runarberg

Unsurprising stuff can still suck, and we can still complaint about it.

All the rich people become bankrupt or otherwise loose their political capital, new politicians are elected in that owe more to workers and thus enact anti-capitalist policy to win over the loyalty of workers.

That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.

Or capitalism ends in a big messy fight.

Looks like the account has been banned. I think it is very likely it was an AI.

I would think the opposite. Zitron’s position is in fact much easier to defend because it is actually falsifiable. He makes solid predictions which can (and often do) turn out wrong. If you make a vague prediction you are not falsifiable and your position adds nothing but fearmongering and propaganda.

Note I expressly labelled my “Marxist generalities” as an aside (kind of in an attempt to make my biases clear). You don‘t need to refute it if you don‘t want to. And even if you did very solidly refute them to the point of me saying “I was wrong about everything”, my actual point would still stand. Ed Zitron should in fact not short the market if he wants him self taken seriously.

For me it is inertia. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010. It works well enough that I haven‘t bothered to switch. I may finally switch if decide to fill to distro with AI crap.

I recommend buying your own CDs (at your local music store, directly from the band when you attend their concerts, or on Bandcamp/Discogs), ripping them, and putting them on the local file system of your MP3 player, phone, your car’s SD card, etc. Sometimes if you buy a vinyl record it comes with a convenient download code, and if it doesn’t digital albums are very cheap on Bandcamp.

I also recommend tuning regularly onto your favorite radio station (mine is KEXP Seattle; and Rás 2 in Iceland) particularly when they have live performance to discover new music.

Shorting the market is a terrible idea if you want people to take you seriously. „Of course Ed Zitron is speaking against the datacenter build-out, he has financial interests that the whole thing collapses,“ people would say.

Aside: I also fundamentally disagree with you, I think shorting is never a good idea, nor is participating any type of market game a good idea. These market games are a rigged game where the owners of capital engage in systematic exploitation of the working classes. Everyone who makes money by gaming the market made it because hundreds of worker did not get their fair share for their work.

Because it is dumb.

The behavior of gamblers is a poor measure of ... well, anything. People listen to experts because of their expertise, not because they gambled their money on a bet.

I expect to see this laundry folding robot when I can take the hyperloop between LA and San Francisco.

To be fair the chances of the laundry folding robot is quite a bit higher then that of the hyperloop, but my point is that I believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I will be skeptical that this AI lunacy we are in now is directly responsible for laundry folding robots, that is I think we could have laundry folding robots without those trillions of dollars of datacenter investments and training of LLMs.

This is the story I hear over and over again when an expert evaluates using AI for an introductory course inside their own field. The thing is full of mistakes, bad or wrong information, and unhelpful advises.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdj_Fm4XM60

If a person writes a textbook, a tutorial, a blog post etc. which is that bad it won‘t be recommended by peers and a beginner will either not know it exists, or find see the bad reviews from peers. The beginner will then look for a different textbook, tutorial, blog post etc.

When self learning with AI, you don‘t get that. The best advice a peer can give you, is simply, do not use AI to learn stuff you don‘t already know.

More and more evidence is surfacing that suggests AI addiction is real. It may be as simple as that Nicholas Polson has developed a severe case of AI addiction.

There is a name for this phenomena. It is called bullshit jobs[1]. The author David Graeber who coined the term argued that over half of jobs were bullshit jobs, so your 70% estimate is not far from what some actual scholars in the field also estimate.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

By this metric then leaded gasoline and the Deep water horizon oil spill, and Reagan era deregulations were also transformative, so was the Apollo mission, the SETI program and even Eurovision. Arguably Alchemy was also transformative even though it was unsuccessful, because the scientific funding that went into various attempts led into many vital discoveries.

If this the criteria we are using form something being transformative, then being transformative is truly unremarkable in this context, to the point of being a distraction.

Money would circulate at least as much if used for climate solutions and even more so if given to workers. The AI build out is not benefitting workers, like hardly at all, it creates a dismal amount of jobs, and is raising utility prices for many of us.

But the technology also doesn’t have to be transformative either. I for one am not convinced.

The two things being true may as well be: LLM will not be transformative and the LLM business is mangled in terms of ROIC vs CoC.

In fact given the behavior of AI companies, I actually consider it more likely then not that the effects of the technology is severely over-hyped. I for one do not trust the words of the people who mangle their business in terms of ROIC and CoC. Why should I?

If you truly believe that the cost of financing should not be included in your net loss (I don‘t know anything about money, so I don‘t know whether you should or not) $8 billion in net loss is also mindboggingly large number.

As a member of the working class who believes this money is coming from systemic exploitation of the working classes, I hate it that Anthrhopic can just loose $8 billion like that. Those $8 billion could have been used elsewhere, including to mitigate the effects of the climate disaster, to educate the youth, towards social security, or to increase the wages of the working people who could have used it to pay rent, or go to the cinema, or a family trip to visit their grandma who lives in Wyoming.

The same authority that allows me to claim that teleportation transporters, hyperdrives, and holoemitters do not exist and cannot be built using existing technology.

Logical fallacy, of the worst kind.

Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

Second, plenty of stuff is possible to build, and is not built for one reason or another no matter how powerful. We never built our nukes in space for example. And there is exactly one reason why nukes in space was never built, and that reason is that we agreed not to.

Party A is responsible, and it is not even a question.

Before we had tech companies for which crime is legal, you couldn’t just put to market a dangerous (and addictive) product that will break the law in unpredictable ways.

Like selling a car that may automatically accelerate to 150 km/h if you make three left turns and turn on the windshield wipers.

I predict we will see more and more of these convoluted rationales (i.e. excuses). All these basically boil down to: “I know AI is crap, but I have found a way to make it useful. Trust me.”

I am gonna appeal to Occam’s razor here and say, the integral variable here is AI, and the only variable you need to know is AI. The problem is AI.

I am a psychological monist, I do not believe there is any difference between our body and our mind, that our minds, just like our bodies, can be fully explained as a physical phenomena. I share this philosophy with lots of people, including prominent philosophers of mind.

There is nothing wrong with me.

I am not a teacher, nor even an expert in the pedagogical sciences, as a layperson I can point out what looks wrong, but I need not know what is better.

Maybe asking teachers is better. Maybe a robust metric across generations and across population simply does not exist, and cannot exist, and we just have to accept that we cannot compare the education of kids in America today with the education of kids in Guatemala a decade ago.

You find sources written by experts and vetted by peers.

This is not very hard, and we all used to know how to do this not 3 years ago.

How do you know the explanations were correct?

No. My take is that test scores are a lousy measure of education. Maybe students are indeed learning less, and that would be worrying, but while we measure that using test score we simply cannot control for test taking ability.

Copyright violation ≠ theft of labor.

There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.

Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.

Mental activity is a subset of physical activity.