320904930275328 etc)



He would not have been attached the current administration if he had even hinted at so. Quite the opposite.


David sacks and the rest of the all in venture bro crew collectively lost their shit when lina khan actually enforced our anti trust laws for the first time in decades. That is a huge reason why silicon valley elites switched to maga


I think SWE fundamentals matter - because it will be a long time before software is a closed system.

And the problem is that as long as humans are in the loop building software that dynamic will have to be maintained.

We use Loki for logging at work. There’s certain types of queries it just doesn’t support. And so the question becomes -

Do you change logging providers Adapt to Loki’s capabilities Create a third layer / tiered storage.

And each of those decisions have multiple downstream consequences. It’s not that LLMs can’t make those decisions per say, it’s that

What does an LLM do when five different people ask for a system optimized to do five different things.

It could figure it out itself, but like I don’t think that’s how the human software contract works.


“Debuggable? It can add extensive instrumentation in seconds.

None of this requires expertise, prompting, or mention of TDD. It's the default.”

I’m pretty sure it takes some level of expertise just to use the term “instrumentation” correctly in a sentence.


There are nasty things we can do in software that can indeed make debugging difficult (for instance in the “make everything reactive” craze, some random subscriber could trigger from some piece of state changing that isn’t obvious at all and fully asynchronous and in a totally different part of the code).


It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?


The point on Radithor seemed suss to me:

“Introduced in 1918, Radithor was William J. A. Bailey's biggest commercial success, selling 400,000 bottles between 1925 and 1930. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued warnings against the use of Radithor but did not have the authority to ban it during this period.”

Many of these examples seem less like settled science and more like a set of fads. But it also seems to leave out all of the fringe things people tried and didn’t work.

While I’m not completely obtuse I don’t actually understand the point this person is trying to make other than knowledge is hard and political.

“1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.”

Is this a pro-institutional screed or an anti-institutional one?

I feel like what’s weird is people don’t really have a solution here. We’re simultaneously criticizing cutting edge science while simultaneously trying to lower the bar around getting things like “peptides” to market.


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