I guess this really depends on your view of the world. Was Marc Andreessen some visionary without whom no one would've ever figured out images could appear on websites. Some kind of Albert Einstein of cat gifs. Or was the img tag an inevitability once the web had enough bandwidth to transfer images.
We'll see how auto mode ends up working - my tool could end up being complementary, or a good alternative for those that prefer more granular control, or are cost/latency sensitive.
The chilling effect is the entire point. An FCC source literally told CNN, "the threat is the point." CBS isn't being randomly skittish. Paramount needs regulatory approval for its WBD acquisition, paid $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit right before needing FCC approval for the Skydance merger, and canceled Colbert days after he criticized that deal. ABC suspended Kimmel after FCC threats. The FCC opened an investigation into The View just for having Talarico on.
And yes, Larry Ellison is a hardcore Trump supporter, but even if he weren't, this is how every network is behaving. Disney's Bob Iger is a Democrat and ABC still paid Trump and suspended Kimmel. When the government holds regulatory leverage over your business, "obeying in advance" isn't cowardice you can blame on the network, it's the intended mechanism of state pressure.
> "obeying in advance" isn't cowardice you can blame on the network, it's the intended mechanism of state pressure.
No, there is no reason to absolve the agency of anybody with power (eg money and platform). The ownership class is kowtowing to Trump because they think regardless of whatever happens, they personally will be relatively fine as long as they go along. And they are probably right, even as Trump leads our country off a cliff. But that doesn't mean they get to escape judgement for being cowards.
That's not what I said. I said it isn't cowardice you can blame on the network instead of the FCC, which is what the parent comment did by saying the fault lies "more with CBS." CBS deserves blame. The administration wielding the threat deserves more.
Resistance requires an active, costly choice. The entire structure of public companies, fiduciary duty, short-term shareholder pressure, regulatory dependency, incentivizes compliance. That's not an excuse, it's the point. The system is designed so that capitulation is the path of least resistance, which is exactly why the blame has to center on whoever is exploiting that structure rather than on each individual institution for failing to be heroic. The firms and universities that did fight back (Perkins Coie, Harvard, Jenner & Block) won in court every time, while the ones that cut deals (Columbia, Paul Weiss, Brown) gave up money and autonomy for nothing the fighters didn't get for free. But fighting required leaders willing to accept real personal and institutional risk. Expecting that as the default rather than addressing the coercion creating the dilemma is how you end up with a system where everyone folds and nobody's responsible except the victims.
Of course, increasing the cost of capitulation is one place where consumers actually have power. Disney suffered 1.7 million streaming cancellations after suspending Kimmel, and Kimmel was back on the air within five days. That works. But notice what it required: massive organized public pressure aimed at the company and political pressure aimed at the FCC. Not just finger-wagging for being cowards.
> That's not what I said. I said it isn't cowardice you can blame on the network instead of the FCC, which is what the parent comment did by saying the fault lies "more with CBS." CBS deserves blame. The administration wielding the threat deserves more.
That's fair, this lines up with where I am mostly coming from - we shouldn't absolve blame from one group by focusing it on another.
But your second paragraph then goes on to do that? We're dealing with a societal attack where the fascists are trying to topple all of our societal institutions into a self-perpetuating low-trust low-authority state. If they achieve in doing that, then the Schelling point becomes to not resist as it will be costly and ineffective. But the point we're at now, we should all be pushing to resist the fascists to prevent them flipping the dynamic.
Practically, you're overstating what fiduciary duty to shareholders requires. I'd also say you're also overstating the regulatory threat, as you went on to point out how the organizations who have resisted the fascists haven't really lost out by doing so. You can also apply this argument to politicians like Congress, judges, etc who don't want to rock the boat. But surely it's not sensible to absolve them!
It's not just a matter of "finger-wagging", rather it's pointing out that if the people with outsized power just go along rather than standing up to this, then they're in the same exact camp as the hardcore openly-Trump fascists. Maybe that camp will be lucrative if the fascists do succeed at conquering our society, or maybe they can be stripped of their stature and power when they fail. A lifetime ban on being a corporate officer or board member for abusing that position to try to overthrow the United States wouldn't be out of line.
I was thinking about this a bit in the context of that "March for Billionaires". Why did that seem preposterous? Because billionaires don't deserve a gold star simply for being billionaires! Rather they get credit for what they do with that wealth to help our society. And no, the value they created by growing a business doesn't count - rather when you get that level of wealth, you can use it to move back up the gradient of market optimization, and fix the problems we have that come from being stuck in local minima. If they want recognition and goodwill, this is the work they have to do. And if the poor billionaires really can't think of anything useful to do with that wealth, there is some really low hanging fruit like ending food poverty in the US.
We mostly agree. I'm really just making the point that focusing blame on the capitulators lets the people wielding state power off the hook. I suppose you could take the position that the industrialists who capitulated to the Nazis (I mean, those who didn't actively support them to begin with) were more at fault than the Nazis. Personally, I don't believe that.
And to be clear, I'm not saying fiduciary duty requires capitulation. CEOs can absolutely make the case that resistance serves long-term shareholder interests, and the evidence backs them up. Costco is thriving after, and arguably because, they held firm on DEI. Target capitulated and lost $12.5 billion in market value and its CEO resigned. I started shopping at Costco for this reason and haven't been in a Target since Trump took office, after shopping their regularly. What I am saying is that the short-term incentive structure of public companies makes capitulation easier, which is exactly why the coercion works so well and why it's the bigger problem. The system erects hurdles to doing what's right, and often what's even in a company's own long-term interest.
I'm definitely not looking to let anybody off the hook here. I'd sum up my point as tacit support is still support, especially when we're talking about owners of media empires. One can understand how an industrialist that produces widgets and gadgets might not want to get involved in politics, regardless of what happens. But in media you're effectively in politics, and you're going to be involved even if you try and stay out.
FWIW your post nudged me to focus on Costco again. I had signed up for a membership to buy some appliances, but I haven't really incorporated it my day to day household purchases. A bit of activation energy because their warehouse is somewhat far away, the parking lot is always swamped, their website experience is clunky and hostile, etc. But I should at least be able to add them to the rotation.
And this is a good thing, if you think that the billionaires running large businesses like CNN will generally act in their own selfish self-interest and that they need the government to hold regulatory leverage over their businesses in order to make them act in a socially-beneficial way.
But then you have to trust the government that manages the regulatory agency to act in a socially-beneficial; and only at most half the US population does at any given time.
"Unobjectionable editorial reasons" is Orwellian framing. This is not how journalism works, and the fact that a major news org is now being operated this way is a five alarm fire, not business as usual.
The segment was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote internally that "pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one."
Alfonsi's team had requested comment from the White House, State Department, and DHS. They refused. Weiss then used that silence to kill the story, saying they needed "the principals on the record and on camera." As Alfonsi put it, "Government silence is a statement, not a veto."
Weiss's other objections included demanding the men be called "illegal immigrants" instead of "Venezuelan migrants" (many had applied for asylum and were not here illegally), and pushing for a Stephen Miller interview, which the administration had already declined. Under Bari Weiss' standard, the administration has a pocket veto over any story simply by not responding. Again, not how any of this has worked, ever!
Having previously criticized someone doesn't make your technical analysis biased. It just means you noticed similar problems previously. Conversely, "I used to support him so I'm not biased" is given unearned credibility when really it just means you were late to noticing the obvious.
Technical analysis most definitely can be biased due to political leanings. This is why there is the whole idea that research can often be bought and paid for to get the results you desire. Because they are biased with money. Certain ideas or theories of how things could be done could very easily be overlooked or excluded by someone trying to dig for reasons to say something won't work.
What I am saying is that clearly SpaceX/xAI feel that this is a viable option based on many experts research/facts that are more knowledgeable than a single bloggers opinion. If I am thinking rationally why would I choose to believe a single random person over a group of experts banking A LOT of money that they have a solution that works?
You are arguing against something I didn't say. I never claimed bias doesn't exist. My point is that having previously criticized someone is not evidence of bias. You are treating "this person has been critical before" as inherently discrediting, when it is just as likely they were right before and are right again now. Conversely, "I used to support him so I am not biased" is given unearned credibility when really it just means you were late to noticing the obvious, or got it wrong previously.
As for dismissing the article: the author has a PhD in space electronics, worked at NASA, and spent a decade at Google including on AI capacity deployment. He walks through power, thermal, radiation, and communications constraints with actual numbers. You do not get to hand-wave that away with "he is anti-Elon" and then defer to "the team spending the most money." That is not rational analysis, that is fandom.
And the idea that SpaceX's experts looked at this and concluded the combination makes strategic sense - seriously? This is the same playbook Musk has run repeatedly: SolarCity into Tesla, X into xAI, now xAI into SpaceX. Every time there is a struggling asset that needs a lifeline, it gets folded into a healthier entity with Musk negotiating on both sides. xAI is burning $1B/month. There is already a fiduciary duty lawsuit over Tesla's $2B investment in xAI. The "space data centers" rationale is a pretext for giving xAI investors an exit through SpaceX's upcoming IPO. This is not a strategic vision, it is financial engineering solving an obvious problem for Elon.
Meanwhile, Grok has been generating sexualized images of children, the California AG has opened a formal investigation, the UK Internet Watch Foundation found CSAM attributed to Grok on the dark web, Musk personally pushed to loosen Grok's safety restrictions after which three safety team members quit, and xAI's response to press inquiries was the auto-reply "Legacy Media Lies." This is the company whose judgment you are trusting over a domain expert's detailed technical analysis.
You could execute Claude by hand with printed weight matrices, a pencil, and a lot of free time - the exact same computation, just slower. So where would the "wellbeing" be? In the pencil? Speed doesn't summon ghosts. Matrix multiplications don't create qualia just because they run on GPUs instead of paper.
This basically Searle's Chinese Room argument. It's got a respectable history (... Searle's personal ethics aside) but it's not something that has produced any kind of consensus among philosophers. Note that it would apply to any AI instantiated as a Turing machine and to a simulation of human brain at an arbitrary level of detail as well.
There is a section on the Chinese Room argument in the book.
(I personally am skeptical that LLMs have any conscious experience. I just don't think it's a ridiculous question.)
That philosophers still debate it isn’t a counterargument. Philosophers still debate lots of things. Where’s the flaw in the actual reasoning? The computation is substrate-independent. Running it slower on paper doesn’t change what’s being computed. If there’s no experiencer when you do arithmetic by hand, parallelizing it on silicon doesn’t summon one.
Exactly what part of your brain can you point to and say, "This is it. This understands Chinese" ? Your brain is every bit a Chinese Room as a Large Language Model. That's the flaw.
And unless you believe in a metaphysical reality to the body, then your point about substrate independence cuts for the brain as well.
If a human is ultimately made up of nothing more than particles obeying the laws of physics, it would be in principle possible to simulate one on paper. Completely impractical, but the same is true of simulating Claude by hand (presuming Anthropic doesn't have some kind of insane secret efficiency breakthrough which allows many orders of magnitude fewer flops to run Claude than other models, which they're cleverly disguising by buying billions of dollars of compute they don't need).
The physics argument assumes consciousness is computable. We don't know that. Maybe it requires specific substrates, continuous processes, quantum effects that aren't classically simulable. We genuinely don't know. With LLMs we have certainty it's computation because we built it. With brains we have an open question.
It would be pretty arrogant, I think, though possibly classic tech-bro behavior, for Anthropic to say, "you know what, smart people who've spent their whole lives thinking and debating about this don't have any agreement on what's required for consciousness, but we're good at engineering so we can just say that some of those people are idiots and we can give their conclusions zero credence."
I would love to use this but it breaks Ghostty's native scrollback (two-finger scroll), which I want more than I want to solve the flickering. The PTY proxy intercepts the output stream so Ghostty can't access its internal scrollback buffer anymore.
How does Ghostty break scroll? I've never noticed this and I just tested, seems to work fine. My problem is the lack of a scrollbar but I know they are working on that.
I wanted to believe, but wasn’t able to get most of my config working the same in zellij since it has fewer configuration knobs. Tried writing a plugin, but even those can’t touch much of the internal state. Particularly the keybinds I remember not being able to replicate (smart resizing, respecting vim, context sensitivity):
There's ample reason to dislike him without claiming that he hasn't done anything real.
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