The distance between wanting and having

"The distance between wanting something and having it is now a sentence."

https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2096287558330437757

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

Larry Ellison built one of the largest software companies on earth. He just said a lot of its code is no longer written by people. Ellison: “A lot of the code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’t writing. Our AI models are writing.” Every era of computing shortened the distance between wanting something and having it. Punch cards gave way to assembly, assembly gave way to compilers. Each time, the machine absorbed a layer people used to do by hand. Ellison: “We just tell the model what we want the program to do and then the AI comes up with a step-by-step process to actually do it.” Software has been a translation problem from the start. One person knows what a system should do, another spends months turning that into instructions, and meaning erodes along the way. Ellison: “We don’t write the procedure. We declare our intent, but the model writes the step-by-step procedure that we commonly think of as a computer program.” The translation step is gone. Knowing what’s worth building becomes the entire job, and far fewer people can do that than write code. Every tool in history made the how cheaper. This one produces the how. Ellison: “They diagnose medical images far better than we do. They design drugs that we can’t.” The same shift is running through medicine and chemistry. Name the outcome and the method arrives. Ellison: “There’s a big gotcha on these models and that is the models do not get trained on your private data.” The model learned from nearly everything humanity has published. Hospitals, labs, factory floors hold ground truth it has never seen. Ellison: “For some reason, private people want to keep their private data private. And that’s not going to change.” The models come to the people who hold the data. The intelligence spreads and the data stays put. Humanity has always had more good ideas than hands to build them. That constraint is lifting inside our lifetime. The ideas that used to die between someone’s head and someone’s hands now get built. The distance between wanting something and having it is now a sentence.

Conversion from TDS

 

The linked post is the second tweet in a thread by @JoshuaLisec. Its on-screen text is:

You first met me as the guy Scott Adams talked out of being a liberal.

I had a real case of the TDS, but the Great Influencer cured it safely and effectively.

Here is that case study: June 14th, 2019.

The attached video (~10:37) is an excerpt from Coffee with Scott Adams Episode 565 (June 14, 2019). Exact spoken transcript (cleaned from auto-captions for readability, original wording preserved):

Scott Adams: I can hear you. Tell me how to pronounce your last name properly.

Joshua Lisec: Lisec. Lisec.

Scott: Okay, Joshua Lisec. Now you responded to my request to talk to somebody who once had Trump Derangement Syndrome, but maybe I helped talk you out of it or maybe you came out of it yourself. Does that accurately describe you?

Joshua: That does, yes.

Scott: And how bad did you have it? And tell me what is your political leaning. Do you naturally lean left or right? Would you label yourself?

Joshua: Yeah, I would say I'm center-left, a reasonable liberal. Yes, we do exist.

Scott: All right, so you had terrible thoughts about Trump. Could you summarize what terribleness you thought were the problems in particular?

Joshua: Yes, and I can even give some context. About a year prior to the 2016 election I had been a listener of Sam Harris's podcast, and of course that left-wing ecosystem, kind of the intellectuals of the left, were predicting that this guy was going to be opening concentration camps and deporting the millions of illegal immigrants and starting World War III, and he was this sexist, racist, bigot, homophobe — all these things that were hallucinated. Now, looking back, that's what was happening, but at the time I was fully convinced: well, these smart people are saying these terrible things are going to happen, they seem pretty confident, so why would I believe otherwise?

Scott: Would you say that it was the group thinking that influenced you more than your own critical thoughts about the facts?

Joshua: Definitely yes. Like a lot of people, as a busy person I don't necessarily have hours on end to do all the research and the deep-diving myself, so I would look at these commentators, podcasters, so-called journalists whose opinions I respected. It's a perfectly reasonable shortcut because we can't think through every topic to the bottom. You have to rely on people to give you the cliff notes.

Scott: All right, so what was it that changed? How did you come out of it? Give us the brief journey there.

Joshua: Reflecting on it, I think there are three specific things that happened that were like cracks in the other movie screen that I was watching — the two movies on one screen. So there were some cracks on my screen.

The first crack actually was how Sam Harris, after the 2016 election for unrelated reasons, was kind of dragged through the reputation mud by establishment left-wing commentators, intellectuals, and media. And I personally knew this guy: Sam Harris isn't a bigot or an Islamophobe or anything like that. So I saw the same people that were saying Trump is evil, they were saying Sam Harris is evil.

Scott: That's really interesting. So once you saw that the same treatment could be applied to somebody you did know about and you felt confident, that made you doubt the same treatment they were giving to Trump who you didn't know as much about.

Joshua: Yes. That was the first crack — they're turning on Sam Harris, especially like Vox and that whole disaster.

The second one: a far-left friend of mine posted on Facebook an article in Rolling Stone. This is I think maybe a little over a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, before my son was born. The headline was something that just sounded terrible, something to the effect of "Trump rolls back child labor laws." Oh no, this evil terrible person, sweatshops — you can just see the sweatshops in your head, right? And everyone's sharing it, thousands of shares, "this man's evil, hashtag impeach now."

I go and I read the article. The article is about how the Trump Administration is instituting a new labor rule which allows blue-collar employers to hire 16-, 17-year-old high school graduates to work at their companies as apprentices. I read that and I say I completely agree with that, totally on board with that. And yet the headline was so far removed from that. It was a hyper-exaggeration. That was the second crack. I said to my wife, "How many of these 'Trump rolls back child labor laws' headlines have we seen that if we had just clicked and read the story, we would completely agree with it?"

Scott: What's the third thing?

Joshua: The third thing was you. This was a little over a year ago, before the hoax funnel. You had this drawing on your whiteboard and you used the various media hoaxes or exaggerations or lies about President Trump. You said don't start with the big one, start with this little one and work your way through it. It looked like a wind tunnel. Work your way through the hoax tunnel and you realize maybe there are legitimate reasons to vote for someone else — in my case I'm kind of on the Andrew Yang bandwagon for 2020 — but there are legitimate reasons to like President Trump's results in his administration, and there are reasons to maybe not approve, but these are not any of those reasons.

Scott: What's unusual about your journey is that it involved reason and actually learning, which is so rare. I think it helped a lot that you said you were sort of moderate left-leaning. Your appreciation for Andrew Yang sort of speaks to that. Yang is half a Republican. I don't know how he can get elected because he's only half one side and half the other. Did you get any pushback from your friends who presumably remain Trump haters?

Joshua: Well, whenever I bring up something like they maybe shared a headline — "oh you hear about what Trump did today" — and I'll say well I looked into that story actually, I read the headline and the article, and actually it was ABC... and then just as you predicted in the hoax funnel, they just hop: "okay well maybe that thing isn't true but this other thing." It's just like hopping from one thing to another. And maybe they'll get to the point where it's something that like okay, I actually agree I'm not a fan of President Trump for those reasons.

Scott: Did you see the video clips of the times that President Trump used the same mocking expression as he was blamed for mocking the reporter who had the handicap with his arm? Have you seen the compilation clips to show he does that all the time with other people?

Joshua: Not until I think it was on your timeline.

Scott: Yeah, so the news funnel completely protects people who are the Trump haters from seeing the exculpatory video. They just never see it. And so you can kind of understand why people are fooled. Now you had the ability to start with a Sam Harris who I would say is actually not really political in a way, wouldn't you say?

Joshua: Yeah. And I think that the type of people he was having on his podcast had some sort of either political affiliation or they were economists, commentators, technologists, and for their own reasons they had fears about possibly being an existential risk, like Eric Weinstein I think that was his phrase, existential risk.

Scott: Even when I disagree with Sam Harris I appreciate that he's trying to get there through some kind of process of reason and facts and discovery and learning. He's trying to get to places through rational processes. Unfortunately he lives in an irrational world so that's going to have a limited effect on people's minds.

Joshua, thank you so much. And I'm sorry about my mix-up yesterday, my technical error that delayed this till today, but this is fascinating. Is there anything else you want to add?

Joshua: Yeah, I just saw a comment in here I want to respond to. Somebody asked "is he an artist or an engineer?" As you would probably expect, just like Andrew Yang I am both. I'm an entrepreneur, I own my own business, I'm a real estate investor as well, but my main business is as a ghostwriter. So it's creativity, it's writing. I own a creative business in addition to another enterprise, so a little bit of both.

Scott: Want to give your company a plug? What's the name of your business?

Joshua: Sure. It's Entrepreneurs Wordsmith, entrepreneurswordsmith.com is my business. I've ghostwritten 40 full-length books since 2011, so we're celebrating eight years this month.

Food monopolies

 

Wall Street Apes

@WallStreetApes

Missouri farmer Joe Maxwell speaks on how large corporations are price gouging Americans by making sure we are controlled by monopolies and no other competition can get in “Eggs went up 300% in the grocery. The largest egg producer in the United States, Cal-Maine's profits went up tenfold. The avian flu was serious, but the fact is they only lost about 6-7% of the flock. So they screamed avian flu, which gave them an excuse to hike up prices, gouge the consumer, rake in billions of dollars. One company made more money in a quarter than it made in the whole year before. USDA economists came out and said, "Well, we see prices are way far above what they ought to be based upon the facts. We expect other people to come into this market and lower the price of eggs." 4 months later, the report came and said, "We're not sure why nobody came in." But no one did because the concentration is so heavy you can't get into the market. With 4 companies controlling retail groceries, with their sweetheart deals with the big 4 producers of any food item, you can't get in, and it allows those companies to gouge the consumer and shortpay the farmer, and they reap all the money.” He’s right there are 4 major companies on each side acting as huge gatekeepers that can crush any competition and make sure only their selected companies succeed The Big 4 grocery companies are: - Walmart, including Sam’s Club - Kroger - Costco - Albertsons, which included Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Acme and more Then you have the companies controlling the production Beef packing: Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef Pork packing: Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, Seaboard/Hormel Chicken: Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride with us majority-owned by JBS, Wayne-Sanderson, Perdue Nearly all packaged goods like cereal, soda, snacks, yogurt, bread and more are owned by a handful of giants, their names are PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Nestlé and a few more America is the illusion of choice. These massive companies control nearly all our food industry. We need three companies broken up and extremely stick monopoly and pro-competition laws.

The vise tightens

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

I often speak of a new 1989. I’ll tell you why, in the end, we’ll almost have to thank the globalist project. Look at Spain today.

Madrid, Toledo, Seville, A Coruña, Bilbao. Streets full. Ceuta cracking at the seams. Tens of thousands of people saying stop. And on the other side of the Rhine: ARD, ZDF, Bild, SZ, Spiegel, FAZ, Tagesspiegel. Silence. This isn’t an oversight. It’s the reflex of a system that senses it no longer has the right to tell the story. The media and a good portion of the political class aren’t “evil.” They’re the agents of a software. Multilateral. Globalist. Vertical. They allocate, they moralize, they censor what contradicts the narrative. This software is breaking. It’s no longer a hypothesis. It’s a matter of time. Why? Because it’s caught in a vise. First jaw: the peoples. Those who’ve lived here for generations can’t take it anymore. An economy that no longer delivers. Housing. Purchasing power. An immigration endured, poorly allocated, never owned, that turns the border into a political adjustment variable. Ceuta isn’t a “news item.” It’s the moment when the cost becomes visible in the streets. When reality enters through the window, the official narrative exits through the door. Second jaw: the United States and Elon Musk. Trump flipped the table. Not with a speech. With a balance of power. The center of gravity of the West has shifted. And Musk is bringing something else. A horizontal project. Tools. Energy. Space. Information that no longer belongs to the middlemen. Far more interesting, and above all more just, than the globalists’ moral Gosplan. On one side, populations refusing to disappear into a spreadsheet. On the other, an America that stops funding the old software, and a builder who’s constructing the next one. The vise tightens. The paradox is this one. By pushing too hard, the globalist project is doing the one thing it never should have: unifying the West behind shared values. Not a slogan. A border. A language of truth. The right to remain oneself. The possibility of building without asking permission from Brussels, Davos, or a newsroom. 1989 wasn’t just the wall coming down. It was a lie that had become too expensive to maintain. Here, it’s the same. The system is cracking because it costs too much in lies, money, and dignity. So have hope. We’re not living a sad parenthesis. We’re living a historic period. The old project will collapse. What comes next can be much better, provided the builders take the place of the middlemen. Go build.

Reality vs expectations

 

Peter Girnus 

@gothburz

I am an Enforcement and Removal Operations officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. I have worked this job for ten years. I still have the button from the first Trump rally I went to, in 2016, before I had the badge. It's in my truck, in the console, under the registration. I don't wear it. I just haven't thrown it away. Sometimes I open the console for something else, my sunglasses, a parking pass, and there it is, and I close it again without deciding to. That year felt like something was actually being built. Not a policy. A room. Everyone in it believed the same six things and every one of the six things was going to fix something specific. Trade. Borders. Epstein. Forever wars. The people who'd stopped listening to us. It felt big because it was aimed at big things with big energy. Epstein meant the people who never get touched finally get touched, all the way up, no matter whose name was in the book. Forever wars meant my sister's kid doesn't get a fourth deployment to somewhere he can't find on a map. Those weren't abstractions to me. I could tell you the address of the room the six things were said in, and I could tell you who I was standing next to. I want to describe what it's aimed at now, because I read the news like anyone else, and I still say "we" about all of it, and I've started to notice that the "we" covers a lot more ground than it used to, and I keep looking for the version of it I signed up for and not quite finding it, the way you keep checking a pocket for something you already know isn't there. This week alone. The Secretary of War removed or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, something like 1 in 10 of the top brass, and put his own former aide in as acting Army chief. He called it a cleansing. The Army Secretary resigned in the middle of it. The math on who got cleansed and who got promoted is not subtle, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't see the numbers on that. The President renamed a lake. Signed the paper himself, in the Oval Office, said it was official and effective immediately, over a trade argument with Canada. The order doesn't bind New York, doesn't bind Canada, doesn't bind anyone but the federal government, which means the only entity required to call it Lake America is the government that renamed it. I keep turning that over. We used to talk about winning countries. Now we're relabeling a lake we already owned half of, for an audience of federal letterhead. The FBI put a former congressman on a nine-hour flight and had air marshals watch his phone the whole way to see if they could read his passcode. He was a manager in an impeachment trial once. That's the offense on file, as far as I can tell. Nine hours over the Atlantic, two federal officers, one phone. And Epstein. I have to talk about Epstein, because it was one of the six things, and it's the one I think about longest. There was a release, millions of pages, back in January. Then in July there was a memo. No client list. No blackmail. Nothing but what the first report already said about how he died. That was the finding. I read it the day it came out, standing in a parking lot on a break, and I remember not being able to make my legs walk back inside for a minute. He said he'd release it. He said it enough times that I stopped hearing it as a promise and started hearing it as a fact that hadn't happened yet. Then the memo said it had already happened, and it was nothing, and I was supposed to just carry on with the shift like the ground under that particular thing hadn't moved. Meanwhile there's a real war a few time zones over, and a new oil deal in Venezuela, and a Treasury Secretary using the word asphyxiate about another country's economy on the record, and I clock in Monday like all of that is a normal week, because at this point it is. That same weekend he posted a video of an island "being blown to smithereens," two exclamation points, over footage nobody at the Department of Defense could confirm happened. No strike record. Just the video. I watched it twice before I clocked that it was generated, which says something about the video, or something about how used to this I've gotten, I honestly can't tell you which anymore. The other video from that weekend was geese. A flock of them, wearing his hairline, holding rifles, standing guard over the lake he'd just renamed. I don't know which post he expected people to read as intelligence and which one he expected people to read as a joke. I don't think that's a field on the form either. None of that is free, and I don't mean what we spend on it. Gas is close to $4 a gallon nationally, up more than 30% since this war started. The 30-year mortgage rate is 6.72%, and the reporting on why cites this exact conflict by name. Home prices are up about 17% over the same stretch, the median payment is $2,191 a month now, and grocery bills are climbing faster than most people's raises. In that same stretch, the family running the war has made about $4 billion off businesses that didn't exist before the second term, most of it crypto. One venture alone moved $1.4 billion in token sales, and the family's own entity kept 75% of it. I'm not an economist. I process removal files. But I can read two numbers in the same news cycle. One of them is going up because of the war. The other one is going up because of the war too. They are not the same family's number. I signed up because I was scared of something. I still am, if I'm honest, the same something, government deciding what you're allowed to keep, deciding it's not really yours. That fear was the whole engine. I built ten years on top of it. What I can't work out anymore is whether the thing I signed up to stop needs us at all to make its case, or whether we've spent a decade doing its opening argument for it for free, one grocery bill and one mortgage rate and one gas receipt at a time, while the people telling us to be afraid of it get richer than anyone in that argument has ever been. And then there's the file I actually touched. We arrested a man at the airport in New Orleans for overstaying a visa and missing his hearing. Routine removal order, routine flight home the next day. He'd spent years telling anyone who'd listen that officers like me deserved total immunity for doing exactly this job. He meant it. I believe he meant it. The form does not have a box for that. I checked, the way I've checked before out of something like curiosity. There's a box for entry date. A box for hearing date. A box for status. His said removable, the same word it says for everyone else's file in the drawer. I used to think the point was the six things. Borders, trade, Epstein, no more forever wars, the people who stopped listening. I still think that's what it was, in the room, in 2016, when it was a room and not yet a filing system. I don't think anyone renamed a lake for those six things. I don't think 80 generals got cleared out for those six things. I don't think the plane full of air marshals was about those six things. I don't think the memo that closed the book on Epstein was about those six things, and I don't think the file on the man who wanted us protected was about those six things either. I think the six things built the machine, and the machine outgrew the six things, and what's left doing the work now is just the machine, running on its own weight, filing whoever's in front of it under whatever box fits, while the six things sit in a truck console like a button nobody's thrown away. I kept the button. I never got a box that said which side you were on. Nobody did. That was never a field on the form. I just thought, in 2016, that we were building the kind of thing that would have needed one.

Anyone can code

 

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

·

2h

Marc Andreessen described people at his firm shipping software who have never read a line of code. Andreessen: “A fair number of people who we both know are former programmers who stopped coding at one point and then, all of a sudden, have picked it back up again.” Start with the ones who already knew how. They had the skill and stopped using it anyway, because building something small was never worth the hours it cost. Every capable person carries a list of things they could make and never will. The skill was not the binding constraint. Andreessen: “We also have partners at the firm who have actually never coded, who are now ripping out software like crazy. They’ve turned into ‘AI vampires.’” The people who never had the skill at all cleared the same bar in the same year. Whatever was stopping both groups, it was one thing, and it sat somewhere other than talent. Andreessen: “I asked him, he vibe coded the whole thing, ‘Have you looked at the code?’ And he was like, ‘Hell no, I’ve never done that.’” For as long as software has existed, building it meant handing your idea to someone who could translate it. Every product that exists is the version that survived being explained. An idea leaves your head as words. Those words reach a person who has never stood where you stand, and they build what the words described. A fraction of what you meant. You look at it and say not quite. Months of that, and you ship the closest approximation anyone had the patience for. The trap is that the deepest problem knowledge is the hardest kind to say out loud. Fifteen years at a hospital intake desk gives you an understanding that lives in your hands and your instincts. Michael Polanyi had the phrase for it. We know more than we can tell. So the filter was never whether an idea was good. It was whether the idea survived being described to a stranger with a keyboard. The ones that failed that test never got as far as being proposed. Andreessen: “He’s not a programmer by background, and yet, all of a sudden, he’s hyper-productive.” Now you can show instead of describe. A working version exists in an hour, and you correct it against the thing itself. Correction is something everyone can do. Nobody needs vocabulary to recognize wrong. Multiply that by every operations lead, every teacher, every nurse, every machinist who has spent a decade knowing exactly what should exist and lacking the words to commission it. Andreessen’s partner did not become an engineer. He stayed the person who knew the job, and the distance between knowing and having went to zero. Software has been a record of what could be explained. It is becoming a record of what people actually understood. The thing you have been describing badly for ten years does not need better words anymore.