Forum Log

Millennials came of age just as the old promises began to be broken. Millennials were told that they were special, that the world was their oyster, and that they were entitled to success. Millennials are upset that the promises are not coming true. They despise religion and foster resentment towards the institutions. A German would say that this is nothing compared to losing everything in the war, experiencing the division of one´s country, years of famine, war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, and building from scratch. Germans do not believe that anyone is entitled to anything apart from human dignity. Disappointment is a normal response and can be worked through. Entitlement is a prideful belief that one is owed something.

" This truth is only available to the most advanced atheists and the most advanced Christians. The advanced atheist has purged himself of all traces of folk religion, and understands the world as it is - an infinitely cold universe of protons and electrons, whose fundamental rules are a few lines of mathematics with no concept of humanity. Our galaxy is not even special, let alone our planet. To the advanced Christian, God’s will is just as cold and his justice is just as inexorable, and evil is sent to punish evil. Maistre read the French Revolution as God’s punishment of the decadent liberals who brought it about, and the weak conservatives who failed in their duty to oppose it. Was he wrong? I love my protons and electrons, but I can’t see how he was wrong. " https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-cant-handle-the-truth

Source: https://www.motivenotes.ai/p/what-makes-5-of-ai-agents-actually Selected points: --- Most founders think they’re building AI products. They’re actually building context selection systems. 'The base models are the soil; context is the seed.' Context engineering considered as LLM-native feature engineering: - Selective context pruning = feature selection - Context validation = schema/type/recency checks - 'Context observability' = trace which inputs improved/worsened output quality - Embedding augmentation with metadata = typed features + conditions Goal: Treat context like a versioned, auditable, testable artifact, not a string blob. Important: - You must trace which inputs led to which outputs (lineage) - You must respect row level, role based access (policy gating) - If two employees ask the same question, but have different permissions, the model output should differ. AI chat conversation works when it removes a learning curve.

In inflation-adjusted terms, the cost of a house in Bozeman has tripled in the last twenty-five years; young working-class kids who grew up there can no longer afford to buy a house in the town they grew up in. They either wait to inherit property, pay outrageous rents, live in a camper — or leave. This has had the effect of ‘cutting off’ the continuity of the culture there; the Bozeman “old-guard” now finds itself diminished, steadily replaced by the new generation of largely ex-urban newcomers who have effectively ‘colonized’ the town. Moreover, even if a young Bozemanian (Bozemanite?) can situate himself in a decent housing scenario — his town is now a sprawling, traffic-choked version of what it was when he was a kid. The construction is endless; there are hundreds, if not thousands of people now living on the streets there in RV’s, vans, and campers. https://substack.com/home/post/p-175627800

Bozeman, Montana is about as far away from the US urban / coastal cultures as you can get. Nonetheless, urban people displace Bozeman people, not the other way around. I find myself concluding, yet again, that owning a house is no protection against the economic currents of our time. Economic networks are the powerhouse. People hooked into an expanding network simply displace those who are not. So one’s focus must always be one’s network. (Even if you acquire a house, your neighborhood is displaced and restructured, and your kids grow up in the new environment, and themselves are obligated to leave - so you only put off the defeat for one generation.) I think we could think of the phenomenon today as “internal colonization” by different networks. The focus is now Montana instead of the Congo. A model: Networks process transactions. Skills are valuable economically if they allow you to help a network process more transactions.