So literally the day after that announcement we’re seeing a nationwide ground stop due to unspecified equipment failures out of Chicago.

Hopefully this won’t end investigations into their sanctions fuckery and you can get a bit more mileage out of that image. Still makes me laugh-so-I-don’t-cry at how shitty and shady everyone in this story is.

This can only go well. How long before we get reports of crashes avoided due to pilot judgement overruling AI guidance from towers? Or just straight-up plane crashes?

This is true, but given how so many other AI boosters have committed hard to being hawkish towards China to justify throwing more money into the AI money hole I think it’s worth using the “treason” angle as a wedge issue. I don’t personally think it’s that big a deal apart from the rank hypocrisy of it, but it feels like a far stronger push against Nvidia and the bubble as a whole than focusing on Jensen’s personal relationships.

I would expect that the bigger problem is going to be the actual movement of chips. They’ll probably to keep the focus on the affair rather than actually interrogating the degree to which sanctions were violated. “Tech CEO is a dick to his family” hasn’t exactly ended the career of anyone else so long as the money keeps moving. But given how much the domestic AI push has used hawkishness about China to justify itself there could be real problems keeping congress at bay if it turns into both an anti-AI CEO issue and an anti-China issue.

I’ve been going down a Weird Little Guys archive binge for a little bit here and this eschatology is even less hinged than the most ridiculous accelerationist nazi terror screed.

Also I can’t imagine the MAGA crowd being excited about their tech minions operating in someone else’s territory. Data sovereignty is all fun and games until some Paraguayan commie starts getting chummy with China or whatever.

I am at least glad that hunting down trans people and burning down any place where people (especially kids) can get gender affirming care is probably not going to be an active priority up and down the various levels and branches of government the way it seemed to be for a while there. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a step in the right direction yet, but it should at least be a temporary halt in most areas.

Hey wait a minute that episode was iconic for being actually good.

But what about the way abnegating our duty to smell piss infringes upon the other guy’s right to piss freely?

Man, Cheesecake no longer sounds like a real word and I’m real hungry now. Clearly the cheesecakes are too powerful and simply thinking about them or talking about them for too long will allow them to tempt even the most stout-hearted to open the fridge.

It’s always vague talk about how they need to rearchitect their workflows to better integrate blah blah blah. There’s never a specific model they want to move to or a specific plan or even a single detail about what this should look like other than “more LLMs!”

I propose the reason for this is that we’ve already seen what this kind of model looks like with Gas Town or whatever he’s calling it now and it’s both blatantly stupid and incredibly expensive so any CTO who honestly tried to move a real company towards that model would laughed out of the room or sued for breach of fiduciary duty.

He was on Weird Little Guys last week too. Seems like a good egg with a good book.

I don’t find myself having nearly as many occasions to make use of them as you do, but I do think that all the misplaced AGI hype makes it hard to evaluate the actually technological advancement that LLMs represent. Like, being able to statistically model language to the degree these things do is neat, and I would be more surprised if it wasn’t possible to use that to do some useful and powerful things. But just like how it’s impossible to separate the underlying math of the cryptocurrency sphere from the ideology of technolibertarian griftocracy, everything that the LLM space has produced is poisoned on some level by millenarian technofascism. Like, the degree to which our economy and culture have been warped by these things is entirely a product of the people who think that they’re going to spit out a God that makes whoever does so first king of the world forever. All the actual useful things people are getting from it are around the edges and happening in spite of the demands to remove guardrails and quality checks and human accountability from these systems. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the underlying mathematics is without value and can’t be part of good and useful systems in the future. Machine Learning as a whole had already demonstrated the value in automated pattern identification and reproduction in a variety of fields from medical diagnostics to pastry sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m strongly in favor of throwing out all this bathwater even if there might be a baby in there somewhere. I just think that “hard to evaluate independently” isn’t necessarily the same thing as “without value in other contexts”.

Christ Almighty just @ me next time. The other element of this dynamic is that non-technical managers or users, who would previously have heard about these vulnerabilities from our IT security group who are equipped with our specific context, are now hearing it from OpenAI’s marketing copy.

Nah, my computer can totally do math on its own. Wanna see?

cos(4)

Bam!

7²

Get mathed on!

4E183

See, your human brain can’t even do math like that.

I imagine they’re running into the same issue that github is, just on a lesser scale.

Generative AI is an extractive and oppressive technology with the goal of faking and replacing human creativity, and because it can’t feel pain, it is used as an industrial drone army stapling together bad systems that we rather should have overcome.

Yeah this is a good one.

You know, it seems like ever since the Heartbleed debacle we can get a rough sense of how complex a vulnerability is by examining how much explanatory text or context on normal system operation is required to explain it to a layman.

“I asked it to make me an admin and it just… did it” might be the literal minimum level of complexity by that standard.

They’re backed into a corner where any number high enough to not be embarrassing for everyone involved is wildly unrealistic and any realistic number is going to be embarrassingly low. Trying to leave blanks so that someone else has to provide the actual numbers is basically the only option that doesn’t involve committing lots of fraud.