Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind:

to take a casual reply to a post

and turn it, with an easy button’s press,

to flawless iambic pentameter

might be the finest way to learn the art

of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff.

It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.

The market should be able to solve this problem without the government setting arbitrary rules, and people should be allowed to sign contracts that limit or restrict their freedom, so long as it involves informed consent from all parties.

If Microsoft wants to hire an AI expert for a million dollars a year, and restrict him from competing for 2 years after leaving Microsoft so as to avoid losing market advantage, that seems like a reasonable thing for Microsoft to want. If all Apple has to do to get all the Copilot secrets is hire the chief copilot engineer for 1.5 million, seems like that creates a toxic dynamic and all but guarantees acquihires and a near immediate turnaround in a startup to corporate pipeline for raiding IP.

Maybe we should be limiting businesses to doing business at a scale they can responsibly handle. If you can't get human customer service for your computer issues because Windows and Mac have scaled far beyond the number of users they could ever hope to handle, maybe that market needs regulation, and unless they scale customer service accordingly, they don't get to target a majority of the world's population as their customer base?

That'd certainly create jobs and opportunities for Linux and induce a revolution in software markets, and it'd limit the incentives for MS and Apple and big tech to do shitty things to suppress the markets overall.

Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.

You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.

They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.

This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.

It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.

government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"

When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.

Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.

Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.

This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:

1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)

2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)

3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments

I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.

the fact that the public is stupid does not mean there is no feedback

And you are criticizing half the country based on a ideology? These employees are at almost no risk of losing their jobs because someone calls their representative to complain, this is fantasy.

While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.

So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Sometimes they'll announce the changes, and they'll even try to spin it as improving services or increasing value.

Local AI capabilities are improving at a rapid pace, at some point soon we'll have an RWKV or a 4B LLM that performs at a GPT-5 level, with reasoning and all the bells and whistles, and hopefully that'll shake out most of the deceptive and shady tactics the big platforms are using.

I can't imagine that this is the way it will go... Tokens haven't been getting cheaper for flagship models, have they? You already see something closer to their real cost if you compare e.g. the Claude subscriptions to their actual token pricing.

> Local AI capabilities are improving at a rapid pace, at some point soon we'll have an RWKV or a 4B LLM that performs at a GPT-5 level, with reasoning and all the bells and whistles, and hopefully that'll shake out most of the deceptive and shady tactics the big platforms are using.

Maybe, but LLMs are scale game, and data center will always be more capable than your local device. So, you will always be getting a worse version locally. Or do you think we'll LLMs in data centers stop getting better and local LLMs will somehow catch up?

I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.

Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.

Kinda crazy that Yudkowsky and all those rationalists and enthusiasts spent over a decade obsessing over this stuff, and we've had almost 80 years of elite academics pondering on it, and none of them could come up with a meaningful, operational theory of intelligence. The best we can do is "closer to AGI" as a measurement, and even then, it's not 100% certain, because a model might have some cheap tricks implicit to the architecture that don't actually map to a meaningful difference in capabilities.

Gotta love the field of AI.

By updating the tests specifically in areas AI has trouble with, it creates a progressive feedback loop against which AI development can be moved forward. There's no known threshold or well defined capability or particular skill that anyone can point to and say "that! That's AGI!". The best we can do right now is a direction. Solving an ARC-AGI test moves the capabilities of that AI some increment closer to the AGI threshold. There's no good indication as to whether solving a particular test means it's 15% closer to AGI or .000015%.

It's more or less a best effort empiricist approach, since we lack a theory of intelligence that provides useful direction (as opposed to a formalization like AIXI which is way too broad to be useful in the context of developing AGI.)