Just as if has always been.

I fully agree, but as data availability is one of the primary limits that hyperscaling is running up against I can see the true believers looking for additional sources, particularly sources that aren’t available to their competitors. Getting a new device in people’s pockets with a microphone and an internet link would be one such advantage, and (assuming you believe the hyperscaling bullshit) would let OpenAI rebuild some kind of moat to keep themselves ahead of the competition.

I don’t know, though. Especially after the failure of at least 2 extant versions of the AI companion product I just can’t imagine anyone honestly believing there’s enough of a market for this to justify even the most ludicrously optimistic estimate of the cost of bringing it to market. It’s either a data thing or a straight-up con to try and retake the front page for another few news cycles. Even the AI bros can’t be dumb enough for it to be a legit effort.

Can’t wait to see how this overlaps with the other story that keeps on rolling (like a burning cybertruck doing 50 through a school zone) out of the UK. You won’t even need to bother designing wildly non-representative surveys of the parents of trans kids anymore. Imagine the efficiency!

Part of me wonders if this is even supposed to be a profitable hardware product or if they’re sufficiently hard-up for training data that “put always-on microphones in as many pockets as possible” seems like a good strategy.

It’s not, both because it’s kinda evil and because it’s definitely stupid, but I can see it being used to solve the data problem more quickly than I can see anyone think this is actually a good or useful product to create.

Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.

Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.

I mean you’d think if the tools lived up to the hype they’d be able to advertise themselves more effectively.

It also means you can update your priors about your own biases predictive instincts being good, allowing you to be more confident in literally everything you’ve ever believed or thought about for half a second. Superpredictors unite!

Reject Terminator; Embrace WarGames.

I cannot describe how deeply gratifying this was to read. The unemployment is real.

I think it comes down to a deflection of the inherent cruelty of the system. Part of the structure of capitalism is that some people are going to suffer unjustly because your ability to get the resources you need to survive is gated behind your ability to either hold capital or provide value to capitalists. You don’t have to look far to find examples of people who are either physically unable to do so or who find that their proverbial cheese has been moved by economic forces beyond their control or understanding, and now the terms of their economic and social existence are wildly different and less favorable.

By comparison, evolution by natural selection relies on having more children than the environment can support and having a significant number of those children die before they can reproduce. This also creates a lot of suffering, but since it’s a natural process rather than a social construct it’s impossible to call any part of it out for cruelty. There is no exploiter, and so there can be no exploitation. We can feel bad for the slowest gazelle but we don’t morally condemn the lion because the suffering it creates is part of the natural world.

Of course, free market capitalism is not a natural process, there are things that we could do to mitigate or eliminate the suffering it creates, and trying to prevent that from happening is morally reprehensible. This is particularly true if you’re in a relatively privileged position like, say, a finance capitalist in a major startup hub or working in an industry that for various reasons has been given a significantly better deal than most working people. At that point you’re either doing the exploiting or siding with the exploiters and actively perpetuating unnecessary suffering. But if that suffering was natural then it wouldn’t be unnecessary and you wouldn’t be doing anything inarguably wrong.

It’s just Jordan Peterson and his goddamn lobsters again.

It honestly reminds me of the stories you’d hear from like the 60s and 70s of people cult-hopping because the specifics of the ideology or the religion didn’t matter as much as the sense of believing in something. Notably a fair number of those people ended up in evangelical churches and, presumably, maga.

I mean I guess you can argue that straight up murder has a certain honesty to it? At the same time that is mainly good because it makes it harder to justify what’s happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how that’s working out in the current political climate.

We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked.

Truly AI technology is enabling new frontiers… in abusive work environments.

Heartbreaking:Saltman was funny

As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldn’t have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didn’t like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.

You know, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” argument being implicitly extended to cover second-generation immigrants should if taken seriously, imply that these people aren’t actually obligated to follow US law, which presumably includes immigration law. You know, if you go by a text-first originalist interpretation of the constitution and the law.

I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.

So the guys who have been burning almost as much VC money as they have water and electricity in the name of building AGI have announced that they’re totally gonna do it this time? Just a few more training runs man I swear this time we’re totally gonna turn everyone into paperclips just let me have a few more runs.

Not gonna lie, “enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce” isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the government to be into, but I guess I’m not mad about it?

I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.