The markets are Goodhart’s Law
Cacajao calvus ucayalii
@RedFacedUakari
- 3 Followers
- 53 Following
- 39 Posts
Why hasn’t anyone named their AI “Shoggoth” yet?
delongPre-IPO filings open SpaceX’s black box of financials. What spills out is a wildly expensive rocket, heroic technical risk, and a justified-equity-valuation story that leans heavily on very very distant cash flows. Google already had superprofits when it did its IPO, FaceBook had profits, Microsoft had profits. It was only Amazon among today’s Leviathans that did not—and Amazon had a clear path that penciled out, while SpaceX does not:
**CROSSPOST: WILL LOCKETT: Starship Is Going... 1/
It’s eerie to watch every part of Universal Paperclips coming true
One must correct for grammar in dead languages, but I strongly suspect that “Tekeli-li” is how the Old Ones would have said, “It’s not X, it’s Y”
Mitchell HashimotoAI slop is good, actually. Slop is what enables fast parallel experimentation. The etiquette and skill is understanding the boundaries of where slop exists and the extent to which it should be cleaned up and how.
A few examples:
I’m working on the internals of some system right now. The API and GUI of this thing is fully zero shame slop. It’s horrible. But it lets me focus on the core quality while shipping a usable piece of alpha quality software to testers (transparent about the slop frontend).
Similarly, this system has plugins. We sent agents in Ralph loops overnight to generate dozens of plugins. The plugins are slop. The quality is bad. The plugin API/SDK is absolutely not done.
But we can test a full GUI with a full plugin ecosystem. When we change the API, we can regenerate them all. The cost of change is just tokens, the velocity is incomparable to before.
I built Terraform. We tested and shipped TF 0.1 with about 3 very weak providers. Because we ran out of time. Building was slow. And when we changed our SDK the cost was immense. Totally different today, 10 years later. Today, I would’ve slop generated 100 providers (again, with transparency and cleanup later, but just to prove it out).
As an anti example, I would not PR this (without prior warning) to another project. I would not throw this onto customers without full review or transparency (as I’m already doing). I would not accept first pass slop. It’s almost never right.
Slop is a tool. And like anything else it’s not blanket bad or good. The context is everything.
Dave WinerAt some point we'll realize if we want something new we have to work with each other. Otherwise you get Elon II, III etc. http://scripting.com/2026/05/07.html#a132833
https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-expert-trap-and-the-next-war
It seems to me that a "tell" that the war in Ukraine wouldn't be predicted correctly before it started, was that the top-left and bottom-right quadrants both saw different aspects of the problem: the top-left saw (indeed, lived in) the misinformation bubble; the bottom-right saw the rational analysis. Moral: live in rational space; look for prominent folks in information bubbles, you may be able to predict mistakes.
I remember thinking in the late ‘90s that the NNTP protocol was better suited to discussion than the web was. I thought, “with Usenet, your ISP pays once to bring the discussion close to the reader, while with the web, the site owner must pay for everyone who wants to access their server.” It recently struck me that thing I thought was a cost is a big part of why the web took everything over: it says, “for access, you have to come through me.” Not the only reason the web won, but maybe part.
The film was cynical, sure, but it seems like a time where that cynicism was, umm, not as societally determinative. These days, I wonder if Harry Lime's crime would be considered a great business idea, shrinkflation for medicine. #MovieClub