Because it can't and it's a publicity stunt. It achieves three goals:
1) Underscores to the general public that the models are amazingly powerful and if you're not using them, your competitors will out-innovate you,
2) Sends the message to regulators that they don't need to do anything because the companies are diligent to prevent harm,
3) Sends the message to regulators that they sure should be regulating "open-source" models, because these hippies are not doing rigorous safety testing.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been playing that game for years.
It's a relatively soft plastic and I don't think you can realistically build a uniform, good-looking layer that's 1/8" thick, if that's what you mean. If you need that thickness, high hardness, and nice appearance, I think your best bet is just a sheet of glass or acrylic on top.
It can be used as protective varnish, but that would be a very thin layer, probably 0.1 mm or something like that.
It's solvent-based, so it won't set well in thick layers and it will shrink significantly as the solvent evaporates. You can do thick layers with solvent-free thermoset resins such as epoxy, but epoxy will yellow over time.
I think that gen AI has profound negative externalities. I also think that all the other uses of this tech aside, natural language comprehension alone is cool and useful enough that I don't see us ever going back.
So I guess my question for the author is what they're trying to achieve in this essay. Some of the big players in tech may have beliefs that align with some of the tenets of fascism. But the label is so well-worn that it's meaningless. Buying books on Amazon is fascism, writing on Medium or Substack is fascism, having pets is fascism, etc. So, this day and age, not much is accomplished by uttering the word.
With this in mind, what's the prescription the author actually has to offer? That's where it really gets dicey, because the only takeaway from this writing seems to be "geez, someone ought to set some datacenters on fire".
"You best start believing in ghost stories... youre in one"
Executive Summary (not ai, its from the pdf above from Sweden)
1. Democracy in the World, 2025
Democracy for the average global citizen has declined to 1978 levels. The gains of the “third wave of democratization,” which began in Portugal in 1974, have been almost entirely erased.
The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is now at its lowest point in more than 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the United States.
The United States has lost its long-standing status as a liberal democracy for the first time in over five decades.
Autocracies and Democracies
By the end of 2025, the world had 92 autocracies and 87 democracies.
Approximately 74% of the world’s population, or 6 billion people, now live in autocracies. Only 7%, or 0.6 billion people, live in liberal democracies.
The “Great Reversal”: 2000 vs. 2025
Nearly all aspects of democracy have declined significantly over the past decade, marking a dramatic reversal from conditions 25 years ago.
Freedom of expression has been the hardest hit, with declines recorded in 44 countries in 2025.
Torture is increasingly being used to suppress political opposition, with 33 countries experiencing substantial deterioration in 2025.
2. Trends in Regime Transformation
The world has never seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time as it has during the recent years of the “third wave of autocratization.”
A record 41% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people, currently live in autocratizing countries.
The European Union has been significantly affected. Autocratization now affects seven EU member states as well as two of the EU’s key allies: the United Kingdom and the United States.
3. Autocratizing Countries
Nearly a quarter of the world’s countries are now classified as autocratizers, totaling 44 countries.
These 44 autocratizers include 24 stand-alone autocratizers and 20 bell-turns.
In 2025, 10 new autocratizers were identified. Among them are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Media censorship remains the most common tactic among autocratizing governments, used in 32 countries, or 73% of autocratizers.
Repression of civil society has also surged, affecting 30 autocratizing countries, or 68% of the total.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!
Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
I think this is a weird side effect of how we portray evil corporations in fiction and in journalism. We imagine that everyone working there is a moustache-twirling villain. And then we get a job at Meta or Flock or Palantir, look around, and don't see any moustache-twirling villains. There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.
Even if some of the outcomes seem reprehensible, it's not really evil because we're good people. We do it in a responsible and caring way. We're truly sorry that your grandma is now hooked up on endless AI-generated slop, but shouldn't the media be talking about all the other grandmas whose lives are enriched by our AI? We have strict safety rules for the types of cryptocurrency ads that can target the elderly, too.
Let me tell you. I worked at a IRS equivalent service in another country, and a lot of what I did was not very different from spying in our own citizens.
And you know what? there's a pervasive ideology in the place that justifies it all.
One day you wake up, and you realize that you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer, even if the official documents say otherwise.
And we are talking about Tax Payers here. Now imagine an organization like Palantir that can de-humanize their targets marking them with the Terrorist label. It is easy to convince people that they are on the right side.
> you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer
Any force employing threat of violence for control does the same. Police presence, military occupation, hell you even see it in the eyes of loss prevention folks.
> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.
It can get pretty close at times. Witness Meta and Zuck being told, in clear terms, that there was clear material threats to Burmese dissidents with some of the asks of Facebook. "The features matter more."
Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later. Sure, it's a classic, but it's hardly a "must-have". At best, it's something you need to read for school, although many school districts have dropped it from their lists.
Having said that, I think the complaints about book prices are mostly an excuse for preferring to spend time on social media or download pirated books for free.
Leaving aside the question of whether they're priced "correctly", books are cheaper than a Doordash meal or a computer game we buy and never finish. Would the average person really read more books if they were $4.99 instead of $29.95?
> books are cheaper than a Doordash meal or a computer game we buy and never finish. Would the average person really read more books if they were $4.99 instead of $29.95?
As a data point I'm reading some series I enjoyed the first 2 volumes of. I just picked up the next 7 ones because they were there and each of em were ~$5. Wouldn't have done that if they were $30, and I'm not guaranteed to get to the end!
The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.
Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typical example of that good today, without digging into the details, because the typical example today is often a lot worse-made but in ways that aren't apparent just from looking at a wide-shot image of the two things. Often it takes destructive tear-downs to really get at the differences (as it would to do a deep comparison of book binding quality) if you don't have access to watch the manufacturing processes directly.
Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.
(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)
> Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later.
Well it doesn't matter. Even if you compare to books that are newly published, new hardcover fiction is not $43-54. Typical is about $30.
What's especially frustrating is that the posts about AI are also disproportionately written by AI. I can sort of understand that people who are very enthusiastic about LLMs also use them for blogging. But the most bizarre part is that a lot of anti-AI opinion pieces are LLM-generated too. Either cynical click-sploitation or extreme hypocrisy.
Oh my. You still make those? Ever since model chupacobra 2.46 we have AI agents making those for us. At one point I was on the fence about totally outsourcing it to agents but it's way more efficient. Now I have 50 posts a day under different names.
Unfortunate. Tindie is (was?) a pretty unique marketplace. Amusingly, a lot of what they were selling was probably illegal due to FCC rules: for the most part, you can't sell electronics without EMI certification and "I'm just a hobbyist" is not an excuse. Kits get a bit of leeway, but finished products don't.
Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mails asking me to start selling my designs with China-based outlets: they would make the PCBs, assemble them, and pay me some money for every item sold.
Can you share more information about the undercutting? I've heard of places like Elecrow trying to incentivize people to sell via their platform/OEM service but it sounds like you've had people asking you to license your designs?
I never followed up, but I didn't read it as some serious IP licensing thing. It sounded like they've come to the conclusion that they're making the stuff that's sold on Tindie anyway, so might as well set up a website and ship directly to your customers.
It's not likely, but if you're an expert I'm sure you could think of a few ways it would be possible. The reason we give people with pacemakers a list of machines to avoid is definitely not to waste their time because there is no possible way any of those things could be dangerous to them.
As an RF expert I can assure you that I could create a device to wirelessly interfere with a pacemaker. A pathological one, maybe, but the point remains: regulation is needed.
The question is whether such interference could be created by a device as a by-product of its normal operation, not by a weapon that's intended to cause harm.
Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.
As to why we want to make phones as thin as possible... I don't know, but I guess it makes them look futuristic, which helps with sales. The same goes for highly-reflective, glossy screens. I guess I'm not gonna cry if that gets regulated away.
> Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.
Fairphone 6, recent with replaceable battery: 9.6 mm
Galaxy S5, has a replaceable battery, released _12 years ago_ - battery tech has improved a lot since then: 8.1 mm
iPhone 17 Pro Max: 8.8 mm
iPhone 12 Pro Max: 7.4 mm
We want to make phones as thin as possible so the latest flagship iPhone is 1.4 mm thicker than the one from 5 years ago? A whole 0.8 mm thinner than a recent one with a replaceable battery with maybe 0.1% of the iPhone's R&D budget, and 0.8 mm thicker than one with a replaceable battery made 12 years ago?
Galaxy S5 had a tool-free replaceable 2800mAh battery, with hard sides for protection. NFC. Wireless charging (as a user-installed option -- again, no tools, but did add some thickness and weight). USB 3 with OTG. HDMI over MHL. An excellent camera for the time. An OLED screen. A headphone jack. An SD card. A sim card. An IR blaster for changing TV channels at the pub. (I'm probably missing some functions here.)
The bootloader was unlocked in many regions (and became unlockable in all regions). Custom roms were abundant.
And it was waterproof.
(In the subsequent decade+, I have heard it said over and over again that this is an impossible combination of traits. And yet, there was a time when we had all that.)
Bullshit. This was the reason the industry gave for why they were removing battery replaceability support. Everybody hated it when it was first introduced, and to this day I only buy phones which have easily accessible ways to put a new battery on when the day comes. Fuck this BS of "people wanted thinner phones".
It’s also very hard to make them resistant to water and dust, I really like that I can wash my iPhone in the sink and don’t have to worry about it getting wet in general.
This is a lot harder to achieve with battery doors, especially if they need to be as big as a phone back.
Rugged phones are so far removed from any consumer phone in terms of size and weight the comparison is about as apt as comparing military use laptops with a MacBook.
Easiest way to get rid of dust and other buildup, free flowing water for a few seconds and done. Compared to the Middle Ages of using tooth picks or similar to clean the ports and speakers it’s much nicer.
And no, I don’t have my phone in any weird places, just my pocket.
1) Underscores to the general public that the models are amazingly powerful and if you're not using them, your competitors will out-innovate you,
2) Sends the message to regulators that they don't need to do anything because the companies are diligent to prevent harm,
3) Sends the message to regulators that they sure should be regulating "open-source" models, because these hippies are not doing rigorous safety testing.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been playing that game for years.
reply