no, I meant the fiber damage looks like it was done by an animal… just like JFK’s head looked like it just did that spontaneously…

a surprisingly common defense of GenAI is that “so what if it’s stupid, people are stupid too”

I have to assume that people who assert this “defense” will be incapable of designing tools that don’t insult the user

plausible deniability… sounds like we’re dealing with real professionals here

Let’s see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:

@solgato000 7 months ago

@AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to it’s USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop it’s own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.

Moreover, I think we agree that the EA funders will continue to pursue astroturfing places like Twitter and Substack well past the point that provides any effective entry into the mainstream public dialogue. Your point about the prediction market hype, and the gambling bubble more generally, indicates a likely catalyst of that collapse.

If focus is worth 30 IQ points, just imagine how many fewer IQ points you need to dedicate to the Diablo-Dusted Crispy Chicken Nuggets Combo, available for a limited time only at your local Taco Bell! #ad #promoted

if her patrons figure out that there is not much audience for technocratic centrism in the USA in 2026, she may be in trouble.

I think Piper and Casey Newton are part of a class of media professionals, now in mature phases of their careers, who built those careers around posting online and assume that format will necessarily continue to be the core of their work going forward. It’s not just the EA/rationalist factor, although that certainly doesn’t help; it’s the idea of building outward from the Twitter hot-take and resulting discussion. A Substack post like the one we’re examining is a superset of tweets, the tweets are not a distillation of longer-form writing. (And also, of course, Substack itself is an attempt to cram simple blogging into a financialized walled garden, but that’s a separate issue.) People aren’t just disengaging from the 2010s formats of social media, they’re getting sick of that entire way of thinking. So these people who have bounced around from one fragile Web outlet to another, all the while clinging to their Twitter audience to drive their careers, are at substantial risk no matter what they believe. I don’t doubt that their financial backers will keep throwing good money after bad, though, even if they do cut loose a few of the line workers. After all, Scientology still manages to cling to prime real estate in this day and age.

I’d also put people like Jamelle Bouie in this class, but Jamelle a) writes for the New York Times, for better or worse and b) consciously considers himself as part of a broader, enduring historical dialogue and struggle, not someone standing on a capstone or culmination of historical progress who can safely ignore history, as Piper presents herself here.

The plan that starts with a filesystem and ends with an O’Neill cylinder.

(insert Katt Williams joke along the lines of “the fetishes get weirder every two weeks!”)

I’ll have you know there’s lots of important WoW lore in the novels!!!

it’s what they do instead of prayer

If it’s “agentic,” doesn’t that imply it smokes weed for you

Or amalgamating with them. Robinhood has been partnered with Kalshi since last year, and they’re trying to gin up some kind of “standardized” prediction market contract format, a la CBOE’s standards for futures and options.

Intentionally switching to a more trivial scale, while remaining purposefully vague and imprecise, is such a fascinating bafflegab tactic. It’s a giant waving red flag that Altman is bullshitting, but many people (especially in the press!) still take it as profound.

Now that we’ve got the concept of recursive per-seat licensing established, allow me to invite you to contemplate the possibility of the “licensing macro”

Do you get a refund when an “agent” inevitably blows out its context window and starts emitting deranged output, or does that automatically get rolled over into starting up the next “agent”

How sad that Altman’s shell corporation’s property insurance has to pay for this guy’s tedious status anxiety

I’m not quite so pessimistic. It’s important to remember that the actual practical purpose of the extant corporate social media* is to convey targeted advertising; i.e. an optimization (possibly the last optimization) on American management of global supply chains. Those supply chains were already starting to be optimized past their breaking point: flooded with dissatisfactory junk, easily spoofed by low-quality sellers, on top of broader externalities besides. And now, they have now been blasted into fine dust by a failed presidency partially funded by the social media and online advertising barons. It may yet be something of a self-correcting problem, albeit having done substantial damage in the meantime.

*Twitter is now a fully dedicated advertising campaign for Elon Musk’s program of white supremacy, with financial returns no object. It’s not quite going according to plan. By this time next decade, the Twitter microblogging permutation of the tech may be thoroughly killed, and if not it’ll be disgustingly cringe. Who do you think you are posting like that, Baby Trump?!?!

I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that short-form social media in general (Twitter and imitators, Instagram, TikTok) is essentially a failed set of media. But I’ll concede that’s like cramming a Zyn pouch in my mouth while making fun of a guy chain-smoking Marlboros.

I assign a relatively low probability, non-zero but not much more than 5%, maybe a solid 5.5%, that Yud goes even beyond that and implies that he is the 12th imam emerging from occultation

I see what you’re saying, but I think that’s a bit much to expect from a relatively mainstream and (I hate to say it, but it applies) bourgeois publication like the New Yorker. Their editorial line allows them to raise controversy in one dimension (in this case, the particulars of Sam Altman’s character) but not multiple dimensions simultaneously (hey, this guy sucks AND his tech sucks AND you’re gonna lose money). And there’s a lag-time factor, too; seems like Farrow and Marantz were working on this story for at least the latter half of last year. By the time some of the dubious economics such as the bad data-center deals and rampant circular financing were clear, this piece probably would’ve been deep into fact-checking and unlikely to change much in substance.

We here are on the leading edge of this stuff, not that that’s any great advantage! I wouldn’t expect an outlet like New Yorker to be publishing anything like “the dashed expectations of AI” until maybe this time next year. And even then, it might still have a personalist bent.