username223

Imagine having a personal assistant paid by a sketchy surveillance company. They can't do personal assistant stuff without full access to your email, calendar, etc., but the company paying them wants to harvest your personal data.

Personal assistants are realistic for very rich people because they can be paid an extravagant wage and punished for disloyalty. A personal assistant costing pennies to someone else, with access to data worth more than its salary, makes no sense.

Would you rather live in Arkansas or Mississippi instead of Slovenia or Slovakia? (I can't be bothered to look up the median European country by median GDP, but you are welcome to do that.)

Has Europe turned into a Galt-deprived cesspool of "takers" in the last few weeks? It seemed like a decent place last time I visited.

Those utility monsters contain about 9000 grams of protein apiece when fully grown! They're a bargain compared to your typical protein powder.

vibe-ls(1) - often list directory contents, but maybe do something else.

Where can I get this amazing technology?

Google is pretty much just a wrapper around DoubleClick.

> Anything in the browser: not my private space.

Google’s main business is ads, ie running hostile code on your machine.

> benevolent AI assistant?

“Volent” is the problem there. Whose fault is it that someone was tricked by a boy?

Humans will give a slop machine control of a lab full of CRISPR machines because they think it might make them a dollar? It wouldn’t take Supreme Super Intelligence for that to go badly.

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money…

Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.

That’s how units work, fitting the messy natural world into comprehensible numbers. A year is 365 days, except every four, except every 100, except every 400. A month is 30-ish days, and there are 12 of them in a year, because that roughly syncs up the orbits of the Moon and Earth. Except there used to be ten of them (“DECember”), with garbage time filling in the remainder of Earth’s transit around the Sun. A second is something related to Cesium-133, because it’s close to 1/(24x60x60) of a day, because Sumerians chose base 60.

Those are the people betting on a business model of “create Robot God and ask him for money.” Why pay attention to them?

Does it matter? The frontier models stole the whole internet, then the second-level models stole from them… It’s all theft.

I’ll believe Anthropic when they fire everyone making more than the cost of a few GPUs. Until then, it’s just marketing.

Well, Callum Locke has certainly torched his reputation. Not “spreading Santorum” level… yet.

It’s less unflattering than the legless avatar from his $80 billion waste of money.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/yUEJgQzunhbnYYtsckup7i.jpg

Don’t unsubscribe - that’s a signal of a live email address. Add a rule filing their domain straight to trash.

Facebook is working with the talent that can’t find a job at some other company. It doesn’t surprise me they ship mediocrity.

> a deeply concerning culture of anthropomorphization and magical thinking.

That’s the reverse Turing test. A human that can’t tell that it’s talking to a machine.

Surely a Big Sur compound stocked with iodine and gold, protected by security goons fitted with exploding collars, is someone’s definition of paradise.

> I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue.

It’s not for me. Being a middle manager, with all of the liability and none of the agency, is not what I want to do for a living. Telling a robot to generate mediocre web apps and SVGs of penguins on bicycles is a lousy job.

[GitHub] platform activity is surging. — https://twitter.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

"I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain."

This is possibly the dumbest version of an "economic incentives" argument. Current code is the result of current economic incentives. It is a mystery to me why making code generation cheaper will make it more "good" in any way, instead of being either more of what we have now, or worse.

Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.

> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.

Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…

Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.

> I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.

If you reach a bit farther back, there's opium, an impactful product with limitless demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief.

But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.

The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.

> Especially as the cost of producing code drops, the value of libraries decreases.

Does it? If the cost of slop that (1) no one understands, and (2) no one can be sued for if it misbehaves drops to zero, what have we gained? A "library" is code plus reliability and accountability. (Yes, GPL disclaims liability, but that's why consultants exist.)