YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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Less well known, but perhaps more interesting given that the phrase blue blood has already been used.

That part almost makes sense. Like, from the Bank's perspective your deposit is a liability, not an asset. But the mortgage on your house that they very much can give you is an asset for them and a liability for you. Two-column accounting works like that; everything in my asset column is going to be in someone's liability column.

But none of the other nonsense follows from that at all. It's the few sentences bordering on lucidity to make you forget how insane all the promises from earlier were.

It's true. Also notably the scam isn't on the car dealerships or the family court or, it's on the guy who buys a course in sovcitery, or the books, or the document templates, or whatever else they're selling.

I mean, of course they didn't carve "this" - they didn't speak English, so "this" would have just been a random assortment of squiggles!

I wouldn't say there's no mysticism in the singularity, at least not in the sense you're implying here. While it uses secular and scientific aesthetics rather than being overtly religious the roadmap it presents relies on specific assumptions about the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and identity that may sound plausible but aren't really more rational than having an immortal soul that gets judged at the end of days.

And it doesn't help that when confronted by any kind of questioning of how plausible any of this is there's a tendency to assume a sufficiently powerful AI can solve the problem and assume that's the end of it. It's not less of a Deus ex Machina if you call it an AI instead of a God to focus on the Machina instead of the Deus.

Except their magic money machine is fake, but their need to buy food and housing and whatever else is very real. In order to sustain themselves they're either also grinding away at a 9-5 in addition to trying to make the magic happen or else they're straight-up grifting other sovcits and aspiring sovcits into giving them money.

There's a reason why the C in OPCA stands for "commercial".

No no, they're not breaking the law they're using their secret law magic to let them follow the Superlaws that apply to the coolest and sexiest people rather than the plebian laws that apply to people like the cops or the courts or their ex-wives.

I mean, if you want to trace it back that far you're talking about the bronze age Canaanites, and arguably through them the Phonecians and Carthaginians would be better successors than the Israelites. If that's the case then the land should either be under Tunisian administration (for maximum cultural continuity after the fall of Carthage during the Punic wars) or either Turkey or Italy for political continuity through right of successive conquests. Or maybe we want to go with one of the theories about just how far afield the Phonecian diaspora went and consider the state of Utah their most direct modern descendent.

The ancient history of the levant is fascinating, but in the context of the current conflict over the nation of Israel it is relevant only in that it is a major part of Israeli nationalist mythmaking. If you want to actually trace who lived in the region thousands of years ago and where they ended up to determine who the "rightful" government should be you're going to end up in some really goofy places unless you already know what answer you want to get and are seeking justification rather than illumination. Hell, nationalism as a concept only dates back a few hundred years, and before then you're arguing about the competing claims of kings and empires through descent, conquest, oaths of fealty, and whatever else. Who ruled/owned/managed your land and who you were as a people were far less connected, and using that as a justification for modern government actions honestly sounds like they're out of actual justifications. It's just Putin ranting to Tucker Carlson about medieval maps for two hours while Russian troops shell Ukrainian cities.

Nah, his ego is big enough that he's probably some version of the an-cap, with a personal political based in "I could give everyone this utopian world if the government and the 'woke mob' and the labor organizers would just get out of my way."

The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon I've ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??

Thanks to the power of Technology(tm) we can have an LLM generate spam, an automailer send it out to millions, where an automated spam filter can identify them and hide them in a separate inbox to be automatically deleted in a couple of days. Of course the technology isn't perfect and sometimes someone sees one of these ads and, I assume, spends money on a product. But I have faith that these problems are solvable and we'll be able to totally automate email spam to no longer interact with human beings at any point. Once that's done we can apply the same methodologies to weekly internal memos, daily team meetings, and even unsolicited dick pics. Imagine never needing to take or see pictures of a stranger's junk ever again while still massively scaling up the number of unsolicited dick pics in flight at any given time.

I guess the other relevant example in film would be Wargames. At least nobody is recommending hooking ChatGPT up to the nuclear launch system.

I honestly hope you're right about the coming AI winter. I was watching a report from a major South Korean arms show yesterday and one of the themes that the defense industry appears to be taking from the war in Ukraine is that more independent and autonomous weapon systems are going to be useful tools to counteract jamming and to reduce manpower requirements. Nobody appears to be putting OpenAI into the kill chain, and I think on balance autonomous systems are a more ethical way to address the problem than other options. I can't believe we're seeing cluster bombs and land mines making such a comeback. All the same, a strong push against AI more generally would help make sure we don't end up combining the IFF of a land mine with the trigger discipline of the CIA's predator drones.

Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.

It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don't think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.

Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don't think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it's often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.

In both cases, the thing that people didn't like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don't like AI art, they don't like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they're still being pitched for.

You know, I can't tell if this is supposed to be "I know you're saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it's more complicated than that" or "I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I'm honestly okay with that".

Gonna guess the latter given where it's coming from and the fact that the actual "more complicated" is a salad of non sequiturs.

As long as music is alive, so is The King. A-thank you. Thank you very much.

See also why I'm finding this comment several weeks after the fact. MoreWrite in particular seems to often get buried even when I'm looking at the local awful.systems threads only. The lemmy app I use (Connect for Android) can identify when a thread has new comments but I have yet to find a way to sort by that.

Can you spare me the suffering and confirm who they're pointing the finger at this time?

Ah, but he's not really a Scott so much as a Scot, and a Monty to boot.

Credit to her for making the best of a bad situation. "We almost couldn't get legally married, so we had to bring in Elvis to officiate the paperwork after the ceremony" is going to be a top-tier wedding story for every party going forward.

Honestly I think a lot of the worst evo psych takes don't even get as far as hypothesizing or evidence. They fail at the first hurdle of "identify something about the world". It's the classic Freudian error of never once asking "hey wait is everyone like this or is it just me?"