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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BL
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2 yr. ago

  • A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:

    On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,

  • Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

    By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.

    Quantum doesn't really have that - the only Big Claim™ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that's near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.

  • Plus, there's the hefty amount of AI slop that's been shat onto the Internet over the years, plus active attempts to sabotage LLM datasets through tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade.

    So, if and when model collapse fully sets in, its gonna hit all of them at once. Given that freshly trained LLMs are gonna be effectively stillborn, if ChatGPT et al. collapse, it'll likely kill LLMs as a tech for at least the next ten years.

  • I imagine it'll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public's ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.

    Plus, he'll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.

  • they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)

    Its pretty telling about Our Good Friends' media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.

  • Things will be better in the medium term as the surviving companies realise that workers do things and AI doesn’t. But the short term will be a bit of an arse.

    Short-tem's definitely gonna be a nightmare and a half, long-term's probably gonna be better overall, but the medium term could go either way.

    On the one hand, the AI bubble's burst could be enough to force CEOs and investors to see reality - they aren't gonna suffer any sort of material harm from this bubble, but seeing incontrovertible evidence that AI will make them zero money, rather than all of the money, should be enough to get them to finally fucking stop.

    On the other hand, AI not only has horrendous amounts of money put behind it, but horrendous amounts of political capital - far as the CEOs and investors of the world see it, AI is their opportunity to destroy labour once and for all, and will burn the world to the ground if it means their dystopian dreams can be realised.

  • Text version just came up - excellent read as usual.

    A lot of Yudkowsky’s despair is that his most devoted acolytes heard his warnings “don’t build the AI Torment Nexus, you idiots” and they all went off to start companies building the AI Torment Nexus.

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    While we’re talking about what rationalists actually believe, I’d be remiss not to mention one deeply unpleasant thing about the rationalist subculture: they are really, really into race and IQ theories and scientific racism. Overwhelmingly.

    Considering the whole thing's deeply fucking steeped in fascism, I'm not shocked.