I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:

• algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it’s “The Algorithm” in capital letters like “The Social Media Algorithm”; then it becomes evil
• machine learning - been out for decades, hasn’t destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
• machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. “Machine intelligence” performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we’ll give it a pass)
• artificial intelligence - machine intelligence’s evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it’s the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists

One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.

Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords

“I’m not a Nazi, I just like the esthetics of someone else’s blood on my black uniform”

It’s almost like “you have to buy a new laptop to install it and help train our AI on your private documents” is somehow not convincing enough. Maybe if they also removed local accounts and forced you to have an online MS account? Nah scratch that, it would be stupid

AI goes haywire and starts actually giving reliable information

but can YOU do it before I finish my coffee?

Grok likes to finish on his face and some went in his eyes

I track the location of hundreds maybe thousands of phones every day for minutes at the time. I see people using them while I commute. Where can I collect my fee from the US government for my services?

“Not with that attitude, you can’t!” -Lego

It’s more that each person will have a moment in their life when they are at their gayest

or CEOs

Might not be the biggest risk to your life but it’s 2.3% out of 55 Millions death (so, just to put things into perspective, we’re talking 1.6M deaths per year).

Besides, the risk is not only death directly in an accident. For those 33% who died from heart diseases: stress is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and the paper does mention specifically work stress as a risk factor

The risk of a cardiovascular event was higher in patients with a history of social isolation (OR, 2.47), marital stress (OR, 2.28), work stress (OR, 3.2), childhood abuse (OR, 2.78), or trauma (OR, 2.67).

Again not all of it will be due to commuting to work, but raising your stress levels by having you commute needlessly in traffic is not good for your health even if you don’t die in a car crash.

“A grand transformation into AI is the only way out of growth declines resulting from a population shock,” the ministry said in a statement, referring to South Korea’s record low birthrate.

The funny bit is how “AI companions” are one of the most profitable uses of AI so far . See how THAT increases a country’s birthrate.

This is Analysis-Paralysis. Why should they spend all their time counting past crashes when they are busy increasing the production of new ones?

/s

Ah yes “The Porn Loophole”, was one of my favorites , I should still have it on a DVD somewhere.

LLMs can’t do protein folding. A specifically-trained Machine Learning model called AlphaFold did. Here’s the paper.

Developing, training and fine tuning that model was a research effort led by two guys who got a Nobel for it. Alphafold can’t do conversation or give you hummus recipes, it knows shit about the structure of human language but can identify patterns in the domain where it has been specifically and painstakingly trained.

It wasn’t “hey chatGPT, show me how to fold a protein” is all I’m saying and the “superhuman reasoning capabilities” of current LLMs are still falling ridiculously short of much simpler problems.

As a paid, captive squirrel, focusing on spinning my workout wheel and getting my nuts at the end of the day, I hate that AI is mostly a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem. I am being told “you must use AI, find a way to use it” but my AI successes are very few and mostly non-repeatable (my current AI use case is: “try it once for non-vital, not time-sensitive stuff, if at first you don’t succeed, just give up, if you succeed, you saved some time for more important stuff”).

If I try to think as a CEO or an entrepreneur, though, I sort of see where these people might be coming from. They see AI as the new “internet”, something that for good or bad is getting ingrained in everything we do and that will cause your company to go bankrupt for trying too hard to do things “the new way” but also to quickly fade to irrelevance if you keep doing things in the same way.

It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to say now “haha, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 Millions and now they are out of business”, but all these people who have seen it happen are seeing AI as the new disruptive technology that can spell great success or complete doom for their current businesses. All hype? Maybe. But if I was a CEO I’d be probably sweating too (and having a couple of VPs at my company wipe up the sweat with dollar bills)

So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all “the fact they didn’t have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper”.

Now the US is getting behind on “AI wars” because China has more energy for huge data centers?

How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?

I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action

A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.

Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.

And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.

Like, you know when you are walking and suddenly they Hulk out and break your shoes? Man I hate foot-boners!