istewart @ istewart @awful.systems

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11 mo. ago

But how are they going to awkwardly cram robots in everywhere, to follow up the overwhelming success of AI? Self-crashing cars are a gimme, but maybe a "sealed for your protection" Amazon locker with a robot arm that handles the package for you?

I was in LA this time a couple years ago, and some robot delivery startup had already left their little motorized shopping carts littering the sidewalks around Hollywood. I never saw them moving, they just sat there almost like they were abandoned.

😳

I've seen conspiracy theories that a lot of the ad buys for stuff like this are a new avenue of money laundering, focusing on stuff like pirate sports streaming sites, sketchy torrent sites, etc. But a full scraped, SEOd Wikipedia clone also fits.

Sajam deviated from fighting games to do over an hour on this game, if you'd like to feel your brain gently melting out your ears:

https://youtu.be/G9s3QmIbVg8

Oh my god, the gacha anime-waifu horse racing phone game is real. Why did I have to find this out today, or ever. Better than 50% chance that Roko is a paypig for it

Over the last few years, I have fully gotten on board with the idea that the haunting vestige of the idea of people as property is one of the core weaknesses of American society, and the "western civilization" enthusiasts that promote its supremacy.

Of course, there are a lot of other people who have been on board with that point of view for centuries.

They're doing it with cryptocurrency right now.

Or their cooling design stinks, or they/Nvidia are just telling the fab we don't care about yields, just send us everything that powers on and we'll figure out which ones are good in production

Very true. I think one of the possible low-key outcomes of the bubble is a rise both in open-source driver hacking and manufacture-on-demand PCBs to accommodate what would otherwise be high-dollar e-waste.

Somebody gotta adapt them to boards with actual video outputs tho

What with all the rapid innovation surrounding small modular reactors, I still firmly believe that I will be able to bolt a nuclear reactor to a DeLorean in my garage

Much the same mistake I (and many others) made trying to get into the series! Although I have to say that I'm still one of the philistines that gerikson brings up who's read Phlebas and Player of Games and not much else.

Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

We're going to have to stop paying attention to guys whose main entry on their CV is a website and/or phone app. I mean, we should have already, but now it's just glaringly obvious.

Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience? Letting the creeps have even a tiny bit of legitimacy is too much, especially as mainstream outfits are working overtime to legitimize them.

I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for prompt context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don't want to delve far enough into the concept of "awarenaut" to form an opinion, so we're just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well

For the record, none of these generated clips thus far have featured an appearance by Omega Tom Hanks

You're absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs "bicycle of the mind" concept was still a driving force in the field.

I still don't think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, you've got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillset... and since it's a probabilistic process, you're still not going to get consistent results.

I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you can't say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many people's salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.

Looking forward to stumbling across this one in a used bookstore 20 years from now, comically misfiled next to a copy of John Dies at the End

It's like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him