If you’re like most developers, cognitive dissonance? https://www.gitclear.com/coding_on_copilot_data_shows_ais_downward_pressure_on_code_quality>

My favorite are the gigantic companies falling all over themselves to buy this for their workforces before it’s even clear what value a bot that can’t reliably do arithmetic is going to add to Excel

Eh, there are limits. Utah has a pile of petty claims against the federal government including delusionally contesting ownership of federal lands. There’s a difference between having a narrow policy limiting the degree of law enforcement cooperation on one or two matters, and Utah passing a law that says “if we disagree with the feds on literally anything we can refuse to cooperate with them any time we feel like.” One is a matter of policy and discretion, the other actively flaunts federal supremacy. Utah doesn’t just get to decide it owns the national parks inside its state borders and order its employees to treat National Parks Service workers as trespassers, but it sure seems like this law is carefully crafted to create situations like that.

This is also hot on the heels of Utah also passing another bill that flaunts federal policy as regards separation of church and state. They really want to pretend they never joined the Union or like there’s never been a conflict between states and the federal government before and like this is somehow new territory.

Like the lawyer in the article said, this is what we’d call a whacko interpretation of how the Supremacy Clause works and is likely meant to appeal to the voters more than anything else.

Since most industries treat their awards ceremonies as no more respectable than industry galas + appointing lists of insider-approved “most notable content” awards, I treat them that way! IE I got back into sci fi this year after a hiatus of many years. I looked over the Hugos from the last ten years to find some interesting titles to get me started. While I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest by any of them, I could also tell there’s no way these were actually the best of the best sci-fi from the last 10 years.

And, you know, if the people throwing the gala are smart, they’ll understand it as an advertising event for the whole industry, so the dog and pony show counts, unfortunately. They can, and many do, shit out lists of recent notable titles put together by editors for advertising purposes, but who checks those? Who cares? But holding an award ceremony with judges, that’s something you can get media coverage of. There are pictures to take, controversies to be had, etc. The more unique and interesting it is, and the more credible the dog and pony show, the more excited people get about it.

You can’t sustain that angle of an awards ceremony if it’s obviously just wheeling and dealing. But since it’s all just wheeling and dealing these days, what can you do but throw out the baby with the bathwater? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

It’s amazing how often people are told, en masse, to like something or give it credence simply because it’s being marketed as something that they should like or trust, and they just sort of go along with it. Of course, if it didn’t work, the advertising/marketing industry wouldn’t be as big as it is…

Yeah, he does like to play around with the sometimes confusing, fragmentary, and disorienting nature of subjective experience, especially during traumatic events, doesn’t he

Considering that the literal modern social contract is predicated on, at least, the formal right to organize, which in turn is underpinned by the NLRB, if the fascist supreme court overturns it, that means workers will be footloose and fancy-free in terms of national allegiance, huh?

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Yeah, AI’s been a whole field for many decades, machine learning and deep learning is a whole field that existed and was doing tons of interesting work across a variety of domains before transformers came out. Fully agreed that LLM’s are a party trick, but companies use party tricks to gin up interest and money for their real work all the time. None of this changes the fact that AI is important technology.

The pandemic triggering a cultural shift to WFH is a big part of the problems in the commercial real estate market. Basically, America becoming 10% more technologically sophisticated may have unhinged the financial system. Story about the impact of tech on society, I guess?

So more or less, since many businesses are only keeping their offices because they have multi-year leases preventing them from simply packing up and going fully remote or downsizing to a smaller office, we can expect occupancy rates to continue falling and slow-burn exacerbating the commercial real estate crisis. And really, the problem here is just that banks are overinvested in commercial real estate, not knowing that a pandemic would alter work patterns in a lasting way. So again, we’re all in for a fun ride on the roller coaster that is capitalism, literally because of problems caused by real estate speculation.

There’s no doubt, the rightists on the court want him there and the liberals are terrified of speaking out one this one. The procedural argument they’re using is that “the 14th Amendment delegates this power to Congress, so Colorado doesn’t get to unilaterally decide because they’re bypassing Congress.” Unfortunately for this line of argument, Congress already used its authority to pass a law, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which states that anybody who engages “in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto” is ineligible for political office.

Since the courts have already sent a variety of participants and organizers to prison for seditious conspiracy, seems pretty reasonable to conclude there have already been findings than Jan 6 was an insurrection or rebellion of some kind, or else it wouldn’t have been seditious. Even more to the point, participants in Jan 6 have already been found ineligible and removed from public office due to their participation in Jan 6. Colorado is simply applying already-existing federal statutes regarding Trump’s eligibility, and more to the point, arguably states that ARE putting him on the ballot are actually the ones flaunting federal law.

It’s both. Basically, if he’s right that this is among the most important tech in world history and deserves $7 trillion in research, it’ll make OpenAI the du jour monopolist over said most important tech in world history if he gets it. Outright dystopian.

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If only someone could have predicted this long-term crisis of profitability within the capitalist system to which no permanent solution existed!

Spoiler, the Butlerian Jihad and the prohibition on AI was actually a problem runs away before Dune fans can tar and feather me

For perspective, global annual GDP is $105 trillion, which means Altman is asking the world to invest 6.7% or so of the entire world’s economic output for one year in his company.

Arguably since mainly what people actually want from the Web is just a cross-platform document renderer/UI system, if you designed something new from the ground-up with zero legacy nonsense, well, those are both complex problems, but I somewhat suspect we’d end up with something better and easier to develop for than the Byzantine nightmare that is the web.

Network effects would limit growth, but I think as the web gets shittier and shittier there would be growth.

I found the stats re Firefox usage a little surprising/hard to believe so I double-checked them. Indeed, most rankings show Firefox use hovering at around 2.5%. The open web is sort of already dead, I think. It’s honestly not that uncommon now that I come across websites that don’t work in Firefox and there are zero hints or info that you need to use Chrome. It’s like the world has already forgotten that the web isn’t just an app you access through Chrome.

Google’s been working on this more or less since they launched Chrome, so it’s not surprising, but wow, that fucking sucks.

Right to repair also has an environmental angle. Consider which one uses more resources and likely produces more pollution:

• The RAM in your laptop dies, you take it to a repair shop, they swap out the dead RAM. Dead RAM goes in the bin, laptop has years of life left in it
• The RAM in your Macbook dies, the RAM is soldered to the board, you throw the whole thing away and buy a new one, and when a single component in the new Macbook dies, lather, rinse, repeat

Considering how much extra e-waste is generated when people can’t repair things, there’s really no way to buy Apple and call yourself an environmentalist.