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> Someone Who Isn't Me?

Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)


Senator Corey Booker’s YouTube channel posted the archived video about 9am EST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiehEMlNiCI

Senator booker is a grifter who supports his corporate donors over what’s right for the people.

> Everything that TikTok is doing is being done by Meta, Snap, Instagram, etc. If it’s not done through TikTok it’ll be done somewhere else.

Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence.

TikTok operates under the jurisdiction of authoritarian adversary. This undue foreign influence is the sticking point, not merely the massive media sway.


> Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence

Increasingly, this is an argument for the EU banning them. Especially Twitter.


TikTok operates in the US, so they are operating under US jurisdiction and subject to the same regulations as US companies.

The main difference is political pressure, not legal. US companies will bend the knee to Trump, Chinese companies will do so to Xi. Both of these leaders are authoritarian, but Trump's government is also fascist. However Xi's government is more experienced and successful.

I don't know which is worse, honestly. I mean, at this exact second, China is obviously a more authoritarian state, but the US is riding a bullet train into fascism. So who knows what things will look like in a few years?


> One scenario floated internally by some executives involves elevating him into the role of chief technology officer. Such a job — overseeing a wide swath of both hardware engineering and silicon technologies — would potentially make him Apple’s second-most-powerful executive.

> But that change would likely require Ternus to be promoted to CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some within Apple have said that Srouji would prefer not to work under a different CEO, even with an expanded title.

Possibly, Srouji wants top seat which on its face is not crazy given the chip team's outsize successes with A (iPhone) and M (duh) series chips followed on by R (Reality), C (cellular modem), N (wireless) series, but Apple is a consumer company and a deeply technical CEO just isn't in the cards.


> If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ

The video is sort of funny and reminds me of the paranoiac absurd archival research of the Trystero in Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_.


> Was the kidney donor already dead, from something other than rabies, or were still alive for donation and later died?

FTA

> About five weeks later, the man started to hallucinate, have trouble walking and swallowing, and had a stiff neck, according to the C.D.C. report.

> Two days after his symptoms started, he collapsed of what was presumed to be a heart attack, the report said. The man was unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where he died.

> Several of his organs were donated, including his left kidney.


Seems like there is some part missing in evaluation procedure. If those symptoms were know at time I don't think he was eligible donator material anymore. Or at least to me it sounds like you want to know what was the cause behind those symptoms before harvesting anything.


Can't ask an unresponsive patient who then proceeds to die what his symptoms were ...

People seem to think that the TV doctor habits of testing the most out-there diagnoses possible until you get a positive hit are normal in the real world. They're not. Especially not with medical insurer's "advice" now being required for everything.


I thought only organs of people dying in accidents are donated, and not someone's dying from an illness.


I think the criteria for donation are most easily met by people who die as a result of something like a vehicle collision, but an otherwise healthy person who experiences sudden heart failure may have viable organs... From the reporting, this donor was not otherwise healthy, but maybe the symptoms were not known at the time or dismissed for some reason.


Not really. Organs from people who have died are almost always nonviable. So when it comes to vehicle collision victims, only people who are slowly dieing of internal hemorrhaging are used. Sudden heart failure organs are bad for two reasons: first, if the heart actually fails, you have minutes before organs are nonviable. Second, the medication that's used for trying to keep the heart beating will actually accelerate death, including organ death, if it doesn't work.

Most organs come from from people, usually braindead, who are definitely going to die, but you have days or at least hours before the body actually loses the fight. And even then the extraction process needs to be started quickly, because in the process of dieing the body will, as it's losing blood, ie. power and oxygen, one-by-one cut off blood flow from organs to try to keep the heart, lungs and brain alive. Most organs that have had their blood flow cut off by the body can't be transplanted, so extraction needs to happen before that point.

So that was probably the case here.


(wait until you figure out the answer to the other question ... "wait, if organs after death are not used, nonviable, then what happens if I donate my body to science" ?)


Don't have access to NYTimes, but do they mention anything about all the other people that received an organ? I'm assuming they are tracking them down to get them rabies vaccine?


The donor's corneas were used for grafts for three others. The article states:

> The three patients’ grafts were removed, and one tested positive for rabies, the doctors said. None of the three patients had symptoms of rabies, but they were being treated with preventive drugs, the report said.¶ Since 1978, four organ donors have passed rabies to 13 organ recipients, the report said. Of the 13 recipients, six who received treatment for rabies survived. The seven others, who did not receive treatment, died.

Four of those seven were in an incident from May 2004, which you can read about here: <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa043018>


> We're gonna need that cornea back.

Not exactly a sentence you would hope to hear...


> We don't look to Meta, who only a few years ago thought that the Metaverse would be the "next big thing" as an example of failure to identify the future, we look to IBM who made that mistake almost 30 years ago.

The grandparent points to a pattern of failures whereas you point to Meta’s big miss. What you miss about Meta, and I am no fan, is that Facebook purchased Whatsapp and Instagram.

In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.

While that’s not the thrust of your argument, which is about jumping on the problem of jumping on every hype train, the post to which you reply is not on about hype cycle. Rather, that post calls out IBM for a failure to understand the future of technology and does so by pointing to a history of failures.


> In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.

Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".


> Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".

I was specifically commenting in the context of this thread.* I was not trying to characterize either IBM or Meta except with reference to the arguments offered by this thread’s ancestors.

I understood (and understand) that such scorekeeping of a company as storied as IBM is at best reductive and at worst misrepresentative.

* Your reference to “this thread” actually addresses sibling comments to OP (ggggp), not this thread which was started by gggp.


> Wrong article?

Yeah, it was supposed to be: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/business/dell-children-tr...

Too old to edit URL or delete this submission.


> before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.

While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised that LLMs (software) can generate quality software at all.

I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?

This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.

Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.


> I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software.

It takes deep thought and reasoning to produce good code. LLMs don't think or reason. They don't have to though because humans have done all of that for them. They just have to regurgitate what humans have already done. Everything good an LLM outputs came from the minds of humans who did all the real work. Sometimes they can assemble bits of human generated code in ways that do something useful, just like someone copying and pasting code out of stack exchange without understanding any of it can sometimes slap something together that does something useful.

LLMs are a neat party trick, and it can be surprising to see what they do and fun to see where they fail, but it all says very little about what it means to think and reason or even what it means to write software.


> Rent control is not a great solution long term since it reduces the incentive to build more housing which is the only real fix.

In California (and SF in particular) rent control applies to housing older than 15 years and owned by corporate entities.

How does rent control applied as it is in California disincentivize building? I would think that building would be incentivized by rent control because newer housing stock would be exempt from rent control.


Long term they wouldn't be, and hence lower ROI and therefore disincentivized


> Long term they wouldn't be, and hence lower ROI and therefore disincentivized

While the ROI would be lower compared to allowing rent to increase uncontrolled, in a rent control zone there is more incentive to build (and renovate) to take advantage of market rate leases for (in California's case) 15 years.

Does the argument that rent control (as in California) disincentives building reduce to the argument that uncontrolled rent yields a higher ROI than rent control?

Such an argument is a refusal to allow public good for the benefit of landlords.


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