Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.

I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.

The Academy owes that man an Oscar. He has delivered iconic performances, of many different kinds, but has never received recognition.

This is the perfect time for LLM-based AI. We are already dealing with a significant population that accepts provable lies as facts, doesn’t believe in science. and has no concept of what hypocrisy means. The gross factual errors and invented facts of current AI couldn’t possibly fit in better.

That’s the beauty of modern corporate capitalism. The upper tiers of management are shielded from any responsibility by their subordinates. Their subordinates then have a strong incentive to shift the responsibility elsewhere so it doesn’t fall on them. Paying someone else to take the responsibility does not actually benefit the company, except may be in the short-term, but it does benefit the people who get to make the decisions about it.

And if the service provider really screws up, and loses too many contracts, they either sell out to another company just like themselves, make further profit, and go back to doing what they were doing, or they shut down, form a new company, and go back to what they were doing.

The only people who can be hurt by all of this are the regular employees, who lose their jobs as part of the cycle, and, occasionally, the shareholders, who are never adequately represented by the board. It’s a prefect system where bad decisions only affect those who have no part in them.

“The Cloud” just means “someone else’s sever”. A lot of people who should know better just don’t get that.

It’s entertaining to take almost any internal memo or external press release and substitute “someone else’s server” every time “the cloud” appears. They all suddenly look insane.

Financially ruining the AI industry would be an awesome side-benefit.

Late stage capitalism rewards management for any appearance of change. It really doesn’t matter whether the results of that change are good or bad. And even a CEO who keeps destroying companies can always find a similar position elsewhere. The feedback loop is hopelessly broken.

AI is not universally bad. There are some things it does well. The problem is that there are a lot more things it does badly, often in harmful ways, and most people using it have no idea how to tell the difference.

You seem to be using it the right way, with caution and awareness.

Actual computer scientists should also be included with those groups.

I have tried to charge my Samsung watch on all kinds of Qi devices. They don’t work. The newer Samsung phones can charge them, but only because they have a separate set of coils that support watches.

Actually saying that they want slave labor is considered bad public relations.

I’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.

We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.

AI is already replacing significant parts of the technical workforce. The key is that it doesn’t have to successfully replace them. It just has to convince the sociopaths in the C-suites that they can pretend it will so they can layoff masses of employees. That will allow them to collect obscenely large bonuses, sell their stock at a huge profit, and move on to destroying the next round of businesses. Fortunately, the only people this will hurt are, well, us.

AI is so far from being the main problem with our current US educational system that I’m not sure why we bother to talk about it. Until we can produce students who meet minimum standards for literacy and critical thinking, AI is a sideshow.

That is a good point. I think you’re right that being raised in an entitled environment by a socipathic parent brings out the worst in people. It also selects for the worst child being the one who wins the fight to take over the business.

The ratio of poor to ultra wealthy is far greater than a million to one. Other than that, the only practical reason they have for not doing it is that they still need human labor for most of what they do. That isn’t going to change anytime soon, despite AI. However, they don’t need their labor force to be free or happy, which is why the US is on the cusp of a fascist takeover.

The rule of law has largely stopped mattering to the ultra wealthy. It may occasionally inconvenience them, but they know it will never affect them in any personal way.

Not all of the ultra wealthy are socipaths. Unfortunately, terminal-stage capitalism does a surprisingly good job of selecting for sociopathy at the very top of the hierarchy. Becoming that rich requires both a strong belief that you deserve it and a disregard for how acquiring it harms others.

This is actually a triumph for Musk. SpaceX has figured out how to blow up their rockets without all the cost and time required to prepare for a launch.

One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.

They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.

It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.

It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.