It's amusing to watch the movie version of The Fountainhead and see what are supposed to be Roarke's buildings. He likes the pedestal style, where the first floor is mostly open-work columns around a small lobby. Turns out this is terrible in cold or windy areas. Wind hits the side of the building and is forced down into the area around the lobby. Doors are forced shut by wind pressure. People are knocked off their feet. A strong wind in snow produces a horizontal blizzard.
The Meteorology Building (bldg 54) at MIT was built that way, with all of the above problems. Much embarrassment. Later, much computational fluid dynamics and, in 2019, a rebuild of the plaza level with more walls.
> The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
And now it's used for bungee jumping.
The US equivalent is the Hunter's Point crane.[1] This was built to do a very specific job - lifting battleship turrets. It's not used any more.
Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering?
"The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
I think they should be responsible for accurate listings, swift refunds, taking down misleading products, and banning repeat offenders. I somehow think making Amazon "responsible for what they sell" goes far beyond that in ways that are not reasonable. Only those that make products should be responsible for them.
Well they don't ban repeat offenders. Trying to directly regulate the banning of repeat offenders seems more difficult and less fruitful than giving the store fallback responsibility for the warranty.
Australia gives the store primary responsibility and it seems to work well for them.
I guess if they aren't prohibited from having a contract with the manufacturers to have them fulfill or reimburse warranty claims, then it would be acceptable to to require stores to honor it. They'll be more careful about who they allow in.
That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.
When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
Andon's store in SF has had some press coverage.[1] "A curated boutique for slow living." It's a gift shop, at 2102 Union St. It looks like the kind of retail that trust-fund kids open. Has anyone been there?
It's just an experiment. But once this gets going, it's going to be interesting. There are a lot of underperforming businesses and CEOs out there. One way to make it after getting an MBA is to find a boring business with an older owner who's lost interest, and work out a deal to run it for a cut of the profits and a stake in the business.
The Andon people mentioned that they've been worried about "a misaligned AI (could) run a business to gather money in order to achieve whatever objectives it might have." That's a basic function of capitalism, so it will happen eventually.
What this adds up to is that when AIs get better at running businesses than many business owners, the "creative destruction" feature of capitalism means AIs ends up in charge of many businesses. The AIs don't even have to be super intelligent, just reasonably good. Reminds me of the remark from a Yosemite park ranger about bear-resistant trash cans: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists".
It's going to be hard to stop this without a worldwide crackdown on ownership concealment. The US allows you to have a US business run by a Nevada LLC partly owned by a corporation in Nevis-St Kitts and another corporation in Granada. This isn't even unusual. Try to find out who really owns an oil tanker not owned by a major oil company. Right now, a fund partly run by an AI might have partial ownership.
This is how AI takes over. Not with an army of robots. With an army of LLCs.
“It’s only a matter of time before we make a profit”. This is the kind of thing that trust fund kids say too: Oh hey yeah we made $100 in profit this week it’s working! (Business is currently $350,000 in the red and emailing the FBI to try and get their bank manager fired for terrorism).
Trust fund kids have the time and resources to keep trying until they succeed. They can afford the failures, and brute force their way to success. Same with people who have access to "free money". It's a rigged game.
Updating a Rust renderer from WGPU 24 to WGPU 30. 640 lines of fixes needed so far, and more to do. I've fixed all the easy stuff, and now I'm down to
reverse engineering breaking changes of excessive cleverness.
I wonder if Claude Code could do this. That's a useful metric for the future - if a coding agent can't handle the breaking changes in a package upgrade, it's the package's fault. The day may come when that's something Github Actions checks for pull requests.
It's impressive that you didn't reach for Claude Code first :)
Would be good to keep track of how long it takes you to complete, so you can compare it with how long it takes Opus and then Fable to accomplish the same thing.
> It's impressive that you didn't reach for Claude Code first :)
I should have. All I have right now is a free Cursor account and Github Copilot. I've got to start spending money on tokens and get up to date. That article today by Carmack chewing out game devs for hand coding was striking, considering who he is and how much low level stuff he has done.
I'm doing 3D rendering in Rust. (Think three.js, but in Rust.) This is well outside the mainstream, so there's not much on the web to populate training sets. A year ago, AI coding tools could not cope with this area at all. Today, maybe.
I have no idea how good Claude is at understanding breaking changes to an API. I expect it would get simple changes, such as structure field renamings, without any trouble. But the gyrations required to handle write only access to GPU memory in Rust might not appear in the training data.
No, they are not in trouble yet. I'm not saying SaaS is dead. The article, to me, reads as, if you are in SaaS, you better be looking at ways to build power above and beyond a simple service, be it a network moat, corporate compliance, competing with the vertical....
Incoming Oracle news: "Oracle’s Cold 6 AM Layoff Emails Hit Staff Amid New Wave of Cuts: ‘Today Is Your Last Working Day’
The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts, which follow a reported 21,000-employee decline during fiscal 2026."[1]
Uh oh. How long until the ORACLE sign comes off the big cylindrical building in San Mateo? Will Ellison have to sell his private island?[2]
That's a softball interview. More hard questions would help.
Here's one good insight, though.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, so look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. And that’s happened repeatedly in history, and it’s really not any different now.
I wonder if the sudden political opposition to AI comes from the realization that it may replace "rich and powerful people". Really, when you look at Trump's appointees, it's a low bar.
(I met Lanier when he was demoing his first VR system. Head tracking lag was about a second. Turn head, wait for image to catch up. Autodesk fooled around with VR a bit in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but concluded that CAD required precision work and VR was like trying to do precision work in ski gloves. That level of VR can be seen in Johny Mnemonic, which had some Autodesk assistance.[1]. Even today, you can't put a nut on a bolt in VR without a cheat.)
The more interesting question is what happens once we replace manual labor with artificially intelligent robots and we arrive at a place where 99 % of human labor got eliminated. How do you maintain civil order? Every country is built on the premise that you have to “earn your keep” but what when that’s no longer true? Think about it, no labor, only capital. What will the people owning the capital demand of people that don’t own any? They won’t be useful to them in any way. I expect something like forced reduction of fertility for regulars to depopulate countries, while hyper rich individuals will extend their life spans and become immortal. And I don’t mean they will really survive but someone like Elon Musk will have their consciousness mapped to an AI and will instate that AI as their official heir. That sounds crazy but they will totally go for it just listen at what Peter Thiel is spouting in terms of immortality and becoming godlike. Hope people will have enough left to say to prevent that but right now it feels we’re going hardcore towards that scenario.
There have been transitions like that before, but they were slow. It took about two centuries for the US to go from 90% farmers to 2% farmers. Some countries deliberately put on the brakes. India has done this. India is still about 50% farmers. India uses subsidies and discourages farm mechanization to prevent massive unemployment.
There have been fast single-industry transitions. But not that fast. It took about 20 years for printing to go from a large craft with a long history to a minor employer.
Not everybody got out in time, but there was warning. Same for longshoremen when containers came in. Computing in general took about 50 years to totally replace the clerical plants of the 1950s. Railroads in Britain took a few decades to really get rolling, and in the US, they made it possible to use the vast interior of the US.
The AI transition looks to be both broad and fast. That's harder for society to digest.
Underlying assumptions of politics and economics break.
> Elon Musk will have their consciousness mapped to an AI and will instate that AI as their official heir
My guess is that sort thing will become common. We'll probably need some lefty policies to distribute the wealth. To each according to their needs and that.
What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking experience of being alive.
Strangely, we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC, and we don’t mind and we even crave plunging into the nothingness of deep sleep each night, but we have a big problem with not being here tomorrow.
But experience might not be encodable. Can you encode pain? Could a computer ever be programmed to feel pain? Not detect damage or report on it, but feel the pain associated with it?
What is “the aroma of coffee” or the “sound of a violin in middle C”? We can define them objectively, in various ways (some having nothing to do with each other).
But if the experiences we have are not encodable then we can’t map consciousness onto a medium. It must be experienced (whatever it is/means - nobody knows) in the here and now.
It’s not magic, but it might not be something that is printable to disk anymore than the “brisk inhale of canyon air” that I can play that back and have that experience, is printable to disk.
It remains to be seen how the experience of “the aroma of coffee” works but I expect there will be progress there. That stuff probably came about through evolution as a kind of situation summary so we can make decisions critical to survival and replication like whether to grab coffee.
>we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC
This is true. Probably just an evolved instinct not to die. Even so I think it would be cool to live on in some form.
They will settle for what’s available at the time, I dont think it makes sense either but they will come up with something that is good enough for their purposes and as long as the copy parrots the original well enough it will pass.
Whatever happened to Musk's plan for data centers in orbit? That seemed silly at the time. It offers a way to get out from under restrictions imposed by national governments, which might make it worthwhile.
I mean for that matter why not float barges in the South Pacific for data centers? Sure it’s a dumb idea, but it’s still less problematic than launching thousands of GPUs on rockets.
Low earth orbit, though... Solar power works well, radio works well, and the international jurisdiction is confused enough to exploit if you have money.
A data center in space still has to get its data up and down from earth somehow. That part will still be subject to government control, so I don't think this would get him anything.
Receiving signals is impossible to control. That is why every spy agency set up number stations in the Cold War. All you need is a radio hooked up to a computer and it gives off zero signal of its own so no one can trace it.
Sending is a bit more problematic but you can build a ground station anywhere in the satellites coverage area, so if you get shut down in one place you can move to the next where officials are easier to bribe.
The real problems are transfer speed, reliability (both transfer and compute) and cooling. All of them are much harder than avoiding governments.
It only gets out of the restrictions as long as the nations say it does - if the US decides to ban Musk from putting up satellites it can put him in jail, blow up his satellites or even have him killed
There's no reference to a "ghost gun" in the LA Times text. It's only in the headline. In the text, the weapon is referred to as an AR-15. SFGATE, though, quotes cops as saying "AR-styled assault rifle also known as a ghost gun.”
The "ghost gun" thing refers to guns without serial numbers. For an AR-15, that usually means something assembled from an "80% lower receiver", a part which exists purely to evade US gun laws. [1] It's not quite complete; it takes some final machining. This can be done by hand with modest machine shop tools, or there's a special-purpose 3-axis CNC mill to do it for $4000, available from Ghost Gunner.[2] (They used to sell a simpler device for $1200 which was only useful for the single task of finishing "80% lower receivers", but the current $4000 unit is halfway respectable as a desktop CNC mill. It understands a subset of G-Code. Nobody seems to use it for general CNC work, though. A good desktop CNC mill for $4000 would be useful, but they'd need to get serious about cooling and chip removal.)
Unless it was edited after your comment, it's mentioned in the first paragraph:
> Two young people riding in an autonomous vehicle were arrested in San Francisco after authorities allegedly found them in possession of an illegal “ghost gun.”
The Meteorology Building (bldg 54) at MIT was built that way, with all of the above problems. Much embarrassment. Later, much computational fluid dynamics and, in 2019, a rebuild of the plaza level with more walls.
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