Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.

Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.

Yeah, this is why polling is hard.

Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don’t. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.

This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won’t find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it’s a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.

Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold. There was nothing magical about being on the gold standard.

Money is just IOUs created by the government. The government uses them to pay for goods and services it wants. If the government wants someone to guard a building, they pay in IOUs. Then, every year, the government taxes everybody in the country and demands that they return a certain number of government IOUs to the country. It’s this obligation to pay taxes that gives their IOUs their value.

The person who was paid to guard a building is left holding a pile of IOUs. Fundamentally, they’re worthless. But, there are other people in the country who have to pay taxes and aren’t doing jobs for the government. So, the guy with the IOUs goes to the farmer and says “I know you’re going to need to pay taxes and don’t have any IOUs, I’ll trade you some of my IOUs for some of your vegetables”. After that exchange the farmer has enough IOUs to pay the government at tax time, and the guard still has enough to pay his own taxes.

The mail (a web service), the calendar (a web service), YouTube (web videos), YouTube Music (web music), Google Maps (a web based mapping service)…

You get the picture.

Android spies on you when you’re doing things locally on the device. But, the rest of these are web-based services.

Marinading is for meats that are too tough to cook with minimal preparation. If your hunk of meat needs to be marinated before you eat it, it’s not a steak.

It bans some versions of this, but it can’t ban all of it. The obvious way is fully banned and hard to get away with: pay someone to delete unflattering things about you on Wikipedia. But, you can do a much more costly, slower, but much more likely to be acceptable version: you can buy a newspaper and arrange for that newspaper to write flattering articles about you. Since those articles qualify as a primary source, you can then have someone update Wikipedia to include things from that article using the article as a primary source. That doesn’t delete the unflattering things, but it pushes them down the page and surrounds them by flattering things. If you’re a billionaire, you’ll find a way to get the articles edited in a way that is permitted by the Wikipedia rules.

there’s always at least one guy who’d hyperfocus on monitoring something like this

That’s the thing, there’s only about 3000 billionaires worldwide, but 8 billion other people. Let’s say out of those 8 billion, there are maybe 20 who really, really hate Bill Gates. All it takes to undermine all Bill Gates’ attempts to launder his reputation is for a few of those 20 to keep an eye on his Wikipedia page in their spare time, and challenge any changes that try to whitewash his reputation.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work well, but at least this causes a trickle down effect. Gates spends millions with PR firms to keep his reputation clean, including vandalizing Wikipedia. Those PR firm employees are unethical assholes, but they’re not billionaires. Gates (indirectly) pays their wages. These PR firm assholes then spend Gates’ money to buy BMWs and prostate massagers. That ends up trickling down to car mechanics and massager manufacturers.

So, every time you edit Wikipedia with unflattering but true information about billionaires and middle eastern oil states, you’re causing some wealth to leak out of the billionaires’ pockets as they fight to contain that information. And you can do this damage while just sitting on a toilet.

I don’t think anybody, other than maybe high-school kids, thought Wikipedia was some perfect site with no flaws. Even with these flaws, it’s really an amazing achievement and deserves massive amounts of praise.

Just compare it to what came before: Encyclopaedia Britannica and the like. Wikipedia is estimated to be about 95x bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica. So, it goes more in depth on almost everything, and has orders of magnitude more articles than Britannica had. And, do you think Britannica didn’t face pressure to not publish controversial or unflattering information on rich people? It was probably much, much easier for the rich to get things their way when it was a single, for-profit publisher, rather than a worldwide group of volunteers. And then there’s the issue with being factual or having a neutral point of view. That’s always going to be a challenge, but it’s much more likely there will be systemic bias for an American-owned for-profit company than it is for a volunteer-based non-profit with editors worldwide.

Also, the way Wikipedia works, it’s much harder for these PR firms to completely hide things they don’t like. Nearly all of Wikipedia’s edit history is easily visible just by clicking a link on the page you’re reading. If someone removed something unflattering, you can often find it just by going through the edits. It would be nice if the rich couldn’t adjust the main pages, but at least it’s extremely hard for them to make unflattering information completely disappear just due to how the editing process for Wikis works.

Finally, paid PR professionals can’t just edit whatever they like. Wikipedia editors are notoriously proud of what they do, and annoyed at seeing their site vandalized. Often edits will be rolled back, or pages will be locked. Eventually a billionaire might get what they want, but to get a fact changed on Wikipedia they’ll probably need to pay a reputable news site to make a counter claim, then have one of their paid PR flacks to use that news article as a primary source to allow it to be used on Wikipedia. That’s an expensive and fragile process. Do it too often and you damage the reputation of the news site so it can no longer be used for that kind of thing. And, all it takes to undo that is a good journalist doing their job and reporting the truth and a volunteer Wikipedia editor updating the page.

So, don’t lose hope, just think that billionaires are spending millions to try to launder their reputations, and often those attempts are being undone by some girl in sweatpants casually updating Wikipedia on her phone while she binges Critical Role.

The cyberpunk future I wanted was one where you could jack off into the matrix, and fly around in a 3 dimensional representation of the world’s entire information ecosystem, using your whole mind and body to understand data, instead of just being tied to a 2-d screen. Instead we got this:

Most Cyberpunk stuff was written in the late 80s / early 90s, so it’s more based on the issues of that period, which is now about 40 years ago.

Sure, some people were initially against electricity. But, it’s not like they had to beg people to use it. There was enough demand that the main issue was deciding between AC and DC, not whether to do it at all.

The way that sort of invention often works is:

1. Inventor thinks they have a world changing idea
2. Inventor spends their own time and money to build a prototype
3. Inventor shows the product off to the world.

If it truly is a world changing invention, step 4 is “world is amazed, inventor can’t keep up with demand”. There are also frequent cases where the world goes “meh, not for me”. Now occasionally those are when an invention is ahead of its time, and years or decades later the inventor is vindicated. The other case is when the invention really isn’t good, and there simply isn’t and will never be demand for it.

Somehow, the AI bubble is built with people ignoring the feedback from people that keep saying “meh, not for me”, and the various “inventors” burning more and more of their money trying to change people’s minds. Has that ever worked?

Has there ever been a true world-changing invention where the “inventors” had to beg the public to use it?

Capitalism says that the market won’t reward people making those things, and the companies might fail as a result.

But, we’re no longer in a capitalist world. We’re in a corporatist world where it’s closer to technolfeudalism where it doesn’t really matter how bad your idea is, because you aren’t out to make a profit, instead you’re out to extract rent.

This is the thing I hope people learn about LLMs, it’s all hallucinations.

When an LLM has excellent data from multiple sources to answer your question, it is likely to give a correct answer. But, that answer is still a hallucination. It’s dreaming up a sequence of words that is likely to follow the previous words. It’s more likely go give an “incorrect” hallucination when the data is contradictory or vague. But, the process is identical. It’s just trying to dream up a likely series of words.

I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets

That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.

If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.

Let’s just say AI truly is a world-changing thing.

Has there ever been another world-changing thing where the sellers of that thing had to beg people to use it?

The applications of radio were immediately obvious, everybody wanted access to radios. Smart phones and iPods were just so obviously good that people bought them as soon as they could afford them. Nobody built hundreds of km of railroads then begged people to use them. It was hard to build the railways fast enough to keep up with demand.

Sure, there have been technologies where the benefit wasn’t immediately obvious. Lasers, for example, were a cool thing that you could do with physics for a while. But, nobody was out there banging on doors, begging people to find a use for lasers. They just sat around while people fiddled with them, until eventually a use was found for them.

As someone who watched the Simpsons in the 90s, to me the modern version is unwatchable. But, it’s still on, so people must still watch it.

It’s pretty great that we have a cultural touchstone like this that multiple generations can understand. This image is a Darmok and Gilad at Tanagra for multiple generations of English speakers, who can all hear the voice just by reading the words, and understand the context in which they’re meant.