Yeah, his name comes up in the Folding Ideas video. Don't remember his name though, but if I remember correctly, he was a stock trainer who realised that large investors had large bets on game stop stock going down, and if it instead went up there was a lot of money to be made by betting on it going up. So he made such bets, spread the word, stock went up, he got rich and exited stage left without getting prosecuted for market manipulation.
But by then the whole memestock thing was of to the races.
“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.
Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.
If I remember correctly, Josef Ressel, one of the inventors of the propeller (there was severa, but he was in Austrial), was arrested as an anarchist after a steam engine powering a propeller exploded.
I am not in favour of exploding engines, but it always struck me as a bit on the paranoid side. Not that better ships for the Austrian navy would have helped against Prussia.
But then again, another propeller inventor, John Ericsson, came up with both the Monitor, a torpedo boat, and a mobile artillery that he tried to sell to Napoleon III, so you never know what propeller inventors can come up with if you don't arrest them as anarchists.
Why we failed: we tried explaining why everyone else was wrong and we were right, but somehow it didn't work. We would have needed outsiders who could have translated our obviously correct explanations to the other outsiders, then it totally would have worked. But our for hire signs with "can you talk stupid?" was misunderstood and defaced. Clearly a more stealthy tactic was needed.
A song of ice and fire, or possibly its adaptation Game of Thrones.
There is a character named Arya who goes to assassin school where they brain wash students to become " no one". In the books this grant the ability to pretend to be someone else, and with some magic they can also change their looks. In the TV series it's that plus Kung Fu fighting. The books were better (Hollywood can't compete with the power of your imagination)
I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I'm not sure why. It is objectively awful.
Thinking about it, I think it's a combination of:
Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
Fanfiction of children's fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)
I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor's coworker, doesn't have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.
I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.
Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.
Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.
And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.
On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.
A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called "impersonal me" which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn't show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren't way down on the list, they weren't in the list at all.
Good article. Captures the bubble growth and the lack of profit growth, with lots of examples. And that the capacity growth of AI is limited by non AI works, so no growth into functionality.
Good one to hand to people who needs to understand the nature of the bubble (and that it is a bubble).
The Golem and The Golem at large are two excellent little books about how science and technology actually works. History of science, so heavy on examples (as the historical subjects tend to be) and light on theory. Several examples of what today would be pseudo science but was treated seriously at its time, because they didn't know what we consider basic knowledge (and you can't get it from first principle...)
Good for anyone interested in science or technology, but perhaps particularly useful for the cultists (if they can be persuaded).
I am no fancy copyright lawyer, but if I understand the legal situation in the US, you cannot claim copyright unless there is a human being involved. There was a case a decade ago with a photographer setting up a camera that a monkey or ape used to take a selfie. PETA sued on behalf of the animal, claiming the copyright, and the court ruled that only humans can have copyright so the picture had no copyright.
Though the prompt fans will probably claim to be artists, so I guess more legal wrangling.
Probably ending in something like every time an AI image is created Disney get a cent. And following that, to combat piracy, social media platforms demand proof of current AI subscription to upload image. Sure, in theory you can upload an image you yourself has created without AI, but in practice the algorithm will find it to similar to something else and execute automatic takedown. Isn't it simpler just to pay your AI/Disney tax?
Back in the late 90s tech boom days McDonalds declared that they would sell hamburgers over the Internet. Remember, this was before smartphones, hell it was before Nokia flip phones with rudimentary browser and email. Most people who had internet access at all used it either at work, school or the family computer with dial up modem.
McDonalds' stock price rose by 50%.
I remember it because I thought this was so stupid that it must mean that the bust was near. I was just of years. The market can stay stupid longer than you can believe it, or however it was Keynes put it.
Yeah, his name comes up in the Folding Ideas video. Don't remember his name though, but if I remember correctly, he was a stock trainer who realised that large investors had large bets on game stop stock going down, and if it instead went up there was a lot of money to be made by betting on it going up. So he made such bets, spread the word, stock went up, he got rich and exited stage left without getting prosecuted for market manipulation.
But by then the whole memestock thing was of to the races.