The main thing I have noticed, thinking back, is that his books often require an Interesting Billionaire to move the plot forward – Dodge, T.R. Schmidt, Eliza, the sultan of Kinakuta, whatever – and my suspension of disbelief can no longer always rise to the occasion on that count, even in an SF setting. Which is also I think why Anathem remains my favorite.

belated shower thought: “slopvergence”

I run an email server for myself and every once in a while the UCE starts leaking through until I have a few training examples to feed it. In the last couple weeks I noticed that basically all of the escapees look like fancy Claude output for telling me that I should be enticed by Costco gift cards and free chicken sandwiches.

What I suppose this means is that if you use these tools to generate material in the same snappy variety of output template, “but seriously”, nonetheless you will eventually reach aesthetic convergence with meaningless spam. Is there a term for this yet? “Slop-ratchet” is the one that sprang immediately to mind but I am sure someone else noticed this tendency long before I did.

I’ve been reading this guy’s blog and techpolicy.press articles for about a year and have found them very worthwhile.

and to be clear, that doesn’t include the various people out there struggling to use it “enough” due to the desires of “leadership”

My realization of the last couple weeks is: in the future, being an AI toucher will be a source of intense social stigma. Whenever I see it in the wild I think “good job”.

https://www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-is-proven-to-be-tractable – apparently we have gone stepwise from zero steps to one step in terms of “alignment”, and that step is writing a markdown file with declarative statements asking to be addressed in a particular way

deleted by creator

I have a Kobo Sage and it’s nice, I exclusively sideload epubs/kepubs onto it. I have installed KOreader in case I want to read PDFs.

went to look at their github issues tracker and this one made me cackle. Poe status undetermined but it delighted me so much:

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/issues/16

Subject: Why are the prompts not written in Lojban?

Is Grok incapable of logic in order to use the Lojban logical language?

in the past I have worked in the product cycle at a silicon valley company a little bit and I just can’t imagine anyone I met ever getting to the next step being “tell the customers the new product is marginally better at 15-30x the current price” and then actually doing that instead of cancelling releases, fire-drill meetings all week to change paths as soon as possible, etc. unless they already did that?

“bonkers” is right.