You could try getting laid off, scrambling for a year trying to get back into a tech position, start delivering Amazon packages to make ends meet, and despair at the prospect of reskilling in this economy. I… would not recommend it.

It looks like there are a weirdly large number of medical technician jobs opening up? I wonder if they’re ahead of the curve on the AI hype cycle.

1. Replace humans with AI
2. Learn that AI can’t do the job well
3. Frantically try to replace 2-5 years of lost training time

I’ve seen it pick up lately, particularly in non-sneer-adjacent spaces, but it’s definitely recent and I’m not sure how common it really was, which is a shame because I love it.

If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.

Scandals like that of Builder.ai - which should have their own code word, IAJI (It’s Actually Just Indians) - become more and more common[…]

This is just a strictly worse version of David’s AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.

It’s history; sometimes stuff just doesn’t happen. And precisely because saying so is less fun than the alternative, some of us have to.

Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don’t just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn’t choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.

Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you’re willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they’re called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your “natural language” prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you’re doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.

There’s something particularly galling about “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”. The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.

Psssh. We all know Ron wasn’t a character, because the only people capable of character are smarmy fascists and those capable of becoming smarmy fascists after one points out how their whole life is actually dumb.

Everyone else is just an NPC. You know, like in real life.

It feels very strange to see this kind of statistic get touted, since a 50% success rate would be absolutely unacceptable for one of those software engineers and it’s not suggested that if given more time the AI is eventually getting there.

Rather, the usual fail state is to confidently present a plausible-looking product that absolutely fails to do what it was supposed to do, something that would get a human fired so quickly.

I mean, arguably an open FTP server would have been better because how many kids these days could actually use an FTP client?

I don’t know. Based on what they’re describing I think it would probably fail in the direction of being deeply boring rather than really getting into the wild nonsense that the concept deserves. Now, it may be salvageable with the introduction of some robotic silhouettes, but given these people’s penchant for never shutting the hell up even that may not be a good fit.

Gotta get those clicks where you can, amirite?

Damn you, Scott! Stop making me agree with people who created blockchain-based dating apps!

Neopets at least brought joy to a generation of nascent furries. Copilot is fixing to have the exact opposite impact on internet infrastructure.

The way rationalists use “priors” and other bayesian language is closer to how cults use jargon and special meanings to isolate members and tie them more closely to the primary information source (the cult leader). It also serves as a way to perform allegiance to the cult’s ideology, which is I think what’s happening here

Grumble grumble. I don’t think that “optimizing” is really a factor here, since a lot of times the preferred construct is either equivalent (such that) or more verbose (a nonzero chance that). Instead it’s more likely a combination of simple repetition (like how I’ve been calling everyone “mate” since getting stuck into Taskmaster NZ) and identity performance (look how smart I am with my smart people words).

When optimization does factor in its less tied to the specific culture of tech/finance bros than it is a simple response to the environment and technology they’re using. Like, I’ve seen the same “ACK” used in networking and in older radio nerds because it fills an important role.

What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat?

Maybe like with standard cannibalism they lose the ability to post after being consumed?

Maybe “storyteller” would be more accurate? Like, the prompt outputs were pretty obviously real and I can totally buy that he asked it to write an apology letter while dicking around waiting for Replit to restore a backup, but the question becomes whether he was just goofing off and playing into his role to make the story more memable or whether he was actually that naive.

Ouch. Also, I’m raging and didn’t even realize I had barbarian levels.

I feel like the greatest harm that the NYT does with these stories is not inflicting allowing the knowledge of just how weird and pathetic these people are to be part of the story. Like, even if you do actually think that this nothingburger “affirmative action” angle somehow matters, the fact that the people making this information available and pushing this narrative are either conservative pundits or sad internet nazis who stopped maturing at age 15 is important context.

Honestly I’m surprised that AI slop doesn’t already fall into that category, but I guess as a community we’re definitionally on the farthest fringes of AI skepticism.