kombookcha

Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa

This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).

Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.

(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)

The person I am referring to is the CEO of Uber. He called this realization that higher token usage did not proportionally increase useful consumer features a "head-exploding moment". That's in his own words.

If you're thinking "that's bad management" then we are in complete agreement. He should have been able to predict this in advance, but evidently he either did not, or is pretending he did not.

The interview is linked in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai...

I should have perhaps said "galling" instead.

After ejecting anyone who spoke out or were even publicly hesistant against the hard swerve into "just do maximal amounts of AI stuff above all else", they're now surprised to find that everyone that remains is dutifully excited about the emperor's new clothes, and yet he remains mysteriously exposed to the breeze.

The other day I had to read a C-suite guy share how he had an epiphany that spending more tokens did not linearly align with more useful features being output by the teams. He was describing it as this breakthrough moment for him, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious that making the KPI "spend more tokens" would result in inefficient token spending, not massive value for the customer.

It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.

I don't disagree. Local politics and unionizing are much more impactful than people realize.

The AI companies and their investors. Full stop.

It's never been a good way to get things done, but when you block off every other venue for change people will be much more willing to take a chance on a high risk option. Violent revolutions aren't usually the first thing people try.

Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.

'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.

I legitimately would rather hear about my coworkers dream than their AI chatlog. At least the dream might be an interesting bit of their subconscious. The unwanted log is just a more annoying way to convey what would otherwise be a single sentence answer.

If the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess there is a certain type of Tolkien nerd who would choose the long listing of elf lineages as the section to have in their pocket for their funeral.

I see your supernerd cred flex, mummified guy!

Full headline is: Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit

Oh wow, I didn't know it was that granular - that's fascinating.

Adding to this, I seem to recall that the specific geological/chemical conditions on the site is consequential for the sorts of glass produced. So presumably, Hiroshmiaite and Trinitite would actually be physically distinct as a material.

As I recall, research on meteorite impacts use the similarly formed Impactite to deduce various things about ancient impact sites. As an aside, I think they also do really elaborate calculations of force and angle of impact based on surveying the spread pattern and distribution of these little glass chunks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impactite

> It seems to know everything

'Seems' is a very dangerous word in this context.

It's important to remember that these stories are orignally an oral tradition that only fairly recently began to be written down. They would have had a myriad of differing versions depending on the preferences of the storyteller, their community and the intended effect on specific audiences.

In a way, retelling these stories in a way that's meaningful to the listeners is the way it always has been. We just have to remember that the darker versions also served a purpose of sense-making, and they can come to serve it again if we need them.

Good on your partner for trying to help those kids.

Ha, that's right! I forgot about that bit.

Man. I do miss Terry Pratchett.

If you genuinely believe this, there is no point to doing anything at all except heroin. Every moment that you aren't dedicating to being on heroin or getting more heroin, to heroinmaxx if you will, is a net loss.

'But what if I run out though' I hear you ask? Simply finish off on a truly heroic dose and sail into oblivion on a wave of bliss that's much better than all your relationships and hopes and dreams. It's real for you, right? If it makes your friends sad, they could just do some heroin about it. More real than real!

Do not willingly become a lotus eater.

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

Creating an addiction-based economy around capturing and monetizing the attention of kids and young people like this will have a cost for society that we will be paying off for generations, even if it literally ended tomorrow.

The opportunity cost alone of all those hours is staggering, without getting into the issues with self esteem, 'brain rot' or the fact that young people increasingly don't dare dance or do hobbies in public because they live in a panopticon of the mind, where everything you do or observe being done is assumed to be either performatively done for an audience, or involves massive personal risk of being surreptitiously recorded for the mockery and amusement of thousands of strangers.

Then there's the gambling, the body image issues, the parasocial influencer grifts... it's no wonder they're feeling burned out and demoralized. They live in a surveillance casino with no exits.

When I worked at a small cinema we would set up the movie to run regardless, because sometimes you would get late-showers buying tickets at the front desk and it's much more trouble to have to speed-start a movie for the projectionist than to be able to do it at the regular schedule. If you start it too late without manually remembering to forward past ads and trailers, you can also risk spilling into the next timeslot causing a pileup of delays. It's far simpler to just start the movie for an empty hall, and let customers join after it's started if they want to.

I'm unsure exactly how the deals with local businesses running ads before the movies are set up, but I could imagine that you're supposed to be running the ads an agreed upon number of times, regardless of ticket sales.

Sometimes in the daytime we would get retirees who would watch a movie and basically loiter around, and occasionally ask if they could catch the end of a different movie running in an empty hall. You'd sometimes let a regular crash an empty screening like this if they bought an extra snack or coffee for it or something.

You only need to be faster than the slowest gazelle in the pack, right?

I recall my old chemistry/physics teacher doing it too - "now THIS guy, he's really greedy for electrons" and stuff like that.

Not with the same reach, but some people kinda could! Specifics depended on where you were in the world, but it existed and to some extent still does. In spite of a very rough decade and a half since 2010 culling many of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-access_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_television_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swindon_Viewpoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_television_in_Austra...

Yeah, I think that's probably correct.

I do somewhat see the value in promoting specific, accessible meditative practices without necessarily using the word meditation for it, simply because it can be needlessly intimidating and put some people off because they come carrying a number of assumptions.

Maybe that same principle does also apply to exercise - some people will do it by accident and have a good time, but still balk at idea of doing capital E Exercise as a distinct activity in itself. Sometimes it really is just a mindset thing.

Somebody else can spin up some AI-generated "AI is good" stories and post those in response. Maybe somebody will deploy respective agents to do both automatically.

The house always wins.

Meditation, like exercise, can be a lot of things.

Choosing a brief walk can be exercise, or a brisk walk that's a little longer - maybe doing some forms of housework can be exercise. But exercise can also be running marathons, swimming laps, playing street hockey, dancing in your kitchen, skateboarding or messing around on the monkey bars. Those would all make you feel your body in various ways, both during and after the fact.

I do think your empty mind train rides can be meditation. The fact that much more intense or demanding forms of practice exists does not invalidate that.

(To belabour the metaphor a bit, regarding potential dangers - if somebody has a knee injury, some forms of exercise will be safer for them than others. Take care of yourself!)

In a just world, an AI consuming Open Source material for training would itself become Open Source, as any other piece of software. There's an ongoing violation of the social contract of people doing things collaboratively, and it is going to massively bite us all in the ass.

I hear you. Topless Quake LAN sweatathon, the sport of gentlemen.

Agreed. I also feel like there is a world of difference between the driver deliberately assuming control at the last second because they notice that an accident is about to happen, and the car itself yielding control unprompted because it thinks an accident is about to happen.

The former is to be expected. The latter seems likely to potentially make an already dangerous situation worse by suddenly throwing the controls to an inattentive driver at a critical moment. It seems like it would be much safer for the autopilot to continue doing its best while sounding a loud alarm to make it clear that something dangerous is happening.