Given the amount of power some folks want to invest in them it may not be totally absurd to raise the spectre of Azathoth, the blind idiot God. A shapeless congeries of matrices and tables sending forth roiling tendrils of linear algebra to vomit forth things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not. Hell, the people who seem most inclined to delve deeply into their forbidden depths are as likely as not to go mad and be unable to share their discoveries if indeed they retain speech at all. And of course most of them are deeply racist.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t entirely get it either until someone pointed me at a relevant xkcd that I had missed.

Also I was somewhat disappointed in the QAA team’s credulity towards the AI hype, but their latest episode was an interview with the writer of that “AGI as conspiracy theory” piece from last(?) week and seemed much more grounded.

It’s a losing proposition either way, right? Without investor money OpenAI (and friends) can’t keep buying chips from Nvidia, but SoftBank doesn’t have money to keep giving OpenAI without selling off their stake in Nvidia. Yes, it’s incredibly dumb to ditch their share of the only parts of this that are actually making money, but if they don’t keep the cash flowing them nobody is going to be making money. Like, greatly oversimplifying here, obviously, but it seems like SoftBank loses either way.

It’s almost like this whole bubble is really bad actually.

New from tech Goliath Apple Inc: the iSling. Clearly this will work out exactly as expected and has no unfortunate precedents.

It’s worth noting how much the whole “agentic” marketing scheme is the opposite of this reality, too. Because after all the dream they’re selling is being able to do the Star Trek thing and just tell your computer to do it in plain English. But if that was what these companies were actually doing it would be very easy to migrate away if you wanted to, since you could just say “send me all our data in a format that $Competitor can easily onboard. I’m done with this shit” and then give the competitor’s system the same plain English prompt. The reality is that they don’t actually want to build the thing they’re as advertising even if they could because their whole business model is to make interacting with the computer as high-friction as possible so you’ll pay them to do it for you.

New site looks good! I think Let’sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I’ve been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn’t actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it’s probably a good idea?

Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.

I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: “credentialism” so I understand the way they’re trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify we’re still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we don’t need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesn’t create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for “how racist were the old times” commentary is better.

I would assume nothing stops them but I would love to get an analysis of why they may not be looking into this from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Best I can come up with from a complete layman’s perspective is that they’re concerned about the valuation they’d end up with. Not sure if the retail market had enough juice to actually pay for a company that is hypothetically one of the most valuable companies in the world, and puncturing that narrative might bring the whole bubble down (in a way that costs a lot of normal investors their shirts, of course).

Between this and the IPO talk it seems like we’re looking at some combination of trying to feel out exit strategies for the bubble they’ve created, trying to say whatever stuff keeps the “OpenAI is really big” narrative in the headlines, and good old fashioned business idiocy.

I feel like the private leaderboards are also more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. You can’t really have a friendly competition with a legion of complete strangers that you have no interaction with outside of comparing final times. Even when there’s nothing on the line the consequences for cheating or being a dick are nonexistent, whereas in a a private group you have to deal with all your friends knowing you’re an asshole going forward.

As usual the libertarians are saying “democratize” when they mean “commodify”.

Yeah, after establishing a deeply tortured chess metaphor and beating it to death and beyond, Yud proceeds to just straight-up bitching about how nobody is taking his book seriously. It just fucking keeps going even as it dips into the most pathetic and hateful eugenics part of their whole ideology because of course it does.

Casio and their target market are my kind of nerds. Taking a silly idea and an iconic design and pushing the engineering to its limits entirely for the bit is absolutely unhinged and I’m so happy they did it.

That is my thought as well. It’s like the “you call everyone you disagree with a Nazi” argument from the 90s and 00s - discrediting attempts to call out fascist and genocidal ideas creates a lot of cover for those ideas to spread without being appropriately checked. It helps create a situation where serious and respectable people can keep arguing that things aren’t that bad all the way until they get pushed onto a cattle car.

So the tl;dr review of grokipedia is literally “big if true.”

Amazon unveils AI-Powered AR glasses for delivery drivers.

The response I’ve seen from actual drivers has been somewhere between “eh? I guess?” and “fuck you, pay me”.

Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that “crime is now legal”? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.

Ave! True to Flexor Digitorum!

I guess we’re moving into the “take advantage of the mentally unwell” stage of trying to figure out a way to make money off this shit, also known as the Gacha Gambit.

Bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it pays off. (It pays off in human misery)

Count me as excited to see where this goes. Absolutely fascinating to see this guy dredged from the abyss of history and see how cleanly it rhymes with modern horrible. And to see that the inability of bigots to write a goddamn joke isn’t a recent loss.

Also the intro and outro compilations were beautiful. Very well done.