spit_evil_olive_tips

a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax

to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:

you're paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.

and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn't cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.

even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.

at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin's current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.

In addition to the sexual harassment finding that led to his resignation

yet another data point that "cancel culture" doesn't really exist. people who are "canceled" simply spend a few years out of the public eye, and then return as if nothing ever happened.

the allegations are so numerous that Cuomo's main wikipedia page can't cover them all, it links to a separate Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment allegations page:

The entire New York congressional delegation, including New York's two United States Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and over 120 New York State legislators called for Cuomo's resignation, as did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President and Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City. President Joe Biden stated his support for Attorney General James's independent investigation; he later called on Cuomo to resign after the investigatory report was released. On August 10, Cuomo announced that he would step down from office in 14 days, making his resignation effective on August 24.

On January 4, 2022, Albany County District Attorney David Soares dropped a criminal complaint against Cuomo and also announced that Cuomo would not face any other charges related to other groping allegations, citing lack of evidence. Three days later, a judge dropped the criminal charge against Cuomo. On January 31, 2022, the last of five criminal cases that had been pursued against Cuomo were dismissed.

a lesson that I would really like the legal system to learn (including DAs like David Soares who is supposedly a Democrat) is that if an elected official commits crimes, and then as a result of those crimes is forced to resign, or loses re-election, or is impeached and removed from office, that is not an excuse to say "well, surely he's suffered enough, it would be kicking him while he's down to continue prosecuting him for the crimes he committed"

(see also: Ford pardoning Nixon, Donald Trump, the former mayor here in Seattle, and so on)

right-wing hypocrisy is so common that pointing it out is a cliche, but I still think it's important to highlight here

in 2020, the NYT published an op-ed from Tom Cotton saying Trump should send in the military against the protests after George Floyd's murder

it caused a huge and predictable backlash, and the editorial editor published a defense of why they did it

We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.

this was always the excuse for platforming the right-wing in supposedly "liberal" newspapers. we need to listen to different viewpoints. have the debate. teach the controversy. marketplace of ideas. if you don't like it, then you're "close-minded" or live in an "echo chamber" or whatever.

(the NYT's long history of publishing transphobic bullshit comes to mind as well)

but then the ratchet clicks one notch tighter, and you have Bezos announcing that they will only publish op-eds that are in favor of "personal liberties and free markets". they won't publish competing viewpoints, because you can always find those elsewhere on the internet.

this argument would have applied equally in 2020, of course. Tom Cotton was a sitting Senator. he can publish his opinions on his Senate website, he can easily hold press conferences, etc. there was no need for the NYT to publish it.

when it's a supposedly "liberal" newspaper, they claim they have an obligation to also publish the "respectable" conservative voices. but when a paper decides to be explicitly right-wing, they don't even pay lip service to claiming they're publishing "both sides".

here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value

it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant

judging by the "more top stories" on Futurism's home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:

Trump White House Tells Elon He's Stepped Over the Line

Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value

Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws

here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella

there's a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:

Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we're going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.

right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new "breakthroughs" that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just "regular" access journalism, it's hard to say.

around 15 minutes in, the host asks:

You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it'll be 10x that. You'll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate... we're doing with all that intelligence?

Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?

and Nadella responds:

Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it's a great question because at some level, if you're going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft's sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there's only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let's first see if, let's say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it's zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I'm not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let's have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That's the real marker, right? So it's not just, it can't just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that's the thing, right?

I think there's a lot of people are writing about it. I'm glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.

When that happens, We'll be fine as an industry. But that's, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.

that word salad is a lot of things, but I don't think it lives up to the "generating basically no value" hype that Futurism tried to give it.

also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition...which is of course for an AI product:

A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what's possible. Through Scale's data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.

As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE's research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity's Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems' expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you're an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE's data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.

did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the "SEAL team"?

from the CDC:

One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles

Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles

...

About 3 out of 100 people who get two doses of MMR vaccine will get measles if exposed to the virus. However, they are more likely to have a milder illness, and are also less likely to spread the disease to other people.

if you have your vaccination records, it'd be good to double-check to make sure that you got both doses. if you missed the 2nd dose, or are missing the records and unsure, you can get a booster at any pharmacy, usually without an appointment, and covered 100% by insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

the vaccine being "only" 97% effective is one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, especially with a virus like measles that is extremely infectious (R_0 of 12-18 - meaning without any vaccines, 1 infected person would on average spread it to more than a dozen other people)

unfortunately, "is such-and-such a crime?" is an overly simplistic way of looking at it

a) is there a law that forbids it?

b) are there law enforcement agents who are willing to enforce that law, by arresting people who break it? (or writing citations / court summonses)

c) is the rest of the criminal legal system (prosecutors, judges, etc) willing to pursue charges against those people?

the answer to A, in this case, is very clearly yes - from 18 U.S. Code § 912:

Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

and that basically doesn't matter. if some right-wing chud wants to cosplay as an ICE agent for the purpose of terrorizing immigrants, the FBI is not going to lift a finger about it, and the US Attorneys (federal prosecutors) working for the Trump-controlled DOJ certainly wouldn't bring charges if they did get arrested.

Representative Andy Ogles' push to allow Trump to run for office in 2028

some fun facts about Andy Ogles:

Nov 2023: He doesn't report having checking or savings. So where did Andy Ogles get $320,000 for his campaign?

May 2024: US Rep. Andy Ogles falsely claimed $320,000 campaign loan, instead calls money a 'pledge'

Aug 2024: FBI agents execute search warrant on Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, NewsChannel 5 confirms

Jan 8 2025: Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles stalls FBI investigation with behind-the-scenes court battle

Jan 24 2025: Facing FBI investigation that Trump could halt, Andy Ogles proposes allowing third term for president

Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.

congrats to HP on the launch of their new "you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this" division.

but also:

HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.

this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)

Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

that's unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there's nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES's lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we're only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still "64-bit".

not just a bill, a constitutional amendment. this means it has absolutely zero chance of passing. it would need two-thirds of both the Senate and House, and then approval by 38 state legislatures.

and because Republicans control Congress at the moment, this won't even get a vote in committee, much less the full House. this is 100% performative. it's a press release from Jayapal's office, no more.

but here's the fun part - Jayapal has introduced this amendment before. here's the 2019 version, for example.

back in 2019, Democrats did control the House. they could have voted the amendment out of committee, and then given it a full vote on the House floor. they could have forced every member of the House to vote on the record about supporting or opposing Citizens United.

why didn't they? my guess is that a bunch of "moderate" Democrats would have ended up voting against the amendment, along with probably every single Republican, and it would have made Democrats look bad.

so much like abortion rights, Democrats enjoy having "Citizens United bad" as a campaign slogan, but when it comes to actually exercising political power when they have it, hey look at the time gotta go.

the other option to overturn Citizens United would have been to expand the Supreme Court to reverse its rightward shift. Biden claimed to be open to this idea...and then appointed a committee to study the problem. a committee made up of 35 members. which is pretty much straight out of the CIA sabotage manual. a committee of 35 people will starve to death trying to come to consensus on where to go for lunch. Biden appointing such a huge committee was a clear sign that he didn't intend to do anything about the problem.

but congrats to Rep. Jayapal, she probably was able to send some great fundraising emails about trying to overturn Citizens United.

I think it’s interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy

the topic of this thread is the genocide in Gaza, Biden's complicity in it, and the response to that from Democratic voters.

as is typical of Biden apologists, you've tried to minimize it, and deflect from it, by bringing up non-sequiturs.

I haven't taken the bait, and tried to avoid letting the thread about genocide get derailed into a thread about section 403b1 of the Inflation Reduction Act or whatever.

and yeah, I'm sure that's very disappointing. my thoughts and prayers are with you in this difficult time.

maybe you'll get the response you're looking for if you started a thread for "let's talk about all the amazing things in Biden's four years that didn't involve children having limbs amputated without anesthesia"

But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.

yeah, Biden was an amazing president, if you ignore the genocide that he supported.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler boosted the German economy by acquiring more farmland. Slobodan Milošević probably had some ideas about progressive tax policy or something.

genocide denial isn't just "I deny that genocide is happening". it's more pernicious than that. it can also take the form of aggressively changing the subject. mention that 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust, and some Holocaust deniers will dispute that directly, but others of them will jangle "lots of other people died too" keys in front of your face as an attempted distraction.

I have a pro-Israel friend, when I talked to him about how Palestinians in the West Bank are forbidden from collecting rain water he didn't deny it, he just changed the subject to talk about the incredible advances that Israeli scientists have made in water-efficient irrigation techniques.

I'd urge you to consider that your comments have the effect of this sort of "soft" genocide denial, most likely without you intending it at all.

This is all by way of response to you saying that Democrats don’t actually do anything, more or less, they just run around making things worse and asking for money and votes.

yeah, you completely misunderstood what I'm saying.

this is a framing of the problem that I often see from apologists of people like Biden - that his critics want him to "do more".

as if politics can be simplified down to a big dial with "do nothing" on one end, and "do lots of stuff" on the other, and critics simply want the dial turned higher.

in this oversimplification, if you can paint criticism of Biden as "he should have done more" then that criticism can be refuted with "no, look at all the things he did". which is what you're trying to do here. I say Biden has no principles, and you try to refute that with "no, look at this bill that he signed".

what I'm actually complaining about is Biden and other Democrats doing the wrong thing.

Biden approved a bunch of oil drilling. I would have preferred him to do less. less would have been an improvement. less would have been consistent with the Democrats' supposed principled opposition to climate change.

Biden approved (and expanded) a bunch of weapons shipments to Israel. again, I wanted him to do less.

the "do more" vs. "do less" framing of politics is so simplistic that it would get you a bad grade in a high school civics class. the actual question is, when Democrats do something, what are they doing and why are they doing it. is the thing they are doing good or bad.