Also, happy Pride :3
Yes, happy pride month everyone!
I've decided that this year I'm going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows... wonder if anyone will notice.
That's it, I'm ordering a copy.
Ah, thanks, well my sarcasm detector isn't that good.
160,000 organisations, sending 251 million messages! [...] A message costs one cent. [...] Microsoft is forecast to spend $80 billion on AI in 2025.
No problem. To break even, they can raise prices just a little bit, from one cent per message to, uuh, $318 per message. I don't think that such a tiny price bump is going to reduce usage or scare away any customers, so they can just do that.
From McCarthy's reply:
My current answer to the question of when machines will reach human-level intelligence is that a precise calculation shows that we are between 1.7 and 3.1 Einsteins and .3 Manhattan Projects away from the goal.
omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It's hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman's "a few thousand days".
Also great, right after that:
Nevertheless, it is common in literature for a good writer - to show greater understanding of the experience of the opposite sex than a poorer writer of that sex.
Yeeeaah, sure. And to write that in the 1970s even.
If anything, this McCarthy reply makes me want to read the Weizenbaum book.
I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.
Same, and also I'm still trying to process that "uwu" breached out of furry spaces and became a widely understood term. (Although I'm not entirely sure what way it took, it's also possible that it breached out of anime-related communities. Maybe some day cyber-archeologists can figure this out.)
In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, there's one to an article about a turntable redesign he worked on, and from that article:
The Sondek LP12 has always been entirely retrofittable and Linn has released 50 modular hardware upgrades to the machine, something that Ive said he appreciates. "I love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product that's actually better than the one you bought years before," said Ive.
I don't know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that it's Ive, of all people, saying that.
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Good luck!!
they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash
The cringey "hello, fellow kids" vibe is really unbearable... good that people are not falling for that.
Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he's supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.
Personally, I've not been impressed with Ive's design work in the past many years. Well, I'm sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how "unapologetically honest" the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I'm not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for "the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s", and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.
If the companies wanted to produce an LLM that didn’t output toxic waste, they could just not put toxic waste into it.
The article title and that part remind me of this quote from Charles Babbage in 1864:
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
It feels as if Babbage had already interacted with today's AI pushers.
But wait, the best(*) animes came out in the 90s, early 00s. What does that mean? Is the simulation running out of juice?
(*) details of my anime evaluation function are confidential and proprietary