Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
So I managed to find some more of the AI 2027 author’s opinions on their predictions after a bit of poking around, I’ll let this snippet speak for itself
EDIT: in several comments below, AI 2027 co-authors Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland provide clarifications and corrections to what I’ve written here. Uplift – the extent to which AI tools are accelerating AI R&D progress – is indeed well short of where the AI 2027 scenario predicts. However, the authors do believe they were on track regarding the rate at which uplift would progress; they merely have adjusted their view of where things stood in early 2025. So uplift is indeed short of the AI 2027 scenario, but may now be advancing at the predicted pace, just from a delayed starting point. And frontier AI lab revenue is in fact ahead of AI 2027’s predictions; the 80% figure I’m citing here, which is labeled “economic value” in the linked report, turns out to reflect company valuations in addition to revenue. Finally, valuations have jumped since the 80% figure was computed and are now “about on trend”. Daniel and Eli provided some other clarifications as well, see their comments.]
“Don’t worry guys it’s only the present that we failed to predict, not the future!”
They are claiming that company value is the metric? holy crap
That and treating ARR as a reliable indicator of revenue. Which isn’t as bad as the valuations, but is still pretty bad. Ed Zitron has explained all the ways they game ARR, and, more importantly, it doesn’t matter how much your revenue grows if you are spending 2 dollars for every dollar you make (or spending 20 dollars for every dollar they make, as seems to be the case with their subscription plans).
Maybe the boosters will shut-up once OpenAI and Anthropic finally run out of venture capital to burn on subsidizing subscriptions, but actually, judging by the way the AI 2027 authors are still claiming credit for being right, they will probably just look for someone else to blame for the high costs.
Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet
In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”. “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”. “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.
AI bros fundamentally misunderstanding why people create and enjoy art part 304
Counterpoint, why are these LLM bros still on human social media rather than just asking their chatbots to simulate a forum full of people who disagree with them just enough to be interesting but not so much that they actually risk changing their mind.
I was at Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin today and the last speaker took a moment to complain about AI during their speech. “These billionaires are burning the planet down with generative AI because they don’t have the patience to draw a picture or write an email…”
Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’
copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall
“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”
who in hell is Joe Allen.
I don’t think brian johnson’ll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon
Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”
who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That’s a depressing thought.
Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”
Titled his book after FFX bosses ???
Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.
They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.
Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.
interesting
At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.
acid trip, or wrong kind of anime
Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.
This guy needs a QAA bio, he’s been baking.
we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.
Oh no. The horror. What a cruel fate.
He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity
Is this why noodles are scary?
What a weirdo, would prefer people hate AI survelliance states for the like facism, environmental damage, and devaluing of humanity personally not sure being afraid that computers steal your precious spinal energy leads us to coherent politics
I have so many questions about this man and while I don’t actually want answers I would rather get them by choice than wait until his corner of the cultic milieu comes bursting into general relevancy like the Kool-Aid Man.
Apple sues OpenAI over leaking their secrets
Now I’m no business guy, but this appears to be pretty catastrophically bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI
Happy Two Years, everyone!!! one month late, but we’ve officially made it over halfway through 2026 and the only “plague” has been people gaslighting everyone into believing hantavirus would be the next covid
Lesswronger is mad the current pipeline to sanewash and legitimize lesswrong forum posts into academic content takes too long and thinks about ways to accelerate it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/michaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=gyJWhLjq5fPh9Bv3b
create a pipeline to convert (some subset of) LW posts into PDFs on arXiv, or some other Respectable™ site that doesn’t require peer review.
Not even Haskell is safe from the endless pushing of AI slop. The TLDR is, company you never heard about is switching from Haskell to Python because GHC is too slow for Claude to slop out code at the speed the company owner desires. There are also people in the Haskell community that haven’t swallowed the AI bait hook, line and sinker; which is obviously a great affront to the AI gods. Of course, no AI psychosis induced breakdown is complete with the tired old “AI is here to stay and…”, can’t have people actually think on their own now can we.
Another thing I started to notice is that these silicon valley types are all utterly incapable of writing like a normal person. Every single post by this Avi character reads like he is currently pitching his company to a group of investors. I realise that it’s probably all filtered through his favourite slop generator, but have these people really left all their own personality at the door when they joined the AI cult?
More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:
Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.
I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.
Someone made a pretty good, albeit very cautiously, almost concern-trollisly written blog post about recent internet drama Odin v. Wikipedia. Surprise: the conclusion is that Odin is fashTech. (warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed. I do not believe the actual text is LLM-written but you can never be sure with that kind of writing style)
https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/I have been looking into the mentioned clique for some time now and I share the concerns of the author. It does not take a lot of digging to learn that, for them, an interest in low level performance goes hand in with a far right worldview. Apparently it is where you end up if you are an “indepenent thinker”. Two examples:
- In the Odin 1.0 video, Bill shares his bookcase. Below the programming books I can see “The Strange Death of Europe” and “The Madness of the Crowds”. On the lobsters thread about the announcement, Abner Coimbre shared an archived version of the mentioned private video. Apparently “unions” = “communism”.
- This is the blog of one of the organizers of the Better Software Conference. Very interesting reading list this guy has. The other organizers share likeminded views on xitter. Everyone praising the conference wants you to know that it is a complete coincidence the conference consists almost solely of white dudes.
evola, peterson, rothbard and moldbug on the reading list sure is something
also who the fuck is “bronze age pervert”
e: right, life was slightly better before I looked that up
I’m sorry you had to find out
this waywelcome to the abyss, it sucks here
Wow that readinglist has an interesting fantasy series, HP gateway drug to fascism confirmed.
(It also is just a boring list)
“The Madness of the Crowds”.
I like that there’s a Gamache detective novel with that exact title and smile a little imagining some freshman edge lord accidentally buying it instead of Murray.
Apparently “unions” = “communism”.
…so what’s open-source software, then?
warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed.
Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.
Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease.
Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.
E: He blames it on eating sugar as a kid. AI will fix it.
i’m sure this guy will have a sane, healthy and self-compassionate attitude to disability and long-term illness.
that could be any of who knows how many untested things he tried over years
“don’t die” - famous last words
e: this is also sorta why clinical trials are a thing, and why so often there’s recommendation to not treat disease at all, and why you leave that call to a professional, not decide on your own. especially when your own education is MBA from BYU
update 2: bluesky people say he also ate rapamycin then stopped; also dried cow thyroid; got some unapproved “anti-aging gene therapy” in honduras; probably among many other unusual things. he won’t be even useful as a case study because deconvoluting all this nonsense would be impossible. maybe as an example
man they really do like reinventing alchemy, did anyone suggested cinnabar yet? i guess him blaming sugar for it might be beginning of new grift
Between this and Elon’s sad AI birthday party pics, I came to the conclusion that the default consensus for anything someone who’s wealth exceeds a certain amount says should be ruled horseshit with no further verification needed. Yeah, occasionally there will be a pony under all that shit but it ain’t worth digging for when it’s there.
Anyways, calling horseshit on this because even if parts of it aren’t, they aren’t important compared to the greater horseshit coming from a guy who has an autoimmune disease like Bryan Johnson, that disease being “everything out of Bryan Johnson’s mouth is horseshit”
I missed those pics.
Me too. Saved future readers a search
Elon’s sad birthday pics he posted using his sock puppet account where he pretends to be his mom should be a top level comment here, also is hilarious but sad.
thank you for saving me a search
and even then I regret looking
Thanks, I am however one of those annoying people who doesn’t think he runs his moms account. (We knew his alts due to a lawsuit and how posting screenshots of his setup, and his mom (and that random dude he was accused of being) are not on them, and both have always been weird posters).
Soesnt change the sadcringe.
It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 aah yes years of sketchy medical interventions, no couldn’t be that, it was that time he ate froot loops
I guess the silver lining here is that “his team” might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
The right to bodily autonomy includes doing incredibly dangerous/untested shit to your body that will hurt you until you die; but it does not include posting through it (that is that secondary right to free expression, which also allows us to point and laugh).
Anyway, gg Johnson, maybe one day you’ll realize we are all tiny sparks trapped in decaying bags of flesh and the only thing that matters is what we do with that.
BRYAN JOHNSON: transhumanist body hacker, fucks self up and dies by 50
HUNTER BIDEN: subsists on crack and hookers, will live to 100
move fast and break yourself!
@dgerard all due respect Hunter has said he’s something like 7 years clean so power to him.
And his social media posts are fantastic.
*The PR firm’s tweets
@schnoopy hell of a PR firm to tweet crack smokin
Look up the history of snarky millenial advertising. Everything online is constructed as hell lol
If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.
I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.
Meta’s Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.
Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
because satire is impossible now
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for “”“useless”“” humanities degrees instead. I’m not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
I’m thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said ‘we want the 14 words’).
I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of “ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments”.
It’s good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it’s totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
Top-tier resume material
Not sure if you are aware of the work of the youtuber hbomberguy, but he had a video on some manosphere guys where said ‘what is it with these people and skulls’ when he noticed that david auroni always had his pet skull in each shot.
deleted by creator
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(There’s a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
That is actually an example of what im talking about, he didnt create the sad puppies, he latched on to it and created the rabid puppies. See the weird latching on behavior.
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammett’s line, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”.
HA, and people thought the whole ‘AI generation is the tool of fascism’ was a joke.
More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.
Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.
Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)
like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and they’d look at you like you were off your rocker
“Okay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStop…”
Not sure GameStop would have been a thing without shitcoins showing that this sort of mass media pushing could drive up value. So to properly explain it, start at 13th century bruge. So again you can blame the Dutch for everything. (I know it was actually French at the time).
151 thousand views
one hundred. and. fifty one. thousand. views.
brb ordering a tasty cocktail with which to distract myself
I went with the whiskey glass-sized gin/campari/martini rosso/cherry thing. a less regrettable decision
Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.
OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.
AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.
hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.
The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.
If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.
This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.
So half-right that it’s almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
I hadn’t thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected
For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.
It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.
?O kay?
wget -rwasn’t good enough for a static copy?Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.
This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.
wat
I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.
why can’t you just make a tulpa like a normal person.
well whatever, I’ll ask about the harari.
Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.
what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn’t em dash trigger happy.
now I’m afraid to google farnam street.
I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
I’ve got wordpress sites in production that each do multiple million hits a day. they’re full of some of the worst plugins ever (because wordpress sites living more than a few years seem destined to become hellish katamaris), and still it’s barely at “performance engineering” levels of problem
so when I see $1500/y of hosting? what the fuck are these clowns doing
for comparison: you can get two boxes of tin (together in the ballpark of 32…48 cores, 128GB of RAM, approx 1TB of NVME or 4…8TB of spinnies) at someone like hetzner, with extra IPv4 allocations, for ~$1355/y
I’ve seen media agencies billing in the millions host on less. and venkatesh posts about his blog needing “high end hosting”? the same blog that barely had css or images? absolute clown shit
Paying to run it on someone else’s computer. WPEngine charge $130/month for the level of their Essential plan that’s supposed to handle 100,000 visits/month. That’s $1560/year, which is near enough to his claim that it’s probably what he was on.
the first part wasn’t really a surprise (I am the someone else’s computer in a number of areas), but those numbers… 100k/mo hit cap/target? holy shit. no wonder such fucked fortunes have been made off wordpress
Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.
I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.
Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.
Why would anyone be scared of an empty suit lol
I doubt that this is how it was originally intended but think about all the boosters pointing at an empty suit while saying shit like “you’re being laid off and this is your replacement,” or “I know you’ve been lonely so I set you up on a blind date with this guy,” or even “this is what’s going to solve climate change.” And then imagine looking around and seeing friends, family, the broader media, and government and business leaders listening to them while smiling and nodding.
I believe that ML training is basically an evolutionary process. What does evolution produce most reliably?
Parasites.
You have created things that simulate the social signals of humans, getting us to care about things all out of proportion to what it actually does. It’s like those beetles that live in ant colonies, hacking the smell and social signals of ants so they get babied while providing nothing.
Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character
A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down …
Framing this as a skill issue and not a power issue is a weird choice.
A telling choice perhaps.
