rockercoaster (u/rockercoaster)

rockercoaster commented on The AI emperor has no clothes jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/warrenm

keernan · 5 months ago

When openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms? Why did they push the idea it was a 'black box' that they didn't understand how it worked? That it was a serious threat to humanity and that government oversight was urgently needed (leading to a meeting at the White House)?

I'm not suggesting GPT has no value. But in hindsight everything I described above was pure bull. I suppose it could be suggested that Sam Altman and his engineers didn't understand their own algorithms. But I don't buy that fairytale.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

> When openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms?

Same reason they hyped up how worried they were about "safety" of the "we have to make sure these things are 'aligned' or they'll become Skynet!" variety: Altman was bullshitting to hype up the company. Even the "safety" stuff was just hype. "It's so capable it's literally scary, or soon will be... better invest in / use our product! Imagine how bad it'll be for you if you don't!"

I was on the fence about how serious they were until I finally got around to skimming the "Attention Is All You Need" paper. LOL. LMFAO. No.

rockercoaster commented on ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team wired.com/story/ice-socia... · Posted by u/loteck

Dig1t · 5 months ago

Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.

Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.

Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.

The left has plenty of its own contradictory arguments.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

> Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.

Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.

.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.

So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.

> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.

I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.

> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.

Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.

rockercoaster commented on ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team wired.com/story/ice-socia... · Posted by u/loteck

netsharc · 5 months ago

I'm going to modify my keyboard to generate em-dash when I input "-"...

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

Option+shift+dash, on a default English Mac keyboard. Easy to remember—"modify [option] the dash [dash] to make the biggest common form of it [shift]", or else you can think of it as modifying the underscore (shift + dash) to sit higher on the line (with option).

rockercoaster commented on ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team wired.com/story/ice-socia... · Posted by u/loteck

Arubis · 5 months ago

Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about.

Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)

All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.

rockercoaster commented on ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team wired.com/story/ice-socia... · Posted by u/loteck

jinushaun · 5 months ago

It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.

Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....

I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.

rockercoaster commented on OpenAI Is Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup wheresyoured.at/sora2-ope... · Posted by u/speckx

godelski · 5 months ago

As a reminder, even Apple didn't hit 1T market cap until late 2018. We didn't get a second in the 4 comma club until mid 2019 with MSFT. Google and Facebook in 2021.

And now we have 4 companies above 3T and 11 in the 4 comma club. Back when the iPhone was released oil companies were at the top and they were barely hitting 500B.

So yeah, I don't think anyone has really been displaced. Nvidia at up, Broadcom at 7, and TSMC at 9 indicate that displacement might occur, but that's also not the displacement people are talking about.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.

Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.

rockercoaster commented on Social anxiety isn't about being liked chrislakin.blog/p/social-... · Posted by u/rohmanhakim

cortesoft · 5 months ago

I hadn’t heard the word countersignaling before, but it matches something I had observed many years ago.

My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other, the things that we are most self-conscious about… yet every time my friends make fun of me for something I worry about, I actually feel better and more comfortable with myself.

When I thought about why, I realized it’s because of the hidden message behind the ridicule of my longtime friends; they are telling me, “we are keenly aware of the worst qualities about you, and we love you and want to spend time with you anyway.”

There is comfort in knowing you don’t have to hide your flaws to be accepted and loved.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

The book Impro treats extensively of what it calls "status games", in the context of building believable, natural scenes of dialog for the stage (or other dramatic purposes) and as a framework for making improvisation interesting.

The author muses that the situation of feeling safe playing status games with another person—that is, treating them only as games, not as serious and with real status in play—is perhaps the definition of what friendship is.

This could include trading barbs, taking turns playing the bully and the victim, trading playing "high" and "low" roles, jokey one-upsmanship, that kind of thing. Stuff you don't do with non-friends because there's too much risk of being taken seriously, and too much risk of losing actual status or of hurting someone else's status for-real when you didn't intend to.

rockercoaster commented on A simple habit that saves my evenings alikhil.dev/posts/the-sim... · Posted by u/alikhil

LudwigNagasena · 5 months ago

What’s the 19th century reference?

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).

Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:

> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.

Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.

rockercoaster commented on I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone forums.macrumors.com/thre... · Posted by u/dabinat

al_borland · 5 months ago

Jobs seemed like he actually used everything himself, and he wanted a good experience as a customer. I don’t actually believe Tim Cook uses most of the stuff Apple makes, nothing beyond the basics, and he’s likely willing to compromise that experience to increase the stock price.

I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone. Say what you will about skeuomorphism, it was easy to understand, apps were visually unique from one another, and the friendly UI was a nice juxtaposition to the clean minimalist hardware.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

> I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone.

You’re not alone. The release of iOS7 basically took us from having one OS that didn’t constantly confuse the non-tech-savvy, back to having zero of those. And it’s gotten a little better in a couple releases, but overall the trend is that it’s moving even farther from that over time.

rockercoaster commented on A simple habit that saves my evenings alikhil.dev/posts/the-sim... · Posted by u/alikhil

mistersquid · 5 months ago

> Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?

Doubtful because the concept of clocking and clocking out is an artifact of the shift from mercantilism to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution where people sold their time in exchange for money.

Before that, in Elizabethan England, people were not free agents but subjects of British Empire. Merchants could control their destinies to some extent but did not exchange their labor so much as accumulated wealth through trade. They did not clock in and out.

So, there was not company time vs. personal time. There was just time and people conducted their bowel functions in outhouses and chamber pots befitting their stations.

rockercoaster · 5 months ago

The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.

Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.