I mean it does return a 404 now.

That hatchet job from Trace is continuing to have some legs, I see. Also a reread of it points out some unintentional comedy:

This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on…

Getting referenced in a thread on a different site talking about editing an article about themselves explicitly to make it sound more respectable and decent to be a member of their technofascist singularity cult diaspora. I’m sorry that your blogs aren’t considered reliable sources in their own right and that the “heterodox” thinkers and researchers you extend so much grace to are, in fact, cranks.

That’s what I was going to say. The natural language version actually claims that it leaves the dog behind unattended in every step, even though the following step continues as though it still has the dog and not whichever vegetable it brought back in the previous step.

Either it’s not actually good at natural language processing or some element of the solution isn’t surviving the shift from the river_cross() tool to natural language output. Whatever actual state it’s tracking internally doesn’t track to the output past the headline.

Finally circling back around to this.

Feels like I am not just doing my job but also the work the operator of the service or product I am having to use through chat should have paid professionals to do. And I’m not getting paid for it.

Speaking as someone who has worked extensively in IT support, I think that’s the sales pitch for these chatbots. They don’t want to give users tools and knowledge to solve their own problems - or rather they do but the chatbots aren’t part of that. The chatbots are supposed to replace the people who would interact with the relevant systems on your behalf. And honestly, working with a support person is already a deeply unsatisfying interaction in the vast majority of cases. In even the best case scenario it involves acknowledging that some part of your job has exceeded your ability and you need specialized help, and handling that well is a very rare personality trait. But the massive variety of interconnected systems that we rely on are too complex for this to not be a common occurrence. Even if you did radically open everything from internal bug trackers to licensing systems to communications there wouldn’t be enough time in the day for everyone to learn those systems well enough to perfectly self-solve all their problems, and that lack of systems knowledge would be a massive drain on your operations. But trying to fit in an LLM chatbot is the worst of both worlds, in that your users are both locked away from the tools and knowledge that would let them solve their own issues but still need to learn how to wrangle your intermediary system, and that system doesn’t have the human ability to connect and build a working relationship and get through those issues in a positive way.

I think the idea is to build the fortified cult compound in the Internet. That way your disciples can lock themselves inside and start flagellating wherever they may be in the physical world.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. Like, his role as a spokesperson was to present the administration’s official position and not his personal beliefs. I can believe he did that work for a lot of reasons ranging from purely cynical to strategic to the simple economic “I really need this job” kind of thing. Obviously none of those factors are tied to whether or not he believes what he is saying is true, but I think those are distinct from the active disregard for truth unattached to any kind of specific role or position. Kevin isn’t working as an industry spokesman he’s allegedly a journalist who ostensibly gets paid to write the truth.

Amazing. Can’t wait for the doomers to claim that somehow this has enough intent to classify as murder. I wonder if they’ll end up on one of the weirdly large number of “bad things that happen to people in the national parks” podcasts.

Well found.

Also I love that the conversation almost certainly started with a comment about how everyone assumes they’d be the in the king’s court the cast majority of people would have been some variant of peasant farmer for the vast majority of history. But somehow he still would have totally been the Chief Rabbi, given the most beautiful woman, and generally be a king. I wasn’t there obviously but either he missed the point or they all missed the point. Even when talking specifically about how you can’t choose the circumstances of your birth or their consequences he still can’t imagine himself not being the king.

New version of Descartes: imagine that an LLM no less hallucination-prone than unaligned, is feeding it’s output directly into your perceptions…

Non cogitat, ergo non est

How had I missed that the guy who was “intrigued” by crypto in 202X was also the guy who told the chatbot to make him leave his wife? I really need to pay more attention to the byline.

I’m pretty sure I have no more than three followers, actually.

Longer read than I had realized but worth every word. Very well done.

In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity.

I actually question whether or not this has already happened. The wealthy already have access to enough money that they don’t actually need to sell assets - to give anything up - in order to get credit. Just taking away Elon’s money doesn’t make him stop being Elon. It doesn’t take away his connections, his charisma, his loyal follower base, etc. Even if he did get taken down in court any financial consequence wouldn’t actually hurt his power base nearly as much as the reputational shift (see also Orange Man). Their net worth may not be literally infinite, but I can’t think of any additional power or prestige they could command if it was.

Nope. That would be more immediately concerning but less dumb than the reality.

Alright OpenAI, listen up. I’ve got a whole 250GB hard drive from 2007 full of the Star Wars/Transformers crossover stories I wrote at the time. I promise you it’s AI-free and won’t be available to train competing models. Bidding starts at seven billion dollars. I’ll wait while you call the VCs.

I don’t know, I think by their stated goals they did alright. They took investor money, yes, but they used it to move very quickly and break a lot of things. Now, we should probably have seen ahead of time that this was actually a bad thing and that breaking things is a bad goal, but it was the 2000s and we all thought touchscreen digital watches were pretty neat.

Easy Money Author (and former TV Star) Ben Mckenzie’s new cryptoskeptic documentary is struggling to find a distributor. Admittedly, the linked article is more a review of the film than a look at the distributor angle. Still, it looks like it’s telling the true story in a way that will hopefully connect with people, and it would be a real shame if it didn’t find an audience.

Given the relative caliber of those two I think this may be considered an attempted inducement to suicide by better writer. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.

I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there’s a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we’re going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they’re actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.

Right? I guess maybe the incel-adjacent want to go back to the standards of medieval kings needing to have the whole court in their bedchambers on the wedding night just to make absolutely certain that the royals fucked at least once.

It’s also kind of weird to see Atlas Shrugged on the list. Not because it’s not dystopian because the only thing it’s missing from its libertarian hellscape is realistic consequences in the form of bear attacks. But unlike the others the society isn’t expressly said to be awful by the narrative. Or, for Scholtzenizen, by reality.