Related to your comment, see Nate Silver's take on the NBA gambling scandal.
"Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling than most people you’re probably reading on this story, I’m not sure I’d really care if player prop bets were banned entirely. They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often put team and individual performance into tension with one another..."
If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they have people screaming at them and threatening them violently both for performing badly and for performing well.
Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
They want to get rid of software engineers because we are expensive, we have an annoying habit of saying no, we are not particularly good looking on average and are not obviously tied to directly revenue in a way that sales is (sales folks tend to be good looking too as a bonus.)
It's basic market dynamics + some high school social calculus.
"As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all."
In my experience this is the big difference with AI vs humans. It's not superhuman intelligence (although it does have a massive working memory) but rather the ability to just grind on anything you throw at it, long past the point when any reasonable human would have taken a break or given up.
"It can kind of be be bargained with. It can kind of be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear but it will fake them! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are absolutely right!"
A possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.
"Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.""
interesting related aside: I'm comparing HTML/hypermedia w/MCP as an agentic protocol and adding accessibility information made using HTML-based APIs much easier some agents
right now the primary problem for hypermedia in agentic situations is the chattiness of the architecture, coupled with the geometrically expanding conversation dynamic of ReAct-style loops
some models are able to figure out hypermedia-based APIs more easily than MCP, which is very particular in its syntax, but for more advanced models MCP wins based on the "show me everything at once" model
That makes sense. That “show everything at once” approach probably reduces some of the back-and-forth that hypermedia workflows rely on.
It’s interesting that some models can infer structure from hypermedia more easily. That seems like another place where semantic structure ends up helping both humans and machines interpret an interface. NICE!
Freedom ain't free I guess.
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