My line break produced some good comedy:

Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)

Meh, Benn Jordan did it better.

I think his offer still stands that, despite humanoid robots being stupid, if Unitree sends him one he will film himself having a boxing match with it.

You’re right of course, stupid engineering like that will kill people and already has.

From an emergency responder perspective I’m mostly asking how can I keep my squad safe and how can I rescue survivors. Once we’re there we usually got all the tools you would ever need. And I’m 100% sure, if someone is in danger I’m breaking out the can opener before I would ever bother to call remote support.

The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ

Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.

I expect we’re gonna hear more about the cherry-picked data points that aren’t atrocious for AI. Like specifically the “help me learn” usage stat (the only one where some AI users are on par or better), and the even more specific “help me learn” usage with AI/media literacy discussed in class stat.

There’s probably all kinds of interesting factors involved that had to be ignored because they needed an AI fluff statistic. Like the one fact they mention, that high AI-use and partly non-AI use correllate with curiousity. Kids who want information will use the tools given to them. If your teachers are into AI and discuss it in class, even more so. I expect the “once or twice a year”-users (who bottom out every chart) to include a big bulk of kids that just do not care about education (often coming from unpriviliged households), so they use it to cheat on their assignments and call it a day.

Pretty undeniable though, that the daily users are always worse than the sometimes users. That’s probably the habitual delegation of thought kicking in. I could accept that a subgroup of the AI users learns on par or sliiiightly better than non-users on average, but they might be building up a reliance on tooling that will serve them worse and worse once they get past well-trodden school problems. In the same vein they’re probably all getting fucked, because noone gives a fuck about good text books & reference materials anymore.

@[email protected] I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.

I need to remember the multiple people that pointed me to Next.js and lose some respect retroactively. Though it did feel like a sneaky Vercel ad even back then.

Isn’t evolution beatiful? Each of these specimen has adapted to fit a highly specific niche, it’s knob optimized to predate a specific style of trouser pocket or even certain belt loops.

Oof, the brain poison is real.

Made me remember that I browsed r/cryptoleftists a few years ago, till I started trolling in the comments and got banned. Just checked, and the head honcho, Joshua Dávila, is still on his bullshit. Though he recently announced he is rebranding because TheBlockchainSocialist got too cringe.

PS: r/leftistsForAI isn’t him I don’t think. Though that would be 100% his niche.

This is bullshit and not how pro-Israel influence in US politics works. Kirk was broadly accepted by the republican mainstream and didn’t stray too far from the party line. In fact he was for a while harrassed by Groypers in part because he refused to adopt bald-faced anti-semitism into his rethoric. This theory might well have originated in those circles.

Ah fuck, they’re also funding {ungeskripted}. He’s a way too big german “free speech” type podcaster. I’ve got him on my shitlist recently, after wonky BSW-type supposed leftists were sharing his clips in a political group chat.

Haven’t heard bad stuff about mailbox.org (Heinlein Group) yet.

This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…

The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].

Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.

Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.

https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932

Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.

Yes we are. Bitches (a.k.a. my wife) be thirsting for this dad bod.

I like the notion of pulling together people who are alienated by AI (or late-stage capitalism bullshit in general). I really have an indie web project to launch, once I’ve scored a new job, which sounds more unlikely than ever after this read.

Shame noone mentioned Gram. Seems like it really deserves the attention.

I think I’ll take my clues and abandon my attempts to build up a nvim/vim config. All I want is decent modal editing and LSP support without having to descend into plugin hell. Gram might do that for me.

I just don’t think they’re smart enough to make a dent in an actually competitive industry, no matter how much espionage they got.

They may throw some cash around and buy their way into a niche field that actually has a business model, but I don’t see how the espionage potential would help them much. To break into a difficult domain based on that, you would need the smart humans who can tell you what you are looking at.

Maybe it would be possible if you assume competent shady management, that is willing to invest heavily in human capital and systematically violate every privacy policy in the world. I think that’s just not how they operate.

I think we have already seen what direct replacement by AI companies looks like, and it’s not pretty. Want an image for an ad but you’re too cheap for a designer? There’s a chatbot for that. Want to represent yourself in court? There’s a chatbot for that. Slopplications of that sort did capture some demand for services, hardest felt by creatives I believe.

I don’t believe a takeover of that sort can happen in more sophisticated cases. Critical knowledge in SW (speaking from my wheelhouse) isn’t some guarded secret-burger-sauce-recipe kind of knowledge. It’s vast amounts of knowledge, organized and made actionable through effort and built-up skills. It’s not knowledge they would have to replicate, it’s labour. And I don’t think they can privacy-violation their way to replicate a domain-specific knowledge worker from a chat history.

Wow, no upvotes. None of you did, then? Shame, it really holds up well. And you will get my previous comment.

(DM me if you need access.)