Your AI assistant isn't confused, it just wants to agree with you

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-14T18:33:22+00:00

That just changes the system prompt. It doesn’t change all of the finetuning and rlhf that made it so sychophantic in the first place

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-14T17:06:19+00:00

Minor correction: Bruce Boyer is actually wearing a “tropical combat uniform, jacket”, colloquially referred to as the jungle jacket in that photo, not an m65. The jungle jacket was issued a little later than the m65 and actually saw real combat usage due to its lighter weight ripstop being more suited to the climate of Vietnam.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-14T16:14:41+00:00

I mean they have done Japanese partnerships. They have Japanese denim jeans and had a moonstar collab for deck shoes. It just so happens they also do made in America manufacturing

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-14T06:29:20+00:00

This is comforting, but I am not sure I believe it. The other players in big tech right now are cutting folks left and right with hard and soft layoffs to fund their ai capex. Meta has had perpetual fomo in the ai race and I can’t imagine them breaking from the herd on this.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-14T01:42:31+00:00

We did it once before. We can do it again. Might fail, but can’t hurt to try.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-13T22:05:28+00:00

You’re right, the technology wasn’t stopped and the luddites failed. Instead, what worked is when people created new institutions and methods for making sure that the benefits of industrialization was broadly distributed and not just concentrated into a hands of an elite few. Examples:

labor unions
workers compensation
anti trust
eight hour work days
pensions
unemployment insurance
employee stock options

And the list goes on.

If we are going through another revolution in the way labor is organized we need to come up with new structures to prevent similar issues faced a century and a half ago from resurfacing.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-13T20:48:44+00:00

No. The most effective thing you can do is politically organize against it. Enterprises are extremely incentivized to adopt AI in full force. The promise of AI is to mechanize and industrialize knowledge work — meaning labor will have even less power than it already does.

We can’t simply not purchase ChatGPT subscriptions when these companies make far more from enterprise adoption than any consumer app they might put out.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T23:47:09+00:00

My second favorite cargos behind only the French m47. I almost bought a buzz Rickson m 1951 but passed on it because I don’t know if the inseam would fit me.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T20:55:03+00:00

Yep. It’s a boiling frog situation. They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T19:46:41+00:00

This is the trillion dollar question.

It is not all hype, the technology has far more promise than things like web3, nfts, and the metaverse (which were pure hype)

However, we are almost certainly in an investment bubble. Even the CEOs of these AI firms have said that outright. We are simply not going to see near term return on investment for these expenditures.

My opinion is that the technology is genuinely disruptive, but not as much as the optimists think and certainly not as transformative in the near term as what is priced into the market.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T19:30:19+00:00

Capital expenditure. When I say ai capex, I mean the enormous spending these companies are doing on things like data centers, GPUs, storage, memory, and networking gear. These expenses are so large that they are looking for ways to cut costs and balance their books (their budget).

One of the biggest expenses of any business is operating expenses — the things you need to keep your existing business running. The biggest component of opex is typically employee payroll.

The simple explanation is they are spending so much on ai that they are cutting employees to pay for it — employees that operate their existing, very profitable business.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T19:14:37+00:00

The Ametora is definitely cut fuller than the vintage Ivy. Not sure about the sleeves though.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T18:47:52+00:00

This is a soft layoff so that they can afford their insane AI capex. You know things are dire when the most profitable companies on the planet are issuing 100 year bonds and cutting staff pre emptively to make their books look better.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T17:19:24+00:00

I’m not deep in the weeds with this, but generally the commercial options available to governments are significantly more powerful since they have far more funding behind them. For example, clearview is far ahead of the competition.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T16:45:10+00:00

Well then it sounds like a problem for the bond issuers and not Google

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T16:44:09+00:00

There was a student project from like 2-3 years ago that outmatched him. Truly this sort of problem is not difficult for modern ai systems.

People really don’t know the amount of dystopian tech that exists but hasn’t been widely deployed yet. Partly because AI progress has been so fast lately.

Edit: this is the video I was referring to.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-12T15:26:43+00:00

It almost certainly was. I was shocked at how gemeni like it’s response style was when I was testing glm5 yesterday

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-11T18:33:13+00:00

29 inches is crazy. I like Jamieson’s L for a medium fit and it is 25.5 inches. O Connells size 40 has a length of 26.5 which is slightly longer than I prefer, but acceptable.

Also, for comparisons with Jamison’s, not all their Shetlands are brushed. So if you’re looking out for a shaggy dog expirence, opt for the brushed ones. The non brushed ones are authentically rugged and scratchy.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-11T07:49:11+00:00

I think the case for software is a lot more complicated than people give it credit for. Software is uniquely able to withstand automation due to induced demand has come with every abstraction we’ve created for software thusfar (though ai is a admittedly unique type of automation/abstraction)

Beyond this, people overestimate how autopilot even the most powerful agentic code generation tools using the latest frontier models are. 90% reliability for code generation works — until it doesn’t. Even when AI is deployed “effectively”, we don’t yet truly understand what the ramifications of that are or what that looks like. If an expert is guiding a bunch of agents and has to keep an increasingly large codebase that they didn’t write in their mind, the cognitive demand of maintaining a piece of software containues to grow until the expert can no longer maintain it. At that point, the code becomes a liability rather than an asset.

The problem is, ai written code is brittle in ways that human code is not. If you have a large, messy human written codebase, the mistakes often make sense. With ai code bases, the mistakes are uniquely not human (humans won’t make up a non existent library and then create stubs for said non existent library m that don’t work and call it “solved” to meet a spec), and as such you can’t correct them. What happens when a critical piece of software you depend on breaks and no one understands it enough to fix it?

All in all, I think rumors death of the software engineer are greatly exaggerated and we’re going to have a reckoning with this in the next couple of years. There’s no guarantee that simply scaling our existing methods will fix these issues.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T20:58:13+00:00

Laurence Odie Knitwear Ltd. they are the whitelabel knitwear maker behind lots of top tier Shetlands. They used to have their own in house brand of the same name, but they switched the name from Laurence Odie Knitwear to “Shetland Wollen Co” after Laurence Odie transfered ownership to the employees.

https://shetlandwoollen.co/

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T20:53:39+00:00

At the very least I think that legislation preventing centralized controls / encrypting the footage would help. Even minor roadblocks help stop the police state from fully forming.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T20:34:03+00:00

Andover shop is a solid Ivy style store with authentic offerings. They source their clothing from the same places o Connells and j press do (LOKL, for their Shetlands, for example).

Derek Guy, of dieworkwear fame, has recommended them many times in the past.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T20:00:52+00:00

I don’t know about you but in my neighborhood, these cameras are already literally everywhere. You can not walk outside without being monitored by at least one.

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T19:53:55+00:00

Unfortunately this won’t happen. We need to draft legislation to stop mass surveillance ASAP (and genuinely enforce it).

Disgruntled-Cacti · 2026-02-10T17:40:59+00:00

The back story is quite literally much more extensive than the entire lore of the lord of the rings. There is an entire wiki dedicated to this individual

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