Aerolfos

> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.

Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...

It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it

> This is an article that only cites Zitron’s opinions about subjective model quality. You’re tisk-tisking people to be objective about a bunch of words saying that the author’s opinions are better opinions than the guy he’s talking about OP

Oh it's not just the author's opinions. They're the opinions of a bunch of LLMs he checked, too. Much better.

> Europeans would be far less likely to tip (or tip generously).

Southern europeans tip, there wouldn't be much difference there

Northern ones it depends, they don't tip at home but they usually do on vacations to southern europe (where tipping culture very much exists). Though some of that also has to do with currency conversions, at least historically, even if the tradition has stuck past the euro being introduced. So maybe that's why they don't tip when it comes to dollars?

Deeply ironic that it sure looks like taking the original post, pasting it to an AI with the message "make this angrier" and then simply copy-pasting the output back to the website. In direct violation of their own (supposed) principles.

And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")

> In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications.

It also doesn't quite come around to the idea of something you might call "convenient" obsolescence. Not planned, not actively colluded to happen (the Phoebus cartel did do this, but are one of few examples), but very convenient for the manufacturer when optimizing for other factors (mostly cost) instead of lifespan.

> Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal.

It is illegal.

> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

> [...]

> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies

> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.

The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.

> Astronomers have pretty good terminology for stars,

...do they though?

The "proper" terminology says all main sequence stars are dwarves, but nobody calls them all that in practice. Some astronomers insist on saying "yellow dwarf", but some don't really bother. In general having the only two kinds of star be "giant" or "dwarf" is contentious, but it's also contentious that there isn't a name for whatever is in the "middle". "Main-sequence star" is a broader category and doesn't apply. They're all "stars", obviously, so that isn't specific enough.

The only decent terminology is for the spectral classes, but those only work as long as you look at spectra. The moment you try to figure out what the theory says those stars would look like as proper 3D objects, things get very messy. You also immediately get the issue that star size and brightness goes O>B>A>F>G>K>M. So... it's alphabetic except it isn't. And C is something completely different and doesn't fit the brightness classification at all.

Actually, that is the IAU stance. And their definition for exoplanet includes small, non-rounded objects orbiting stars which would be asteroids (or comets or whatever) if they happened to be around the Sun.

All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...

But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way

They're not very toxic, but my experience is that it's a small, elite community and they're very good at the game.

You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.

> Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.

They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".

By... another AI model. Which uses statistical generation to decide whether the answer is likely to be accurate or not.

Sounds like Spain all right.

The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc.

But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years...

There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.

Because it's not open for modification by the general public? (emphasis general, not just technically minded people)

Manufacturers need to pick a lane - either fully open, and then people who need it can harden their own stuff (and at least be aware of the tradeoff), or fully closed and secure.

This in-between where cars are invasive privacy nightmares that spy on you at all driving hours, and are insecure nightmares that will give up that data to anyone remotely invested, is the worst case scenario, obviously.

From their mission statement:

> I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry.

Someone actually sensible, excellent.

Yeah, probably.

One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.

And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.

So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.

(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)

What does that have to do with anything?

Is reading comprehension really this bad nowadays?

> > I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige

> Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.

Meanwhile, the prestige to be gained/lost from supporting/doubting the big mainstream thing is immense, and the incentives are actually in completely the opposite direction...

Anyway, on that topic The Line Goes Up video covers the arguments about prestige far more extensively and far more elaborately than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

But it's very much not the doubters who are worrying about prestige in crypto and NFTs, and probably not with AI either.

> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs.

The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point, because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so much better every month that you personally can replace developers without even trying as a completely non-technical person with basic writing skills.

Given the hype and extreme claims being made, the fact that he remains ignorant and gets practically no use out of LLMs immediately disproves those statements. The counterargument boiling down to "you're using it wrong" is actually just a further indictment of Sam Altman and his like, because it shouldn't be possible to use LLMs wrong!

The rest, well, the hype needs to die before anyone can make sane estimates of what LLM tech can do for us in various fields. Right now it's all a complete mess.

Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Either they're BS, or the people making these statements are self-incriminating to a terrible degree, either they don't care about their work or are outputting a very low level of quality and being amazed at how "great" and how much better AI output is than their own

All the options are extremely depressing

> * Valuation of the sp500, the hyperscalers and Nvidia is (mostly) reasonable based on earnings

That is a hell of a statement to make (their earnings are mostly negative, after all, except nvidia). Would require exceptional evidence, which doesn't seem to be there.

> * Build out of infrastructure is demand-driven, hyperscalers are not building just for future demand that would not materialize

This does not reconcile with the large amount of empty datacenters and GPUs which have not been installed: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense-ad...

> * OpenAI, anthropic & co can be overvalued but that does not mean there's a systemic bubble

OK? It could also mean there is.

> I think this underestimates contagion effects and the fact that demand appears to be subsidized and may disappear quickly, but it's just MHO.

Even with subsidized demand Microsoft still ended up cancelling over a gigawatt(!) of planned datacenters already back in 2024. But yeah, their arguments are missing a lot.

Or Nier, which are inspired by and connected to Shadow of the Colossus in the same way as SotC is connected to Zelda (explicitly mentioned in the article)

> a big box store in a giant parking lot

You know it's bad when stores don't even "have" parking lots, but are "in" them.

It does, but hey the post above was complaining about recommendation apps in general so, yeah.

Sponsored fear-mongering propaganda, why is this here?

> Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.

Youtube music thinks "videogame music" is a genre and lumps them all together, if you make the mistake of including even one song from a game OST any recommendations go out the window.

For example, a "chill" mix with videogame music in it will happily start including Doom Eternal tracks because "they're the same thing, right?"

> > Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.

> Are you sure about that?

Incredible statement to make, not only did machine learning exist, but neural networks existed!

The first perceptrons were built in the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

If you take a machine learning class, what is the most basic network you will probably build/learn about as an introduction? The MLP - multi-layer perceptron.

It's not even remotely obscure to know ML existed in the 50s and 60s.

They have common ancestors, but it really should be "the crocodiles had split from the avian lineage", with avians including dinosaurs at that moment in time

AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.

> Or is it more young men vs the establishment where the establishment wins the vast majority of the time but occasionally a young dude makes the right longshot bet?

Seems like the latter - except that not only describes how people perceive gambling, but the entire economy considering startups, silicon valley, the current crop of tech billionaires and how they made their fortunes, etc.

So, why not gamble on crypto, NFTs, or prediction markets? Might as well go for the longshots since everything is a longshot anyway