My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

Maybe. But I would counter with that it’s an attitude towards their cynicism. Deep down they know their lies aren’t true, they just consider lying in service of power a natural thing.

As an example, witness one Matthew Miller (the Biden press conference guy) who after smirking his way through lies about how Israel is totally going to investigate itself after the latest atrocity, now has appeared in an interview saying he was just representing the administration, that wasn’t his own view. He knew he was lying in service of at least atrocities (he isn’t ready to admit to it being a genocide), he just considers that natural.

It appears he has stopped smirking, I guess that was his tell that he was lying.

“We’ve set fire to a bunch of money - now you need to give us more” - tech companies “investing” in “AI” to their customers.

I for one has not stopped finding it funny that the 100 billion dollars in profit is their definition of AGI.

I find it a bit interesting that it isn’t more wrong. Has it ingested large tables and got a statistical relationship between certain large factors and certain answers? Or is there something else going on?

Which “Word” do you mean? Is it Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Office) desktop app Word or Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Office) online app Word? Or maybe another program, that is slightly different and also named Word? Maybe Microsoft has put a descriptor on it, perhaps the word “new”, which won’t at all be replaced by another “new” version in a couple of years.

All making it rather hard to search for solutions to problems with these oh so similar, yet when it comes down their problems rather different programs!

Ah well, we change what we can and rant about what we can’t.

Asimov being Asimov, the human consequences of the decline and fall of the galactic empire happens mostly of screen.

How exactly Trantor in a couple of hundred years went from a bustling planetary city to a planet where the last survivors scratch out a living from farming the former imperial grounds, is better left unexplored. If you are living in that world you are much more likely to be among the masses were stuff happens that will eventually be noted by Foundation scholars as “population decline”, than being a Foundation scholar.

“Elsa” does not feature in “The Snow Queen”. The kids in that story are Kai who gets abducted by the Snow Queen and Gerda who rescues him after a long journey which she manages by being good and very, very Christian. It’s also pretty racist, though tame by European 19th century standards. I don’t know who made up Elsa, but I guess they had long signed over their rights to Disney.

As the purpose of the system is what it does, the purpose of copyright is to centralise ownership and control. But then again that is also the purpose of the AI bubble. So they will fight, and the public is likely to lose.

Given the last post, it appears Apple has both an AI hype division and a reality based division. Must be fun for people who has to work with both.

I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don’t usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his “entrepreneurial mindset”, though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways (“Just ask it!”), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 “penicillin-events” in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn’t touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn’t matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn’t leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

I think this is correct.

Nokia managed to push Ericsson out of their dominant position because Nokia were more of a consumer products company, including consumer electronics. But because Nokia did phones as consumer electronics, they didn’t think about them in terms of a platform and had a poor position to compete with smart phones. Their best bet would probably have been to make hardware that ran Android, and at the time I was a bit surprised that they didn’t. Their hardware reputation was stellar.

Elop’s and Microsoft’s actions were still scummy, though from Nokia’s perspective they sold a failing part of their business for billions. Microsoft of course continued to run the phone sales into the ground.

the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it

LLMs famously can’t be consistent, so your fantasy game would have story arcs that doesn’t fit together, brings back characters that are already dead as if nothing happened, and everyone would have a son named Dorian.

Throwing rocks into an increasing pile and after each throw burning offerings to evaluate how much closer we are getting to having a cathedral.

Possibly the worst way of building a cathedral, except it doesn’t really qualify as “building a cathedral”. Some workmen may take the pile of rocks and build an actual cathedral, but that doesn’t mean that the step of throwing rocks was necessary or desirable.

Good point.

Heinlein is a bit tricky because on one hand he clearly has a Point of View, but on the other he tends to reuse material, which includes prodding at earlier systems until they get sufficiently dystopian to demand a strong Individualist Man to step up. Don’t know if he set that up on purpose or if it was a consequence and set up things, or just the need to churn out new books. Sometimes I got the feeling that he tried ideas on for size.

Oh no, the AIs are replacing us!

I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing. Kind of a clash between style and topic there, but hey whatever gets the word out.

I think he means “mass sterilisation of a population” Vs “mass murder of the same population”, which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.

Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

I know you mean sovereign citizens, but reading “sovcit” my first thought goes to Eastmeg One (and my second thought goes to Eastmeg Two, obviously).

Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.

But congratulations on the move!

So now I won’t have to search for places to buy my rocks when Google tells me to eat rocks? Now it can just tell me that Bedrock Gravel and Quarry has all the stones for a balanced diet.

Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was “they are good, none of them will use AI”.

So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn’t want to end up in a group with kids that won’t contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today “contribute” AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.