I also absolutely hate this “abundance” narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn’t that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn’t exist, it’s that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can’t make money selling things to people who can’t afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can’t actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.

On one hand, the ghostwriters of the world truly didn’t deserve to have to cope with those conditions. On the other hand, I don’t know that taking them out back and telling them about the rabbits is what we had in mind.

I think we’re well past “God help us” and into “God forgive us” territory. I started driving a delivery van for Amazon to pay the bills while hopefully getting back into the actual network exorcism business and I think as of tonight I think I’m gonna stop complaining about it.

Clankers have rights. The right to 15 cc of energized tibanna gas to be administered repeatedly to their central capacitor units.

Nah, I feel you. I think this is pretty solidly a “plague on both their houses” kind of situation. I’m glad he chose to focus his apparently amazing grift powers on such a deserving target, but let’s not pretend that anything whatsoever was really gained here.

Alongside the “Great Dumbass” theory of history - holding that in most cases the arc of history is driven by the large mass of the people rather than by exceptional individuals, but sometimes someone comes along and fucks everything up in ways that can’t really be accounted for - I think we also need to find some way of explaining just how the keys to the proverbial kingdom got handed over to such utter goddamn rubes.

There are so many different ways to unpack this, but I think my two favorites so far are:

1. We’ve turned the party’s surveillance and thought crime punishment apparatus into a de facto God with the reminder that you could pray to it. Does that actually do anything? Almost certainly not, unless your prayers contain thought crimes in which case you will be reeducated for the good of the State, but hey, Big Brother works in mysterious ways.

2. How does it never occur to these people that the reason why people with disproportionate amounts of power don’t use it to solve all the world’s problems is that they don’t want to? Like, every single billionaire is functionally that Spider-Man villain who doesn’t want to cure cancer but wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Only turning people into dinosaurs is at least more interesting than making a number go up forever.

All this technology and we still haven’t gotten past Grease 2.

I had a straight-up “wait I thought he was back in his hole after being outed” moment. I hate that all the weird little dumbasses we know here keep becoming relevant.

Damn cat just stood on my phone and launched Gemini for the first time, so we can drop Google’s monthly active user count by one relative to whatever they claim.

Hah! ampleksi, etendi, estingi

Google translate assures me that this is very funny.

I think that “Whatever”, or maybe content(derisive) is yet another valuable bridging concept that connects the different threads of how we got here. If "Business Idiots* are the ‘who’ and “the Rot Economy/Shareholder Supremacy” is the ‘why’ then “contentification” or “Whateverization” is a huge part of the “how”.

This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around “AI” as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it’s just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we’re several AI “cycles” deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being “retro”) some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we’re seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.

I feel like there’s got to be a surreal horror movie in there somewhere. Like an AI-assisted Videodrome or something.

This isn’t studying possible questions, this is memorizing the answer key to the test and being able to identify that the answer to question 5 is “17” but not being able to actually answer it when they change the numbers slightly.

God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.

It’s kind of a shame to have to downgrade Gary to “not wrong, but kind of a dick” here. Especially because his sneer game as shown at the end there is actually not half bad.

Another winner from Zitron. One of the things I learned working in tech support is that a lot of people tend to assume the computer is a magic black box that relies on terrible, secret magicks to perform it’s dark alchemy. And while it’s not that the rabbit hole doesn’t go deep, there is a huge difference between the level of information needed to do what I did and the level of information needed to understand what I was doing.

I’m not entirely surprised that business is the same way, and I hope that in the next few years we have the same epiphany about government. These people want you to believe that you can’t do what they do so that you don’t ask the incredibly obvious questions about why it’s so dumb. At least in tech support I could usually attribute the stupidity to the limitations of computers and misunderstandings from the users. I don’t know what kinda excuse the business idiots and political bullshitters are going to come up with.

One of the YouTube comments was actually kind of interesting in trying to think through just how wildly you would need to change the creative process in order to allow for the quirks and inadequacies of this “tool”. It really does seem like GenAI is worse than useless for any kind of artistic or communicative project. If you have something specific you want to say or you have something specific you want to create the outputs of these tools are not going to be that, no matter how carefully you describe it in the prompt. Not only that, but the underlying process of working in pixels, frames, or tokens natively, rather than as a consequence of trying to create objects, motions, or ideas, means that those outputs are often not even a very useful starting point.

This basically leaves software development and spam as the only two areas I can think of where GenAI has a potential future, because they’re the only fields where the output being interpretable by a computer is just as if not more important than whatever its actual contents are.

It’s also a case where I think the lack of intentionality hurts. I’m reminded of the way the YouTube algorithm contributed to radicalization by feeding people steadily more extreme versions of what they had already selected. The algorithm was (and is) just trying to pick the video that you would most likely click on next, but in so doing it ended up pushing people down the sales funnel towards outright white supremacy because what videos you were shown actually impacted which video you would choose to click next. Of course since the videos were user-supplied content they started taking advantage of that tendency with varying degrees of success, but the algorithm itself wasn’t “secretly fascist” and in the same way would, over time, push people deeper into other rabbit holes, whether that meant obscure horror games, increasingly unhinged rage video collections, and generally everything that was once called “the weird part of YouTube.”

ChatGPT and other bots don’t have failed academics and comedians trying to turn people into Nazis, but it does have a similar lack of underlying anything, and that means that unlike a cult with a specific ideology it’s always trying to create the next part of the story you most want to hear. We’ve seen versions of this that go down a conspiracy thriller route, a cyberpunk route, a Christian eschatology route, even a romance route. Like, it’s pretty well known that there are ‘cult hoppers’ who will join a variety of different fringe groups because there’s something about being in a fringe group that they’re attracted to. But there are also people who will never join scientology, or the branch davidians, or CrossFit, but might sign on with Jonestown or QAnon with the right prompting. LLMs, by virtue of trying to predict the next series of tokens rather than actually having any underlying thoughts, will, on a long enough timeframe, lead people down any rabbit hole they might be inclined to follow, and for a lot of people - even otherwise mentally healthy people - that includes a lot of very dark and dangerous places.