Agreed

When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.

Nah, this is the threat as he describes it:

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country

He doesn’t need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark’s access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he’d control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice

He’s not saying that “corporations are a parasitic species we created that will devour our precious planet and ability to survive and turn it into shareholder value for our corpses to enjoy” no sir he’s saying we need to switch to open source replacements for Office 360 and get Right To Repair for our tractors.

It’s not just that he fails a purity test it’s that he basically only cares about his pet issues like right to repair and hating copyright and positions himself as a social activist while twisting real social issues to fit into his framework of ‘copyright bad, hackers fix this.’

This has been getting posted repeatedly on a reddit sub I follow and it’s funny that we’re still finding Harris fans who somehow didn’t catch on for all these years that the dude is just straight up racist and hates Muslims on an individual basis. The fact that he was probably the most commonly mentioned podcaster on the slate star codex sub is a sign!

I’ll steal my general remark from one of the threads on DTG:

Sam, if you’re allowed to call the mayor an Islamist because his wife liked some posts on social media, can we call you a racist for having a notorious racist on your podcast to yammer about the woke menace?

Let’s just ignore the parts of the globe that also got raped and pillaged under colonialism and didn’t turn into moontouching superpowers I guess.

That was when he got a very gentle NYT bio and flipped his lid.

Aella showed up.

in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.

Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.

His substack reads like LW.

feel like the analogy to the drug trade is still pretty relevant given the violence and predation that the black market pretty much inevitably attracts and sustains. Like, maybe you know a guy who has his own grow op or whatever, but cocaine and heroin money is going through the cartels at some point in the chain and they’re going to use some portion of it for bullets that end up in some journalist’s kids or something.

I lost something in my brevity but my point was the question of how practical stopping a practice is. Alcohol is a ruinous force for bad at every level of society from homeless to Hegseth but a ban won’t work because it literally cannot be enforced, we tried, it failed. It’s made by yeast! AI on the other hand is only sustained at great expense by a delicate chain of high tech, high energy systems. It’s a choice.

While I don’t think we should allow slop to invest every forum any more than addicts should be allowed to shoot up on every corner, I think that if shaming makes people less likely to acknowledge that they’re going down a dead-end road and reach out to their communities and support networks for help addressing the root of what drove them to these maladaptive antisolutions in the first place then shaming is making things worse, not better.

The pendulum is so far on the other side that I can’t even entertain the analogy of AI users being poor harried addicts hiding their use. My boss tells me to use more AI every day. I hate it and I want everyone to hate it. The emotion I want people to associate with it is disgust. Disgust is a powerful emotion, and it dehumanizes those it is associated with.

If they understand that AI is like germs I do not care if sometimes people eat food off the floor following the ten second rule. But we aren’t even there yet, people think it’s like gold or mana from heaven or something.

I would once again like to gloat that I called it.

After the first copycat maybe some calls got made /tinfoil

Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it’s not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away

Often-missed point btw.

Reuters?

Kalanick now runs a robotics startup; in his free time, he said recently, he uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT “to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics.

When I read that I assumed they included it for color to make him sound insane.

If tokens ever become expensive people are gonna start using these to code until they get shut down.

I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.

Mood

I feel like there’s a difference between alcohol and drugs, something people can make in their back yard and AI which requires a first world country’s entire economy to be oriented towards it to function… a difference in what we should be required to accept.

I don’t buy the general argument about shame either. We teach children to shit in toilets and not sidewalks. I see rampant AI use as just another form of disgusting public indecency and the faster we bring shame in to remedy it the better.

It seems vaguely AI flavored to me inasmuch as it’s using contrasts too much (it’s not x it’s y) and it’s way too verbose. Also it’s obviously wrong at least in my experience, middle managers aren’t the sparrows, individual contributors (especially juniors) are.

Maybe that’s just a symptom of a person reading too much AI text and thinking a good tweet would make a great substack.