The body. It’s feeding you vast amounts of information every moment, it’s the one making decisions, you’re the AI assistant providing analysis and advice

If you clone a tree, you get a similar tree. The branches aren’t in the same place. If you clone a human, why would the nerves be laid out the same way? Even if it’s wired up correctly, without a lifetime of cooperation why would your body take your advice?

Imagine you wake up. Red looks blue. Everything feels numb. The doctor says “everything looks good, why don’t you try to stand up?”. You want to cooperate with the doctor, but you don’t stand up. You could move, but you don’t. Rationalizing your choices, you tell the doctor you don’t feel like it. You feel your toes, you shift to get away from the prodding of your doctor, but you just can’t muster the will to stand

Imagine you wake up. Your sight is crystal clear, you feel your body like never before. The doctor says “don’t move yet”. With the self control of a child, you rip out the itchy IV to get the tape off of you. The doctor says something in a stem tone, and you’re filled with rage. You pummel the doctor, then are filled with regret and start to cry

Emerging science suggests this kind of situation could lead to brand new forms of existential horror

Generative AI is definitely useful - it’s mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let’s you easily do things near impossible before

It’s also best used sparingly

That’s because we’re using it wrong. It’s not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it’s mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it’s wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it’s great

For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you’re looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains

Those are some projects I’ve used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I’m looking to build a new one

I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like “build a class to represent this db object”. I don’t trust it to do anything that’s not straightforward - I don’t trust myself to do anything tedious

The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it’s flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible

As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let’s you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer

That’s my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo “rampancy”, a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job

This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn’t have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don’t know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool

Oh, and you’ve never been a total and complete hypocrite with global consequences before?

Of course, you have to wait until the movie company decides to sell approved sunglasses for an additional free. Or get written approval beforehand

It’s also copyright infringement for your life experiences to influence your understanding of the film in ways not intended by the copyright holder. Especially if you think it was bad.

Anyone you share these unapproved opinions with is a potential sale, adding full ticket price + digital rental to the damages

I thought the same thing. It’s a full answer - it’s not just “it’s the motherboard”, it’s “this is what is happening, we’ve reproduced it, and this is how you’d go about fixing it”

Because it’s a monopoly created by international agreement. It’s like a phone number - it needs to be routable in the system, but if you follow the standards, you can get integrated into the system as a registrar

The top level domains are owned by countries - the UK has .UK, the US has .com and .gov, the UK has .io (because they stole it), but most countries have just one. They charge a fee to register a secondary domain, and the registrar can charge whatever they want to their customers to register on their behalf

This is just the centralized system though - you could build your own, AOL tried to do that through “keywords” back in the 90s

It’s more than that - he failed to create PayPal so his group bought a competitor, he didn’t found Tesla or spaceX - he claimed he did, then reached settlements with the actual founders to not contest his claims. He did start the boring company. It didn’t get off the ground because he can’t build a team

NASA doesn’t have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness

NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use

It’s a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren’t a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla

That’s not what arbitration is. This doesn’t stop valve from reaching a settlement, it stops them from using fake privately funded bench trials

Binding arbitration means the results are legally binding, non-binding arbitration means a judge needs to approve the arbitration results before it’s final. Sometimes it’s with an off duty judge, sometimes anyone can be the arbiter

Regardless, on one side you have a repeat customer, on the other you have someone who will probably never be back - there’s a built in conflict of interest

I really don’t get how people so easily accept this. This is an engineering problem, not a law of the universe… How would someone possibly prove something is impossible, particularly while the entire branch of technology is rapidly changing?

The fediverse is just a barnacle on the larger Internet at this point. It has to become more - we need to make our own web

Ok, let’s be real here. A charger can last a decade even if the charging speed slows…a cord will not outlast a phone. If it does, there’s a serious issue

Morality is definitely relative, there’s just some common overlaps

Sometimes the answer is just the same no matter what (coherent) moral framework you examine it through… Sometimes it’s just that simple

For all we know, they’re literally just passing massive checks in a circle to one another to say “yes, it says right here in our bank records that we spent a combined $100,000,000”, meanwhile only 25% actually goes into the production, and they pocket the rest.

That would be illegal and easily discovered

But you could pay $10M to hire another company to do the sound mixing. They might spend $500k to do the work. You might also be the owner of that company, and the money ends up back in your pocket…And that’s not embezzlement or a kickback, because that’s what it’s called when poor people do it

I find it’s about size. A small organization can be good or bad, depending on the members. At some point, you reach a size where the orgs focus shifts to perpetuating itself

Damn straight. I don’t fear AI, I fear an even more uneven playing field

When an organization as problematic as the world Bank won’t work with you…

Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead

You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about

Agreed, but I think it’s more than that

I don’t think he’s offering them plane tickets. That means they have enough wealth to move there - it would instantly be a shot in the arm for the Russian economy. They’d get a captive market, and he’s not even inviting them to be Russian

That selector also means they’re more likely to have useful skills, and the messaging is targeting people very susceptible to Russia style propaganda - he could censor their connection to the outside world, and they’d thank him for it

Also, if NATO arms hit American civilians, that would be a powerful message to reduce international support for Ukraine or NATO.

They’re too valuable. They’d pay off for him immediately, and long term he’d have an isolated community that is just begging to chug the Kool aid