TwoCent

Precisely. Hallucinations were improperly named. A better term is "confabulation," which is telling an untruth without the intent to deceive. Sadly, we can't get an entire industry to rename the LLM behavior we call hallucination, so I think we're stuck with it.

>But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?

It's the first tool that came to hand: I'm sure there are better historical comparisons if I bothered to look. For professional reasons, I was well acquainted with WeWork when they were a big deal. It was clear to many of us in advance of their collapse that WeWork was heading for a hard crash based on their lease commitments and other public data. In this case, public data, such as for OpenAI and Anthropic, strongly suggests that, like WeWork, the economics of the businesses don't make sense. There are some fundamentals that no amount of innovation can overcome. Committing to leases you can't conceivably cover is one of them. Spending $2.35 for every $1 of revenue is clearly another, absent some breakthrough.

WeWork is not a perfect example. But if OpenAI flames out, it will be mentioned in the same breath as WeWork. The reasons are not the same, but they do sort of rhyme.

They're selling a commodity product in a Red Queen's Race. OpenAI, Anthropic, and whatever others get spun up while the gold rush is on are each building costly models at a vast cost to try to get a bit ahead of each other. The economics of this are ugly. The business of building massive LLMs looks more like air transport than the dot com gold rush in the '90s. There will probably be much useful stuff in the wreckage when it's all over, but I've not seen much to inspire confidence that the useful stuff will include profitable companies. This looks like it has all the makings of another WeWork, only this time with an epochal AI winter as the aftermath.

The example from our environment suggests that the apex intelligences in the environment treat all other intelligent agents in only a few ways:

1. Pests to eliminate 2. Benign neglect 3. Workers 4. Pets 5. Food

That suggests that there are scenarios under which we survive. I'm not sure we'd like any of them, though "benign neglect" might be the best of a bad lot.

They are kind of like pacifiers for adults, aren't they? The term "fondleslab" captures that; I believe I first read that moniker years ago in some article on the Register.

Smil's recent "Invention and Innovation" is well worth reading, too. Anything by Smil, really, is excellent food for thought and deeply informative.

Would Mercury be a good candidate, given how far in the sun's gravity well it sits? Perhaps better to start with the asteroid belt.

It depends on the company. It's kind of like a menu item that says "Market Price". You know it's not going to be cheap. You don't know until you ask if the price is less than the value offered.

DeGaulle's observation that "nations do not have friends, only interests" comes to mind.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

It seems plausible that the immune system requires stressors to function well, and the absence of stressors may reduce immune system "strength". Selye's general adaptation syndrome seems applicable here as a first approximation. Muscles atrophy from disuse. Why not also immune systems?

The point seemed to be "soulless investment firms gobble up starter homes". One could make a case from just the evidence in the article that "firms with more capital than they know what to do with overpay for real estate they don't know enough about." Google "Zillow home-flipping business" for a sterling example.

Meanwhile, yes, technology has streamlined the renting experience in positive ways, but the article makes it a net negative. Who wants to deal with a leasing agent?

Two by Joeseph Henrich:

1. The Secret of Our Success https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/9474901

2. The Weirdest People in the World https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/26726468

The first explores the extent to which humans are dependent on culture. It also underscores that we're not as smart as we might think. There's valuable knowledge that accretes culturally over time, and this book was the first to make me consider the ramifications of that on family, business, and community. The second book starts from the premises of the first and highlights the strangeness of Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) cultural norms.

Both books compelled me to consider the power of culture on human behavior and thinking. We're less smart than we think, and there's more knowledge buried within our cultural norms than we realize. I'm not sure it's made me a better problem solver, but it has made me more likely to ask myself "does tradition/norms/etc. suggest a direction for this problem?" Time will tell if that approach leads to better problem solving.

I'll offer a counter-example, to give you a bit of hope. I'm in my 50s. In the last 5 years I've gained one close friend and a handful of new friends in my social circle. Age is no barrier to forming friendships. You must be intentional about it. But new friendship happens throughout our lives.

True. But the focus is entirely different. Gamers interact while engaged in a task: the task is the focus, and communication happens through speech or text. Playing a game and communicating via Discord is a pleasure. Contrast that with a meeting on Zoom or Teams, and the focus shifts. If the screen is filled with little videos of other people, it's mentally exhausting in a way gaming isn't.

I think online meetings I had 10 years ago, where we'd share a desktop but it was voice-only for all participants, were easier on everyone than the current Hollywood Squares presentation of most online meeting applications. Those are mentally and emotionally taxing in ways that gaming is not.

Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" and his collected "Letters on Ethics", in that order, compelled me to re-evaluate. The results have been positive. I recommend the University of Chicago translations: a little pricey for paperbacks, but quite readable.

It's excellent for those of us who aren't atheists, too. I've picked up the recent University of Chicago translation of these, and cultivated the habit of reading a letter or two every morning with my coffee. It's an excellent use of time.

I also found Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" completely recalibrated my thinking about the passage of time and how I spend the time allotted me.

In the book "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction", by Alan Jacobs, he advocates reading "at Whim". It was a welcome antidote to the notion that one ought read a lot and read "great" books. It's a good, quick read that will give some thought-provoking ideas about the reading life.

I never read it as "destroyed by chance". Rather, it was "the pity of Bilbo" (mentioned way back in FoTR, I believe), who did not kill Gollum when he had the chance, that finally catalyzed the destruction of the One Ring.