We will say absolutely nothing about what kind of changes we mean, and the reporting of these comments won’t even speculate, much less ask. But you should definitely buy our stock now in anticipation.

What does Jerry at Android Trends think Pichai’s job is if not making number go up? Trying to act like there’s any substance here is laughable.

Alternate punchline: not nearly as much as he would have a few years ago, but still significantly more than is healthy for anyone. You’ll still get stalker vibes but he won’t care enough to remember your birthday.

It turns out if you can just make the machine know what the truth is and say that you don’t get hallucinations. Unfortunately the truth isn’t emergent from pure language models and expressing Truth through language alone has been something challenging the human race since Krog try to teach Torg how make stick but pointy.

Welcome! The situation these people find themselves in is dire, since they’re both literally and emotionally as far as possible from the people making decisions about their labor. The modern economy doesn’t function without exploitation, and generative AI is the latest innovation in expanding that exploitation and pushing it farther away from the people who benefit and who make the decisions that require it. It does to modern knowledge workers what automation and outsourcing did to manufacturing, and the distance is sufficient that I don’t expect to see even the kind of lukewarm pushback that sweatshops got in the 90s actually manifest for them.

Fuckers like Thiel make me want to start stuffing guys who take too much interest in speculative fiction into lockers again, just to be safe. And I was that kid, right down to the STEM focus and disrespect for the liberal arts.

Abt deflects questions of human rights by claiming that he is neither a human rights expert nor a politician.

And I’m not a proctologist but I still know an asshole when I see one.

Yeah, but everyone already knows Unity is crap. You can’t move papers that way!

I’ve seen people in the gun nuttier circles saying that the weapons the army had were configured for training rounds, sort of like airsoft rather than live ammo. It sounds like they were thoroughly uninterested in going along with this and were trying to avoid adding a mutiny to the situation? And yes, SK apparently has an explicit law that allows the legislation to overrule a declaration of martial law, which is the kind of law you don’t get unless you’ve had several occasions to think about it.

It’s frustrating because there is plenty of real evidence that North Korea is in a bad way. That satellite image is stark and the volume of reports claiming food shortages and lack of basic services are hard to dispute, as is the sheer obsessive control exercised by the government to avoid the depictions of it. You don’t need to make up stories about using human corpses to fertilize your fields or whatever.

Early ICEs also saw immediate value in static applications like water pumps or printing presses. It’s not like there was a century of people tinkering with the thing trying to make it work without any purpose. It rapidly showed value and then was iterated upon and improved until it became practical to use in new ways e.g. being small enough and powerful enough to power a car.

I figure there’s a small chance that the AI bubble ends up acting more like the UK railroad bubble in that after the dust clears and the overproduced infrastructure gets shut down we’re left with the best rail lines in Europe, but I’m not going to bet on that unless and until the salesmen stop trying to sell everyone a rail line between their bedroom and the bathroom.

Another highlight from the actual report is a massive increase in attempts to build AI in-house rather than buy, which highlights existing systems’ inability to generate value. We can’t find any use case for Clippy 2.0 as part of our existing software but, but the investors (and my bosses) might get spooked if we don’t sound like we’re on the cutting edge of this tech that everyone says is revolutionary. In the context of 70-90% of software projects failing in whole or in part I can only expect this to go well.

Being erased from the training data is frankly even more galling than the kind of brute force GDPR compliance they seem to have been using. It puts the lie to any claim that they’re just “moving fast and breaking things” without mind to the consequences, because clearly there was some reason to prune the training data and make sure that the model didn’t have certain information when it was to the company’s (or the founder’s) liking.

It’s the Bayesian version of Zeno’s paradox. Before one can update their beliefs, one must have evidence of an alternative proposition. But no one piece of evidence is worth meaningfully changing your worldview and actions. In order to be so it would need to be supported. But then that supporting evidence would itself need to be supported. And so on ad infinitum.

Also I feel like the logic he based that on was just dumb. Like, some writer out of the last several centuries is going to be the best for whatever given metric. We shouldn’t be surprised that any particular individual is the best any more than another. If anything the fact that people still talk about him after the centuries is probably the strongest argument in favor of his writing that you could make.

But of course Sam’s real goal was to justify the weird rationalist talking point that reading is overrated because podcasts exist or something.

Isn’t the whole point of travel influencers to allow conventionally attractive twenty-somethings to badger smallish local communities into giving them free room and board? If there isn’t a just-out-of-college ex-cheerleader trying to get an exhausted b&b owner to comp them their weekend in exchange for a half-dozen Instagram photos, then what’s even the point?

I mean, with how young she is there’s absolutely no credibility she can offer on how a country becomes like the “D”“P”"R"K. But I can see the superficial similarities between the right-wing griftoverse’s depiction of cancel culture and the kind of cultural authority that gets exercised. That Bogeyman is why they use that fanciful description, after all. I can see how easily she could get radicalized from there, not that it justified any of the lies she’s believed and passed on or invented outright.

This dude learned at miminum the word “stochastic” from LW.

“In what other profession do you need panic buttons?”

I’m just gonna look awkwardly at bank tellers, convenience store clerks, and so many other front-line customer service jobs that either have or would greatly benefit from a panic button to deal with dangerous customer interactions or outright robbery.

I mean that’s just true, at least for everyone but Thag.

I’ve been working up a proper sneer about this for a little while now. The real service that AI provides is that the managers who implement it get increased psychic distance from the people being exploited to power their profits. It’s sociopathy as a service; the exploitation still happens, but you no longer have to bear the burden of looking them in the eyes to deny their PTO request or tell them to clean out their desk.