YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

Jesus Christ that was the most on-the-nose distillation of tech fascism that I've ever seen. Can't wait for the book to get published and see Elon et al endorsing it.

Only it's even worse because without redoing all the work yourself you can't even tell which ones are dead or alive.

Honestly I'm kind of reminded of some of the philosophy around semiotics and authorship. Like, when reading a story part of the interpretation comes from constructing a mental image of the author talking to a mental image of the audience, and the way those mental images get created can color the interpretation and how we read and understand the text.

In that sense, the tendency to construct a mental image of a person talking through ChatGPT or Eliza makes much more sense. I've been following the Alex Jones interviews of chatGPT and the illusion is much less strong when listening to the conversation rather than having it mediated through text, which is probably a good sign for those of us who like actual people. Even when interactive, chatting through text is sufficiently less personal that it's easier to fill in all the extra humanity, though as we see from Alex himself in those interviews it is definitely not impossible to get fooled through other media.

But that's at the ground level of interaction, and it's probably noteworthy that the press releases for all these policies are not getting written by a bot. This tendency to fill in a human being definitely lines up with the tech-authoritarian tendency that OP has discussed elsewhere to dehumanize both their victims and more significantly themselves. I think the way they talk about themselves and the people who work on their "side" is if anything more alarming than the way they talk about their victims.

Me, a network goblin: wait what do they mean physical layer or did meta try to buy TCP somehow?

I mean, I could definitely buy that a perceived loss of face for Trump could negatively impact the vibes for whales in crypto land enough to cause this kind of ~1% dip. The other side of being such a wildly unhealthy market is that you'll see measurable movements based on nothing but "Jerry thought the vibes were off this week and stopped pumping quite so hard" or something.

Honestly pointing me at The Two-Income Trap was the single most valuable thing I ever got from reading Scoot Sooskoond. I feel like I was able to get on board the "oh she actually does know things" train a bit sooner than everyone else.

See, what he needs to do is really get inside the grift loop and pivot back to crypto ahead of everyone else. That way he can be at the front of the pack instead of yet another also-ran in the meta verse and AI grifts.

Nah, I think they're trying to sell the combination of that and some kind of valuable networking opportunity to the kind of person who is to tech entrepreneurship what the unpublished guy who loudly tells everyone in Starbucks they're a novelist is to writers.

It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it's a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it's a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it's so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don't the people we keep electing to fix it just... do that?

I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is "Just Asking Questions."

The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you're asking helps me trust that it's worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for "so much for the tolerant left" bullshit.

Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about "actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn't predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it's all fucked!"

For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don't know that he actually read them.

Possibly fair. I'm pretty sure I've seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I'm not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.

There's a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.

Given thaty wife interviewed with a "digital AI assistant" company for the position of, effectively, the digital AI assistant well before the current bubble really took off, I would not be at all surprised if they kept a few wage-earners on staff to handle more inconclusive checks.

Capability is such a vague word, and intelligence isn't all that much better defined.

I like to think of it as concentrating that draw of the void into someplace less irony-poisoned and openly destructive than many of the alternatives. This way I can avoid spreading the despair into the rest of my life.

Don't forget the part where Europe has had cemeteries so old that they had to be moved or got rediscovered and the solution was to create massive ossuaries that pack everyone's bones in real tight in cool non-human-body patterns.

Rotting for a half decade and then helping turn the walls of a church basement into a heavy metal album cover is kind of #deathgoals if I'm being honest.

Isn't the whole point of rubber duck debugging that the method works when talking to a literal rubber duck?

And proofreading is notably more complex and has a worse failure state than just writing your own summary.

Oh God, some days later he's doing it again

Edit after listening: Content warning for immediate onset transphobia on top of the standard right-wing conspiracy lunacy. Have to try and make it be mean to trans people before we can get to the real "weird nonsense" meat of the interview.

So I'm guessing we'll find a headline about exfiltrated data tomorrow morning, right?

"Our product doesn't work for any reasonable standard, but we're using it in production!"