Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”

So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

Emphasis added.

Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Haven’t listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.

Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mike’s others (You’re Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.

I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.

I don’t have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from “Wait… oh my God you weren’t already doing that???”

But it’s such a huge pull back to go from “hating AI is ableist and basically Hilter” to “uhhhh guys we’ve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most we’ll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.” Clearly there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.

This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there’s a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn’t confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I’m a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn’t have to “win” in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn’t a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.

Between that and his Elden Ring build I think games were one of the earliest identified fields where Elon is actively dumb. Later extended to automotive design and literally everything.

I mean based on podcast volume it would have to end up going there unless one or both of them ended up murdered in the process.

Yeah. Microsoft is actually kind of the victim here, since they’re investing both financially and materially in LLM hardware (and giving Altman and friends a massive discount on Azure resources) when the demand is really not materializing. Facebook went all-in in the metaverse and was eventually chastened for it as much as an organization that size ever can be. Microsoft is doing the same with OpenAI, though with far more capital expended.

So if I follow, basically everyone involved has been banking on users getting confused about what the “legit” version of WordPress is, with known transphobic asshole photomatt being particularly egregious with WordPress.com vs wordpress.org, and then known transphobic asshole photomatt remembered that he also had some more direct influence in WordPress.org that he could use to smite his enemies. Is that about right or am I missing some steps?

Hat tip also to the guy who tried to spin “oil is a commodity” as though there’s the same demand and economies of scale for chatbots as for liquid dinosaurs.

Given the proliferation of libertarians in SV, Ed probably wouldn’t even need to change the “A-minor” line is all I’m saying.

I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).

So to throw my totally-amateur two cents in, it seems like it’s definitely part of the discussion in actual AI circles based on the for-public-consumption reading and viewing I’ve done over the years, though I’ve never heard it mentioned by name. I think a bigger part of the explanation has less to do with human cognition (it’s probably fallacious to assume that AI of any method effectively reproduces those processes) and more to do with the more abstract cognitive tests and games being much more formally defined. Our perception and model of a game of Chess or Go may not be complete enough to solve the game, but it is bounded by the explicitly-defined rules of the game. If your opponent tries to work outside of those bounds by, say, flipping the board over and storming off, the game itself can treat that as a simple forfeit-by-cheating. But our understanding of the real world is not similarly bounded. Things that were thought to be impossible happen with impressive frequency, and our brain is clearly able to handle this somehow. That lack of boundedness requires different capabilities than just being able to operate within expected parameters like existing English GenAI or image generators, I suspect relating to handling uncertainty or lacking information. The assumption that what AI is doing is a mirror to the living mind is wholly unproven.

To be fair, Luckey Palmer is an objectively funnier name.

Yet another word for the good ol’ rank-and-yank. Great way to instantly make number go up by suddenly laying off 10-20% of your employees. The trick is making sure you’ve moved on to another department or another company before the predictable consequences take hold.

Uber ran at a loss to undercut the competition (traditional taxis) and passed the costs of that onto the drivers. Then once people were onboard they increased prices while hanging the drivers out to dry, to the point where ultimately the consumer pays as much as they did for a normal taxi but there’s some ease-of-use improvements from the app, a hell of a lot of money ending up in silicon valley instead of local taxi companies, and an ever-growing mass of human suffering as the gig economy erodes the ability of the working class to find economic security.

Just one more teraflop, bro.

No, that’s stuff belonging to the tenth doctor. You’re thinking of ten ents.

Like, there is definitely racism in the hiring process and how writing is judged, but it comes from the fact that white people and white people alone don’t have to code switch in order to be taken seriously. The problem isn’t that bad writers are discriminated against it’s that nonwhite people have to turn on their “white voice” in order to be recognized as good writers. Giving everyone a white robot that can functionally take their place doesn’t actually make nonwhite people any more accepted. It’s the same old bullshit about how anonymity means 4chan can’t be racist.

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the value of even the most sneer-worthy technologies as accessibility tools, but that has to come with an acknowledgement of the limitations of those tools and is anathema to the rot economy trying to sell them as a panacea to any problem.

I’m still partial to “spicy autocomplete” as a good analogy for how these systems actually work that people have more direct experience with. Take those Facebook posts that give you the first few words and say “what does autocomplete say your most used words are?” and make answering the question use as much electricity as a small city.

But not in the cool way that the people selling them say they endanger the survival of life on this planet, just in the boring climate catastrophe ways that people have been trying to get taken seriously since the fucking 70s.