Counter-theory: The now completely irrelevant search results and the idiotic summaries, are a one-two punch combo, that plunges the user in despair, and makes them close the browser out of disgust.

Subjectively speaking:

1. Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
2. They were more directly lifted from human written sources, I vaguely remember lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by newspapers over google infoboxes and copyright infringement in pre-2019 days, but i couldn’t find anything very conclusive with a quick search.
3. They didn’t have the sycophantic—hey look at me I’m a genius—overly-(and wrong)-detailed tone that the current batch has.

This is obviously a math olympiad gold medal performance, Fields medal worthy even!

It can’t be that stupid, you haven’t read the sequences hard enough.

I mean if you want to be exceedingly generous (I sadly have my moments), this is actually remarkably close to the “intentional acts” and “shit happens” distinction, in a perverse Rationalist way. ^^

But code that doesn’t crash isn’t necessarily code that works. And even for code made by humans, we sometimes do find out the hard way, and it can sometimes impact an arbitrarily large number of people.

Did you read any of what I wrote? I didn’t say that human interactions can’t be transactional, I quite clearly—at least I think—said that LLMs are not even transactional.

EDIT:

To clarify I and maybe put it in terms which are closer to your interpretation.

With humans: Indeed you should not have unrealistic expectations of workers in the service industry, but you should still treat them with human decency and respect. They are not their to fit your needs, they have their own self which matters. They are more than meets the eye.

With AI: While you should also not have unrealistic expectations of chatbots (which i would recommend avoiding using altogether really), it’s where humans are more than meets the eye, chatbots are less. Inasmuch as you still choose to use them, by all means remain polite—for your own sake, rather than for the bot—There’s nothing below the surface,

I don’t personally believe that taking an overly transactional view of human interactions to be desirable or healthy, I think it’s more useful to frame it as respecting other people’s boundaries and recognizing when you might be a nuisance. (Or when to be a nuisance when there is enough at stake). Indeed, i think—not that this appears to the case for you—that being overly transactional could lead you to believe that affection can be bought, or that you can be owed affection.

And I especially don’t think it healthy to essentially be saying: “have the same expectations of chatbots and service workers”.

TLDR:

You should avoid catching feelings for service workers because they have their own world and wants, and it is being a nuisance to bring unsolicited advances, it’s not just about protecting yourself, it’s also about protecting them.

You should never catch feelings for a chatbot, because they don’t have their own world or wants, it is cutting yourself from humanity to project feelings onto it, it is mostly about protecting yourself, although I would also argue society (by staying healthy).

Don’t besmirch the oldest profession by making it akin to souless vacuum. It’s not even a transaction! The AI gains nothing and gives nothing. It’s alienation in it’s purest form—no wonder the rent-seekers love it—It’s the ugliest and least faithful mirror.

✨The Vibe✨ is indeed getting increasingly depressing at work.

It’s also killing my parents’ freelance translation business, there is still money in live interpreting, and prestige stuff or highly technical accuracy very obviously matters stuff, but a lot of stuff is drying up.

A glorious snippet:

The movement connected to attracted the attention of the founder culture of Silicon Valley and leading to many shared cultural shibboleths and obsessions, especially optimism about the ability of intelligent capitalists and technocrats to create widespread prosperity.

At first I was confused at what kind of moron would try using shibboleth positively, but it turns it’s just terribly misquoting a citation:

Rationalist culture — and its cultural shibboleths and obsessions — became inextricably intertwined with the founder culture of Silicon Valley as a whole, with its faith in intelligent creators who could figure out the tech, mental and physical alike, that could get us out of the mess of being human.

Also lol at insiting on “exonym” as descriptor for TESCREAL, removing Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres and the clear intention of criticism from the term, it doesn’t really even make sense to use the acronym unless you’re doing critical analasis of the movement(s). (Also removing mentions of the espcially strong overalap between EA and rationalists.)

It’s a bit of a hack job at making the page more biased, with a very thin verneer of still using the sources.

Ah but not everyone’s taste is the same, therefore the best conceible plate of nachos is made worse by existing, because it can then be confronted to people’s preferences instead of staying in the platonic realm!

Special bootlicking points:

Source: xcancel.com

@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog

@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.

For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg

Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:

Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again

Why the bash hate?

Oh no! I wasted my time on Troll. Typical.

Hard disagree, as much as I loathe JK Rowling’s politcal ideas, and the at-times unecessary cruelty found in the HP novels, it still shaped a large part of the imaginary world of a generation. As beautiful as bird songs are (who the hell refers to birdsong as “output”), this simply cannot be compared.

Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical “art” is already an insult to life and creativity, but a fully-or-mostly automated slop machine is an infinitely worse one.

Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through, people still made choice, even subjected to crazy uninispired didacts from above, the hands that fashion books, movies, music, video-games, tv-shows still have—must have—room to bring a given vision together.

I think people DO care.

I don’t know exactly what you wanted to say, if you wanted to express despair, cynisism, nihilishm or something else, but I would encourage you not to give up hope with humanity, people aren’t that stupid, people aren’t that void of meaning.

The standout monuments of stupidity—and/or monstrosity—in McCarthy’s response for me are.

• Calling JW a failed computer scientist for failing to see that computers and clockwork are different, when really there is no computation a computer can make that Turing Complete clockwork couldn’t be able to replicate.
• Essentially saying that by analogy, where religion should not stand in the way of science, so should morals not stand in the way of science?!?!?! (I mean really? WTF)

Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.

I think beyond “Keeping up appearances” it’s also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.

Seriously though, I can i trust dotnet ever again?

Infinite-garbage-maze does seem more appealing than “proof-of-work” (the crypto parentage is yuckish enough ^^) as a countermeasure, though I would understand if some would not feel confortable with direct sabotage—say for example a UN organization.

I feel the C-SUITE executives are pushing the AI way harder than they ever pushed crypto though, since they never understood the tech beyond a speculative asset, but the idea of replacing work-hours by AI-automation has been sold HARD to them.