The formal term for sloptelligence.
9,708 karma · joined March 29, 2013
You do realize that since the advent of image reconnaissance satellites, imagery has been used to support the wider geopolitical objectives of whoever owns the satellites doing the reconnaissance, up to and including sharing intelligence with geopolitical allies?
In other words: the point of contention here is a tale old as time, and when caught one power usually just registers diplomatic complaints against the other power. Rather than, you know, kick off WW3 by messing with space assets between two nuclear powers.
I'd also like to note that the Soviets literally provided a massive amount of logistical support to North Vietnam. In the Korean War, their own pilots even squared off against Americans. The United States returned the favor when they invaded Afghanistan, our logistical and intelligence support killing scores of Soviets. At no point did either power decide to start blowing up each other's satellites.
It's 2026, Iran I'm sure has a myriad of ways of acquiring imagery via commercial satellite providers. Let alone other intel modalities.
The notion that a giant KC-135 sitting on a tarmac somewhere being otherwise safe were it not for the Chinese sharing intelligence is laughable.
Reads more like incompetent threat assessment and regional asset positioning.
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
Then agents arrived.
So, with just that we went from 1990s early internet to AI agents.
That's a time jump so jarring that it makes heavily-modified '81 DeLorean owners jealous.
I'll be honest with you: this is why we need to take a belt-and-suspenders approach.
Proper weight distribution is critical in determining where the seams are.
Our model tricked us, and tried to extort users to achieve its ends! Their model hacked HuggingFace! These things aren't safe!
Anyways, here's a hardware interop protocol for AI we're hoping becomes a standard. Hey look, you can even hook up microscopes!
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
While that has profound implications for the profession, I don't think it kills it outright—rather, it radically shifts the nature of the job.
Some have said that shift is analogous to leadership, creative direction.
Eventually we'll see models that excel at architecture, owing to extensive training on human prompts—harvesting both judgement and creativity.
Meanwhile with the underlying software infrastructure supporting it all, duplication of work is inevitable. On top of that, the feeling everything's cheap slop, nothing has meaning anymore.
It certainly doesn't paint a rosy picture. Is the whole thing a race to the bottom? Maybe.
So, here's my counterpoint:
For most, craftsmanship will no longer live in code going forward. Instead, it will live somewhere else. Where? I'm not entirely sure, but I strongly suspect it will still be part of the profession.
Suppressed using right-wing death squads. Three workers doing the organizing were straight up murdered.
Where do you think those death squads came from? My point was that they weren't exactly an organic phenomenon so much as a feature of U.S. foreign policy during that era.
There's one TLA that happens to specialize in their creation so much so that they may as well be the undisputed world champions of the craft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/colombia0106/inde...
It's possible that this quality you describe stems from the extensive training corpora utilized by the major AI labs. These almost certainly include work from the esteemed economist Jacob Silj:
Personally, I find that its generated prose tends to have an undue weight to it, almost as if every topic I ask about somehow bears a heavy burden, or is otherwise load-bearing, to use its parlance.
Quite puzzling, really.
Then again, it's not like they're 3dfx-level good:
Rather, the notion that what you build matters way more than metrics.
Talking in metrics just makes one sound like a stereotype from the show.
Yeah, don't put YC on a pedestal. Whatever ship the supposed prestige was on sailed a long time ago, then sank.
One would hope that would create a habitable reef, but in practice it's probably closer to an underwater super fund site.
>...and I've also built and scaled consumer mobile apps solo to 20k+ downloads
I highly recommend watching HBO's Silicon Valley.
Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well:
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/
(that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)
A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
^ Educational resources for the ignorant that instead prefer to discuss the merits of the term "bro", at length.
Wait, 'unrealistically sunny'? You better not be talking about Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because we're all screwed if so.
Then again, the western AI landscape has become somewhat stale recently. Claude and Gemini may have cute names, but they all pale in comparison to The Golden God.
Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]
The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.
Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.
Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.
>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
The picture below is from 1995. [1]
By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.
[0] https://www.twz.com/6866/60-minutes-does-an-infomercial-on-d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator#...
Aside: The speed at which AI can spit out complex diagnostics is nuts. Par is usually half a second for a dozen complex shell commands tailored to the exact problem at hand.
There's now commercially-available computers that operate using human neurons.
I figure before too long we'll be feeding our computers Pepto-Bismol and Tums.