They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.

From the documentation:

While reasoning tokens are not visible via the API, they still occupy space in the model’s context window and are billed as output tokens.

Huh.

The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:

In the story “Little Lock,” which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a “brat” and confesses that she can’t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as “my most shameful thoughts,” and also as “sacred and special.”

I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. “So profound, very wow”? “You mean it’s all shit? —Always has been.”

She mixes provocation with needy propitiation

Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!

But the narrator’s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levy’s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the book’s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own style—the drama of its own specialness—and unable to provide needed context.

So, it’s bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?

I often use prompts

Well, there’s your problem

and hot young singles in your area have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell

on the blockchain

So many techbros have decided to scrape the fediverse that they all blur together now… I was able to dig up this:

“I hear I’m supposed to experiment with tech not people, and must not use data for unintended purposes without explicit consent. That all sounds great. But what does it mean?” He whined.

also discussed over here

When you don’t have anything new, use brute force. Just as GPT-4 was eight instances of GPT-3 in a trenchcoat, o1 is GPT-4o, but running each query multiple times and evaluating the results. o1 even says “Thought for [number] seconds” so you can be impressed how hard it’s “thinking.”.

This “thinking” costs money. o1 increases accuracy by taking much longer for everything, so it costs developers three to four times as much per token as GPT-4o.

Because the industry wasn’t doing enough climate damage already… Let’s quadruple the carbon we shit into the air!

I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of “quantum” bullshit, but hey, here we are.

Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.

(smashes imaginary intercom button) “Who is this ‘some guy’? Find him and find out what he knows!!”

Happy belated birthday!

Buh bye now.

Elon Musk in the replies:

Have you read Asimov’s Foundation books?

They pose an interesting question: if you knew a dark age was coming, what actions would you take to preserve knowledge and minimize the length of the dark age?

For humanity, a city on Mars. Terminus.

Isaac Asimov:

I’m a New Deal Democrat who believes in soaking the rich, even when I’m the rich.

(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)

Lex Fridman: “I’m going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts”

I’m doing a podcast episode on the Roman Empire.

It’s a deep dive into military conquest, technology, politics, economics, religion… from its rise to its collapse (n the west & the east).

History really does put everything in perspective.

(xcancel)

Something tells me they’re not just slapping chatGPT on the school computers and telling kids to go at it; surely one of the parents would have been up-to-date enough to know it’s a scam otherwise.

If people with money had that much good sense, the world would be a well-nigh unfathomably different place…

I actually don’t get the general hate for AI here.

Try harder.

We have had readily available video communication for over a decade.

We’ve been using “video communication” to teach for half a century at least; Open University enrolled students in 1970. All the advantages of editing together the best performances from a top-notch professor, moving beyond the blackboard to animation, etc., etc., were obvious in the 1980s when Caltech did exactly that and made a whole TV series to teach physics students and, even more importantly, their teachers. Adding a new technology that spouts bullshit without regard to factual accuracy is necessarily, inevitably, a backward step.

AI can directly and individually address that frustration and find a solution.

No, it can’t.

Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur.

Another thing I turned up and that I need to post here so I can close that browser tab and expunge the stain from my being: Yud’s advice about awesome characters.

I find that fiction writing in general is easier for me when the characters I’m working with are awesome.

The important thing for any writer is to never challenge oneself. The Path of Least Resistance™!

The most important lesson I learned from reading Shinji and Warhammer 40K

What is the superlative of “read a second book”?

Awesome characters are just more fun to write about, more fun to read, and you’re rarely at a loss to figure out how they can react in a story-suitable way to any situation you throw at them.

“My imagination has not yet descended.”

Let’s say the cognitive skill you intend to convey to your readers (you’re going to put the readers through vicarious experiences that make them stronger, right? no? why are you bothering to write?)

In college, I wrote a sonnet to a young woman in the afternoon and joined her in a threesome that night.

You’ve set yourself up to start with a weaksauce non-awesome character. Your premise requires that she be weak, and break down and cry.

“Can’t I show her developing into someone who isn’t weak?" No, because I stopped reading on the first page. You haven’t given me anyone I want to sympathize with, and unless I have some special reason to trust you, I don’t know she’s going to be awesome later.

Holding fast through the pain induced by the rank superficiality, we might just find a lesson here. Many fans of Harry Potter have had to cope, in their own personal ways, with the stories aging badly or becoming difficult to enjoy. But nothing that Rowling does can perturb Yudkowsky, because he held the stories in contempt all along.

(in the voice of Zoidberg taking careful notes) “Avoid … spreading … despair …”