FriendOfDeSoto

1. Is this from Xwitter? And if so, why? Nothing on that platform is worthy of our time and attention.

2. Even if it isn’t Xwitter. This could be just a joke. Admittedly, not a good one. But a screenshot may not be enough to banish this father of the year.

I just wanted to point that out because a lot of praise heaped upon them comes from the more zealoty side.

I appreciate their thinking to the point that it means there is an office suite of software available that doesn’t currently contain any “American Intelligence” features.

LibreOffice said that there is currently “no integration” that meets all of its requirements, such as ensuring that the users’ data stays on their device and that there is no reliance on a single AI provider, among other considerations.

As soon as there is a version of it that can be run entirely locally, they are not averse to adding it though. They’re not on team never-AI.

It’s designed to be an Instagram alternative as it was when all you did there was look at pretty pictures. They’ve added stories (so the snapchattisation feature, which you can just turn off) but did the tiktokisation separately. I’m glad they did it this way because I liked Instagram around the time Facebook bought it. Instagram today is a bloated, algorithmic mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. And I don’t need more short form videos in my life.

The headline makes it seem like he exclusively asked Grok about Venezuela. The article makes it clear he asked all sorts of things, things a narcissist would ask.

Personally, I think it’s mad the president consults what I’m renaming “American Intelligence” before acting on the world stage. But we should look at the positive here that 47 did consult with anything before doing something rash. Given the situation with Iran, which he has declared resolved some 30-odd times since he started it and yet it carries on, I was under the impression he was just rolling a die at the White Gold House.

“I used AI to make an overly long and oddly formatted post asking for a programming language that isn’t tainted by AI.”

If I could translate this from communism with Chinese characteristics to English: attaching importance roughly corresponds to lol.

What concern of the Chinese is it what anybody calls this stuff in English? Much less so what official US government documents call it. This is granting Trump a dumb headline that didn’t cost them anything and Xi may have actually got something from 47 during the summit that makes them entertain this bullshit.

This is about timelines. In the short-term it’s a win, in the medium-term it’s a threat, in the long-term it’s potentially catastrophic. They need money now.

This sort of scenario assumes that these companies will always be in a stronger position. I don’t think that’s a given. The companies that plundered all data everywhere, torrented what was available, and reluctantly bought what couldn’t be stolen to train their models are being passed on the right by companies that just look to steal or copy their stuff (e.g. China is inferencing the hell out of them). The hostility towards data centers also forces more development away from centralised servers onto local environments. At the same time, stuff is also being released as open source. I think there is a big chance that the big companies and their models today will be mentioned in the first chapter on the history of this technology but will fall by the wayside rather quickly. Their market position is underpinned by a belief that in the future they will be raking in the dough on subscription fees once they get the dirty work of being started here financed, no matter how. That’s a mighty big bet. Not only is a bubble economy a problem, there is no guarantee to protect their “IP.” It’s really like investing in very expensive tulip bulbs.

Also, we don’t fully understand this technology. A lot of the experts don’t either. Anybody who says they’re pretty sure they know where this road will take us in the next five years has ulterior motives.

That’s a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn’t look sexy enough. Or only when it’s hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.

The numbers 47 and 42 are sacrosanct. The former is Trek where it shows up a lot, the latter is the answer to everything. Pick a different number, ChatGPT!

This sounds similar to Google search results getting worse so you need to make more searches or look at more results pages so they can sell more ads on every extra clicked page.

The difference is this though. Google was doing this shit as market leader by a country mile in a saturated market. These so-called AI fuckers are trying to operate on an open heart while the hospital is still being built. What you are doing as a user is helping them get better. Eventually. At the same time they have financial difficulties. So the aim to be the best Skynet runs into operational hurdles, like not having the money to do what needs doing or their models being caught doing questionable stuff. That includes all the cases where human ignorance or hubris is so blame, like the Hugging Face case. That’s not good PR and the surgeon in my metaphor above is forced to switch gear while the half built hospital is being moved to another location yet again.

To the outside, they need to present themselves as trustworthy companies that do good. Internally, we will learn in time they are a fucking mess of competing interests, of which greed will eventually win over any other concern. If a model is getting worse it’s because the conditions of the surgery have changed again. And they will change again. In the long term, the only way is up. In the much shorter term, development will be much more volatile.

I’m so glad I don’t need to use any of that. Especially for work.

Delightful. Tardy is an excellent musician that just won’t die, will he.

If you listen very closely, you can hear the world’s smallest fiddle being played in the distance.

Which is it?

I don’t dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That’s unnecessary. I already think that.

Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don’t think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn’t thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that’s a counterfactual statement, it’s only an opinion.

Let me say up front that I’m very much in favor of democratic socialism. When I now try to disabuse you of two points in your comment, it’s not for ideological reasons. It’s more of a gut feeling about how politics, and especially politics in the US works.

Mandani works in NYC. A politician like that wouldn’t work in Wisconsin or Louisiana. Probably not even in California. That is not to say people wouldn’t benefit from more left leaning politics in those places. But they wouldn’t get elected into high enough offices in sufficient numbers to drive change. There is the US hangover from the cold war that reflexively makes anything with socialism a turnoff for the poorly educated masses (the irony!). And the power of religious belief, especially monotheistic religions, favors right wing authoritarians. The Midwest is too religious for its own good. NYC is the outlier.

MAGAs don’t vote on track record. It’s vibe based and that vibe is obnoxiously trying to own their opponents. The fact that 47 is ruining the US"s standing in the world, the economy, and all unwritten political norms that had underpinned the republic are not as important as fucking with the libs. 47 may be at the end of his political career, somebody is going to take over and continue on this path. You can’t fight feelings with facts. And you can’t drive change without getting enough socialists into office everywhere.

yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :)

That’s because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no “wilderness to conquer.” That’s what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that’s because it’s already there. They wouldn’t build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn’t exactly in good shape.

I agree with you. I still think somebody is going to do something with the compute capacity that hasn’t burned up in cycles to train models to create Yoda with a six-fingered hand. And somebody will find something worth doing with these models. It probably won’t be search, or writing, or making graphics for your PowerPoint. But I think video creation, be it for Hollywood or video games, will be here to stay and be potentially profitable. There will be a use in coding although probably no profit. I’m still hoping for good uses in medicine and pharmacology as well. And as aids to people with disabilities there are probably very good use cases as well. And they are the richest people on this planet so there is a Ferengi level of profit there. /s, of course.

The digitization of books will be useful as well.

In the end, the ROI for so-called AI will be inked in red. And the US will enter a recession, which will give us MAGA 3.0. So invasion of Greenland ca. 2034?

A thing that gets overlooked often is that being the first in a field is often quite bad for business. Apple learned that lesson. They didn’t make the first smartphone, tablet, or mp3 player. They waited for other people to be first and then iterated well on that.

The people who financed laying the train tracks that became the economic arteries of North America (along with robbing more land and pushing out the people who already lived there) didn’t become rich. The second generation that ran logistics and passengers was way more likely to become rich. They didn’t have to pay for the infrastructure but they benefited from it being there.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the son of the South African emerald miners, Google, etc. They’re just laying tracks right now. The conglomerates that don’t rely only on so-called AI have a chance to survive. All the other ones are going to run out of money and/or get bought and taken over. The real winner of the industry probably hasn’t even made it to the starting line.

Training models takes a big investment and then becomes difficult to protect against people who will just try to copy and steal it. In a way, I think world history will look at the US as the first generation track layers. You built the data centers at ridiculous cost, both in hardware and negative consequences for people and the environment, and then get out-iterated by all the people who didn’t want to jump on to the hype train three years ago or couldn’t foot the bill at the time. The cost decreases the longer you wait. US companies think they are investing into future long-tern licensing agreements to use their yet unknown products. I think that’s dumb and isn’t going to happen.

I think Apple will benefit from their lean back and wait approach. They will look at where this stuff consolidates into something useful and then just buy it.

Edit: Forgot this point: most of the train tracks have become redundant in the age of airplanes. The infrastructure is decaying. Data centers may become overgrown train tracks faster than we expect.

Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.