You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

I can’t decide if it’s fitting or ironic that this group of men who spends collectively one week a year in spaces they don’t either literally own or otherwise totally control has such a hard time understanding concerns the rest of us have about privacy.

I should probably be grateful that this sent me down the road of learning about pet trusts, the actual legal vehicle for leaving large sums of money to an animal. But that’s less because it’s relevant to the point here and more because I’m a fucking nerd. Notably the money is controlled by a trustee who is empowered to pay for the animal’s food, healthcare, etc. I imagine that an enterprising trustee in the most famous cases could make some very compelling arguments about the necessity of maintaining, say, a big house for the cat to roam around in that they and their family would coincidentally live in as well, but I don’t care enough to look into it in-depth. If the animal dies before the trust runs out of money, then the remainder is distributed according to either the trust instructions or applicable state laws (in the US, at least). Of course the cases of people putting millions into pet trusts are usually less about the pet trust and more about spiting the other presumptive heirs, a sort of disinterestance with a more spiteful edge.

To the actual argument here, however, all I can say is that nobody without a large estate has ever made the allegedly absurd decision to dedicate their estate to the care and keeping of their pets. Every single case where that has happened has been because of a member of the supposedly-enlightened moneyed classes being fucking weird and having too much money.

I remember having a lot of fun with Roborosewater where they could generate something that matched the format of a Magic: the Gathering card perfectly and sometimes even something playable within the rules but it was always nonsensical in some ridiculous way. There’s a couple streams from the LoadingReadyRun gang drafting a cube from the resulting chaos that are a hoot.

Ed: Here’s a sampling in video form because I can’t find a “best of” article and they get into the “analysis” a bit.

If you look at literally page 1 you’ll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I’m going to go weep tears of impotent rage.

Ed: sorry, it’s page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.

By forcing the question of whether to act before debating how, the signatories appear to be clearing ground for legislative and regulatory work that has not yet arrived.

So it’s a pointless attempt to send up a “take me seriously” flare?

Also I think this discourse as always misses the distinction between economic displacement caused by AI and economic displacement justified by AI. Hiring managers seem to be anticipating AI capabilities that do not exist yet, and the disruption to labor is well beyond what the current AI systems are actually able to replace. I think instead we’re seeing a combination of business rubes buying the hype and the consequences of bad incentives that make headcount reduction look really good on quarterly financials while in a lot of areas not having an immediate negative impact on capabilities or production. Especially when it comes to IT infrastructure, for example, the fact that you’re not paying someone goes immediately on the financial statements, but the fact that your infrastructure is less reliable and crashes more often has a huge experiential impact on your customers and employees but it takes time for that to cash out into something that impacts the numbers.

Honestly If we want to use the hallucinatron the same way we use hallucinogens (minus the “transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm” part) I have no real problem with that. Scrambling and remixing the contents of the world in ways that might prompt actual minds to create new connections and interesting art seems to fit.

I don’t think there’s enough of a market for that to support scaling to any meaningful degree and so have less problems from an enabling/infrastructure perspective. I mean the chemical alternatives let you transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm. AI can’t do that.

This is an important point. If we treat Scott in particular as though he’s speaking in good faith then his arguments are nonsensical. This is not because he’s a fool but because he isn’t speaking in good faith, and his actual worldview appears to be much more amenable to outright fascism and actual totalitarianism than he would suggest here.

My town’s pride event was this weekend. Regrettably the heat and social anxiety in my family won out over heading down there but even so please know that I did remember this exchange. You are still seen and recognized and valid, at least in whatever small ways a stranger on Lemmy can offer.

Stay safe out there.

On one hand I agree that in a lot of ways our current tech surveillance regime looks like the kind of orwellian nightmare that people are raising red flags about. I’m admittedly less terrified by this than I am frustrated at how quickly and easily these systems get assembled when it comes to protecting shareholders from potentially unfavorable market conditions like “people using the software they purchased and installed on their computer in a way we didn’t expect”. Like, the US can’t get it’s shit together to do basically anything about domestic terrorism to the point where elementary schools are having domestic terror drills in order to feel like they’re doing literally anything to acknowledge the problem, but God forbid OpenAI has to acknowledge their product’s risk of aiding those terrorists when they’re trying to get their IPO off the ground.

But also I think Scott is hilariously uninformed about how in-depth the kind of monitoring systems would need to be in order to function trans nationally and not be subject to individual jurisdiction (because otherwise the only one with authority to go after the secret illegal chinese AI bunker project would be China and that’s a non-starter. As I said in the OP I think this combined with the level of transparency that they’re discussing would basically amount to opening up all the books and internal communications directly to your competitors whether on a corporate or national level, which makes it a non-starter.

I’m not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there’s a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them.

I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I’m concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren’t suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.

Property rights

Wait not like that.

You’d think that a group of people this long-winded and pedantic would understand that the most seemingly simple rules are the squirreliest in practice

I can’t think of any catastrophic global upheavals in or shortly after that era that might have given people reason to rethink the ideas that were in vogue at the time.

Nope.

I’m sorry you had to find out this way

Counterpoint, why are these LLM bros still on human social media rather than just asking their chatbots to simulate a forum full of people who disagree with them just enough to be interesting but not so much that they actually risk changing their mind.

I have so many questions about this man and while I don’t actually want answers I would rather get them by choice than wait until his corner of the cultic milieu comes bursting into general relevancy like the Kool-Aid Man.

I doubt that this is how it was originally intended but think about all the boosters pointing at an empty suit while saying shit like “you’re being laid off and this is your replacement,” or “I know you’ve been lonely so I set you up on a blind date with this guy,” or even “this is what’s going to solve climate change.” And then imagine looking around and seeing friends, family, the broader media, and government and business leaders listening to them while smiling and nodding.

I for one would find breaking all of Bitcoin to be quite useful. Once again the conservative comedy-heavy portfolio pays off for the laughing investor!

For anyone else who was curious about the religious context, Luke 15 is about how much God loves repentance, featuring most famously the parable of the Prodigal Son.

On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if there’s any accuracy at all I’m going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.

Like, I don’t think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying “please note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about”.