A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife

B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.

Possibly OT, but fits in with the “finance ruins everything” motif we’ve got going here:

My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this

The continuing presence of stories like this is making me reevaluate my assessment that GenAI will never be good enough to replace creatives, not by estimating that the tech will be better but by adjusting down the level of competency that is apparently permissible. Like, anyone in a vaguely creative sphere who wants to start phoning shit in as aggressively as possible should probably do it if they aren’t already.

That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.

I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).

I mean he accurately predicted the kind of dystopian shit Peter Thiel would do with a morally indefensible amount of money, so that’s something.

That’s a whole lotta words to say “I’m a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.”

Not gonna lie, if Rian Johnson ends up being in that milieu I’ll be absolutely heartbroken.

I mean I don’t doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I’ve got a lot of love for Rian Johnson’s work and don’t have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it’s artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn’t stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don’t have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, but it’s still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it’s not just that AI art is bad - we’ve seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it’s replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don’t think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you’re paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn’t have created the torment nexus, you’re still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.

Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?

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.