lorecore

I think it makes sense. Think of McDonald's or Katy Perry as the bare minimum quality a human will accept. To go even slightly less is to become unacceptable (hence, uncanny valley). There's lots of room for things to be better though, so 20X improvement is possible but 0.5X reduction in quality means it's completely worthless.

I think it's a sliding scale. I love a well cooked meal and would never eat McDonalds, but I could see how someone who does eat at McDonalds wouldn't want to live off Soylent. Maybe a better way to put it is that Katy Perry is on the right side of the uncanny valley.

That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.

I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.

I'm a huge roundabout fan, but this does indeed look nasty. Seattle area driving in general is pretty bad. There's an exit on the 5 in downtown Seattle that's on the far left lane (Seneca street I believe) that feels like putting your life on the line every time you need to take it.

Palestinian land is where they were before being ethnically cleansed since the Nakba.

This is blatantly false. Palestinians are indigenous to Palestine. No one is indigenous to Israel, which was created in 1948. Israel is a colony, defined by its non-indigenous population.

Zionism itself is the colonial movement exploiting Palestinian resources. 100% of Israel is on Palestinian land.

The Palestinians are absolutely indigenous to Palestine and they were absolutely ethnically cleansed from their homeland by Zionists:

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

The Palestinians are absolutely indigenous to Palestine. Israel is a synthetic European creation, no one is indigenous to Israel.

The Manhattan Institute is hardly a non-biased source. It was literally founded by the director of the CIA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey

Sounds like a great way to lower housing costs.

Miami? Have you checked home insurance rates lately? The thought of these NYC second home owners getting gutted by the next hurricane is rather amusing though.

Capitalism is certainly one lever, but were we a communist country, I would still be afraid of the same thing. Centralization of power and ideology driving technological progress is in essence what I think we should all worry about.

AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.

I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.

I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).

I think the 1940s war time culture is pretty distinct. Aside from that, I agree, those are probably aesthetically the most similar of the bunch.

Yes, but you decide when to move from your owned home. My point is landlords can and do cause moving “churn” when you rent above and beyond when you’d move voluntarily.

I have, which is why I'm immune to hasbara.

Moving around a lot incurs its own costs. Time, transportation, movers, deposits (which you're unlikely to get fully returned), new furniture... I think it's an additional "hidden" cost to renting that doesn't get talked about much.

I feel like the last 30 years are significantly less distinctive than the prior 30 (actually 70+) years. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all had iconic and partitioned cultures that are instantly recognizable. I feel like that started to fade a bit in the 90s (what I call the Pottery Barn decade). The 2000s have felt more "alive" to me than the 90s but they're also significantly more post-modern and less distinctive. I consider the 1980s "peak humanity", prior to mega capitalism and data driven marketing enabled by the rise of computing power. I don't think we could ever go back to an iconic and focused cultural decade like say, the 1960s.

The IDF shouldn't even exist, it's a formalization of Zionist terror gangs like Irgun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun

That's irrelevant to the conversation since Israel is carpet bombing civilians.

Documented by IDF terrorists.

Of course it is, and it's very well documented.

It was Google's own code of ethics that stated that they had a ban on building AI weapons. They dropped it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx2zjo

It was Google who claimed to be something and ultimately rug pulled a very important promise.

Working with Israel is going to ultimately be a liability. Microsoft fired it's head of Israel division for helping Israel conduct mass survilence:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/microsoft-fires-head...

Firing someone for trying to stop the company from engaging in violations of international law (not to mention basic human values), is increasingly looking untenable.

I don't think that's accurate. I think every C suite in the country is looking to do away with labor's leverage as much as possible. I think this is a cultural thing more than anything else, C suite + investors looking to get rid of those pesky humans required to prop up their lifestyles. AI is the most credible path toward that. Short, medium or long term returns be damned, this is a reconfiguration of society and they want to shed what they consider to be baggage.

The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).

Not all tokens are created equal. It's easy to use a ton of tokens by having agents work together in parallel. That's basically the equivalent as people spending time in meetings, hardly a productivity win. As with everything in development, results matter, how you get there doesn't (unless you're a bad manager).

It's not mentioned in the article but one thing I constantly struggle with when laying out my office is facing the desk toward the wall (like he originally had it) vs. facing toward the room (the "digital" side of his desk now). I don't like facing the wall but I find when I face the room the monitor totally blocks my view and it kind of looks like ass from the other side. This guy did way better cable management than I have done but still, you're looking at the back side of a monitor like a huge 2001 style monolith, especially if your monitor is black.

I still don't have a good solution for this, and curious what others are doing.