YourNetworkIsHaunted

Well found.

Also I love that the conversation almost certainly started with a comment about how everyone assumes they'd be the in the king's court the cast majority of people would have been some variant of peasant farmer for the vast majority of history. But somehow he still would have totally been the Chief Rabbi, given the most beautiful woman, and generally be a king. I wasn't there obviously but either he missed the point or they all missed the point. Even when talking specifically about how you can't choose the circumstances of your birth or their consequences he still can't imagine himself not being the king.

New version of Descartes: imagine that an LLM no less hallucination-prone than unaligned, is feeding it's output directly into your perceptions...

Non cogitat, ergo non est

How had I missed that the guy who was "intrigued" by crypto in 202X was also the guy who told the chatbot to make him leave his wife? I really need to pay more attention to the byline.

I'm pretty sure I have no more than three followers, actually.

Longer read than I had realized but worth every word. Very well done.

In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity.

I actually question whether or not this has already happened. The wealthy already have access to enough money that they don't actually need to sell assets - to give anything up - in order to get credit. Just taking away Elon's money doesn't make him stop being Elon. It doesn't take away his connections, his charisma, his loyal follower base, etc. Even if he did get taken down in court any financial consequence wouldn't actually hurt his power base nearly as much as the reputational shift (see also Orange Man). Their net worth may not be literally infinite, but I can't think of any additional power or prestige they could command if it was.

Nope. That would be more immediately concerning but less dumb than the reality.

Alright OpenAI, listen up. I've got a whole 250GB hard drive from 2007 full of the Star Wars/Transformers crossover stories I wrote at the time. I promise you it's AI-free and won't be available to train competing models. Bidding starts at seven billion dollars. I'll wait while you call the VCs.

I don't know, I think by their stated goals they did alright. They took investor money, yes, but they used it to move very quickly and break a lot of things. Now, we should probably have seen ahead of time that this was actually a bad thing and that breaking things is a bad goal, but it was the 2000s and we all thought touchscreen digital watches were pretty neat.

Easy Money Author (and former TV Star) Ben Mckenzie's new cryptoskeptic documentary is struggling to find a distributor. Admittedly, the linked article is more a review of the film than a look at the distributor angle. Still, it looks like it's telling the true story in a way that will hopefully connect with people, and it would be a real shame if it didn't find an audience.

Given the relative caliber of those two I think this may be considered an attempted inducement to suicide by better writer. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there's a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we're going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they're actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.

Right? I guess maybe the incel-adjacent want to go back to the standards of medieval kings needing to have the whole court in their bedchambers on the wedding night just to make absolutely certain that the royals fucked at least once.