kombookcha

It's hard to see how they're gonna break even otherwise. The market position is only useful if it's also bringing in enough revenue for them to stay afloat and competitive.

Maybe there's a layer of 'whales' they can access, like a premium tier for businesses that's got more bells and whistles than the living room variety? Other than that, who knows.

It's approaching a very strange situation where people make overly wordy and bloated AI generated content and other people try to use AI to compress it back into useful pellets vaguely corresponding to the actual prompts used to generate the initial content. Which were the only bits anybody cared about in the first place.

One guy pays the AI to dig a hole, the other guy pays the AI to fill in the hole. Back and forth they go, raising the BNP but otherwise not accomplishing anything.

Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.

But biodynamic farming does also emphasise the kind of cohesive view of your crops as an interacting system that you'd find in modern permaculture. It's just that biodynamic implies a bunch of other spirituality stuff that you wouldn't normally consider part of permaculture.

When you tell somebody to touch grass, you're basically telling them that they're becoming overly swept up in something on their screen to the detriment of their mental health and social wellbeing. It might as well be "go call your dad", because the gist is just for you to remove yourself from a situation that's clearly causing you to disconnect from reality, either to your detriment or the annoyance of people around you.

Like that's the baseline that's relevant whether you're saying it to some kid screaming in a video game lobby or some middle aged dude who's going off his rocker in the facebook comment section of his local newspaper. 'You're embarrassing yourself and you need to get some perspective, because the things you're saying don't make sense, and you'll see that if you walk away from the machine for a bit.'

That's not a thing a contemporary LLM can do. At best it will be able to know which buzzwords are popular, which will then immediately deteriorate their usefulness once everybody starts generating AI-optimized noise for their LinkedIn profiles.

Reading this you almost get the sense that this compounding workload was deliberately cruel and backbreaking. Is this some kind of hazing done to new hires, or does EY just have an unbelievably toxic work culture in general?

I can't immediately recall any sci-fi elements from The Archers myself, so that checks out. Anything to do with the lost precursor civilization tends more towards the archaic future-tech. Like in City Of The Lost God there's a magical weapon that's basically an operational laser gun. Or The Island of the Frozen Seas, which has a palace that looks like a downed spaceship complete with sarcophagi/crypods with people in them.

And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)

A very fun example of this theme is in the franco-belgian fantasy comic series Thorgal, which is set in a Conan-esque fantasy world with all the expected trappings, but in which the gods are highly advanced alien entities and magic is often framed as manipulating extremely complex and powerful heirloom technologies that the living have no frame of reference for as anything other than magic.

The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.

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

In my personal experience, pretty much. Theatrically feigned agile is extremely aggravating and grating. Actual agile is in my experience fine and doesn't produce that kind of strong aversion because it 'just is'.

I don't think people are really unhappy with the manifesto, but with applied Agile as it is experienced out in the world where you're having your workday ordered by high powered productivity consultants and LinkedIn-brained middle managers.

What a fun summertime commute! It never occurred to me to use it as transport instead of just working out :)

It can cause overflow from flooding sewer drains, which runs off into the canals. If that happens you'll want to wait a day or two for it to clear up.

It's such an aggressively obnoxious way for huge swaths of infrastructure to become useless wastelands of generative nonsense that I would have been amused if I'd read it in Snow Crash.

Billions of dollars and rare minerals and manpower all going towards drowning the greatest communication tool in human history in noise. It's like kessler syndrome for the internet, except we are actively spending money to make it happen.

What a pointless, useless waste.

"According to Cowart, many of the same freelance writing platforms that have AI detection software in place are simultaneously hiring people to edit content produced by chatbots. That means in some corners of the copywriting ecosystem, almost everything revolves around efforts to avoid the appearance of artificial intelligence.

"They're selling AI content and paying you to fix it, and at the same time they're sending you emails about how to write like a human so you don't trigger their AI detector," Cowart says. "It's so insulting." Worse, the detectors are regularly updated to keep up with ongoing changes from the companies who make AI chatbots, which means the rules about what might get your writing flagged as AI constantly shift. "It's frustrating, because there are a million ways to say the same thing in English, but which one is more human? I don't like the guessing," she says."

Infinite AI slop getting churned out and people getting paid a pittance to make it sound less like AI, in order to trick other people who are actively working to not be fed the slop. What an absurd and depressing state of affairs.

There's surviving, and there's thriving - tardigrades could probably hang out in a Mars crater for a long time, but what they'd need to sustainably live on an alien planet is something to eat during the periods where conditions are right for them to thaw out. If there's nothing for them to wake up to, they won't be making anymore tardigrades.

Say, a very hardy algae that could make it in some suitable microbiome - like humid cracks in the rocks, or a fungus that could hang out in underground caverns shielded from UV radiation.

If we are trying to seed a place with life where we can't reliably go ourselves, it seems important that the 'colony' should become self-sustaining immediately-ish.

(Also I find the idea of launching swarms of micro-pods loaded up with hardy, tiny lifeforms endearing - like throwing seed bombs over a tall fence :) )

Yeah, it relies on a fundamentally faulty assumption that most people feel the same way they do or at least are adjacent enough to be open to their weird fantasy about instant ethnic violence arising from a brief disruption of normal operations. The 'silent majority is on our side but won't speak out' is a necessary pillar propping up their worldview, but doesn't survive contact with reality.

The reality is that people tend to get closer with their local communities during crisis. Especially if that crisis is 'neo nazi dipshits broke the power grid and now we have to go next door and see if they're okay or need to borrow some drinking water from us'. Even if they succesfully fucked up the power for a week it would be a net negative for them.

Crazy how all Teslas have been self-driving robotaxis earning passive income for their owners since 2016. Truly this man will never do a flim flam. ;)

Does it? It hasn't enriched my personal or professional life. I just have to kick my way through a bunch of AI slop on the daily now. It's been a net negative on signal-to-noise in every arena I can think of.

I can't wait. There are so many pointless or directly insulting AI 'features' around now, and they suck. LinkedIn trying to write my messages for me. Outlook is trying to write my emails. Instagram has a deeply cursed AI button to "make it funnier".

I hope the stock market will give all of these people an atomic wedgie for creating the most pointless garbage to ever pass before human eyes.

The hype dying off will be good for literally everybody except the investors. It'll mean fewer people trying to jam it into products as feature bloat where it has no business being, or trying to make it do tasks that it's unsuited for.

The sooner people start to find it boring, the sooner we can stop wasting time on all the hot air and just use the bits that work.

I'm with you. Every time I've used LLMs in my work, I've ended up using more time tidying up after the robot than it would have taken to just do the work myself from the start. I can believe that there are some tasks that it can do very fast, but my experience is that if you're using it for anything that matters, you can't trust it enough to let it do it on its own, and so you just end up doing the work twice.

It's like having an unusually fast-but-clumsy intern, except interns learn the ropes fast and understand context.

The only reason I can't go full tinfoil on this is that it takes a hell of a lot of things working out to fake your death by sailing into a fortuitous freak tornado. How would you even plan and execute that? If he'd just disappeared from the boat in the night or something it would be a different story.

But it sure is weird as hell.

>why the obsession with Elon

Elon is notorious for chasing the limelight and keeping it on him personally more so than the product. Most billionaires are content with doing this type of stuff fairly quietly, hence they attract less attention.

If you do shit for attention all the time you're probably going to get more of it, but it won't necessarily be flattering or directed in the way you want.

As long as you can consistently get enough bag holders through the door for your buddies to cash out with a tidy profit before everything peters out, they won't care that you're a serial flim-flam man. An uncomfortably large amount of alleged VC business acumen in tech is just being a gifted corporate hypeman without that many scrouples.

Anyway, I don't blame you for being skeptical, the Flow Monorail is really more of a Shelbyville idea...

If you ever feel like going back, the Divide Et Impera overhaul mod really, really elevates Rome II into a great game in my opinion. Very, very strongly recommended.

One angle I read elsewhere is that a variety of 'forever chemicals' have been accumulating for some decades now and we may have reached a saturation level where it's noticeably impacting people born into this environment. But it's difficult to sift through, since the effects may not be any one chemical, but a combination of factors or even some kind of interaction when these things are jostling around together inside a growing human.

It would be so insanely cool.

Such a strange situation too - they're right there in front of us, but we can't have them, and it almost feels too good to be true that we might be able to read them one day.

This reminds me of a lovely joke about two economists on a desert island creating an economic miracle of GDP-per-capita growth by repeatedly paying eachother to eat sand.

IIRC sunflowers store heavy metals in their fatty tissues, which means it's particularly concentrated in their seeds, so if you're using them to pull heavy metals out of your soil you should probably be sending the wilted plant away at the end of the season, seeds and all.

I have been very curious to try a Gros Michel after learning that the common artifical banana flavor is supposed to taste like them, not like the post-Panama Disease bananas.

I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.