A- taxes are a thing and therefore a cost that has to be factored in

I will spend less on Taxes + Mortgage for a house sold at-cost than on Mortgage alone on a house sold at a 4x markup.

B- Even if we fix the tax system it would still be a necessity.

The issue isn’t the tax system, its the incentives of public officials. When you can generate personal income off the professional tax base, via privatization, you are incentivized to behave as a corrupt bureaucrat. This leads to both higher housing prices (because you want more money with which to be corrupt) and more hostility towards those taxes (because you’re seeing the money go into the pockets of corrupt officials, rather than into the maintenance of community property).

arguing for utopia or bust is only going to let things get worse

I don’t think identifying moral hazard in a system is utopian. If anything, I think it is vital to reversing negative trends. If you can’t recognize why municipal officials would resist public housing and subsidize artificially high real estate costs, you’re never going to see the path towards getting those corrupt officials out and reversing the trends.

If “the foxes have always guarded the hen house and asking for anything else is utopian” is your response… Idk, buddy. What do you think happens next?

some people do forget “at cost” includes extra to cover maintenance and taxes.

Taxes are a function of property value. One of the more ugly moral hazards of the last few decades has been municipal governments hungrily consuming the enormous tax windfalls of exploding property prices while residents are forced to pick up the tab for more and more privatized municipal services.

The same house jumping from $150k to $600k doesn’t translate into roads that are 4x nicer or drainage 4x better managed or schools 4x more well-funded. It just floods into the pockets of municipal cronies and private contractors, for mayoral vanity projects. Selling property “at-cost” would keep the tax rates down. But high ranking city officials don’t want cheap land in their city. That cuts into their slush funds.

So we see city officials tacitly encourage these exploding housing costs, while residents are priced out of homes they could have easily afforded even during the 2008 housing peak.

Yimby: “We should build more houses to address the housing crisis.”

Leftist: “So people can live in them at-cost, right?”

Yimby: putting on his landlord hat

Leftist: “… Right?”

You’re the problem. It’s you.

It’s a two minute task, but it happens randomly between the hours of “romantic dinner with my wife” and “ten minutes after the baby finally went down for a nap”.

Whose a good little guy? Whose a good little guy? You did such a good job! I’m so proud of you! Yes! You’re an apex predator! You get so many chin scratches!

Even if you don’t like the BG3 campaign…

That’s crazy. The campaign was one of the best computerized D&D adventures I’ve seen published to date.

Neverwinter 1 & 2 lived on for a long time because of this.

I enjoyed the Neverwinter toolkit, but the graphics were still so blocky and clunky. There’s a polish to BG3 that, I think, will draw in a bigger audience.

Also, a big beautiful modding toolkit can have so many knock-on effects. Half-Life gave us a rich basket of spin-offs, from Team Fortress to Counterstrike. Starcraft and Warcraft popularized us a slew of new game styles, like Tower Defense and DOTA. Fingers crossed that we get something similar from BG3.

knock at the door

Me, excitedly answering

“It’s us! The four most famous renaissance era artists!”

Me, crying and running into my room.

Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem

Idk if I’d point at a supercomputer system and suggest it was constructed “without much problem”. Cray has significantly lagged the computer market as a whole.

the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

Again, I would not consider anything in the LLM marketplace particularly cheap. Seems like they’re losing money rapidly.

Don’t think these evangelicals don’t know what they are doing.

They know exactly what they are doing.

there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries

And loads more of its ineffectual nature and wastefulness.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link

You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.

One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine

Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn’t pay for the service.

Google Whiteboard could have been better. Hell, I can think of a dozen apps in the Google graveyard that could have been better.

But Discord still exists and they don’t, so…

The NSA agent assigned to monitor me has a character on my Foundry instance.

Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.

no patience for the semantic argument

I don’t think I’d call arming a terrorist group sementics

and you’re argueing, “what if the CIA funded the wahhabi’s?” as though that contradicts my point.

Is the CIA Wahhabist?

crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.

Crypto has a very real niche use for money laundering that it does exceptionally well.

AI does not appear to do anything significantly more effectively than a Google search circa 2018.

But neither can justify a multi billion dollar market cap on these terms.

The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.

Voice actors simply don’t cost that much money. Procedural world building has existed for decades, but it’s generally recognized as lackluster beside bespoke design and development.

These tools let you build bad digital experiences quickly.

For logistics and finance, a lot of what you’re exploring is solved with the technology that underpins AI (modern graph theory). But LLMs don’t get you that. They’re an extraneous layer that takes enormous resources to compile and offers very little new value.

If the CIA sends aid to the Islamic State, what do we call that?

I guess I should trust the CIA more?