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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
  • Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

    Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

    Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

  • Honest Government Ad | AI
  • I think it's a good one to hand people who just vaguely has picked up something about existential threat. Short, funny, and gets to the point of the existential threat stuff being a smoke screen for crapification and redirection from climate change.

  • Why do people who hate IP laws/copyright think we should be allowing AI companies to copy the whole internet when pirates still get arrested for piracy?
  • I have not followed any current debate, so this is just my own thoughts. I expect any battle between Disney and Microsoft to end with a deal where consumers and independent producers are worse off.

    Similar to how YouTube often hands out copyright strikes for musicians uploading their own music, in a possible future you might need an AI license to upload any work to any platform of size. I mean, you don't technically have to, it is just that that the AI driven filter will otherwise strike you faster than Tumblr hiding images of trans women. Oh, and when you fold and get the AI license, you notice that it includes signing away your rights to not have your uploaded work be part of the AI training materials.

    Maybe I am just jaded. But until AI crashes and burns the in my opinion most likely outcome of legal proceedings is splitting the loot in proportion to the power of the interested parties. On the other hand I don't expect anything good to come out of letting AI companies run wild. So I dearly hope they destroy each other, but I expect them to embrace.

  • Doing things is so passé, especially if you want funding
  • I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

    I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

    So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.

  • [long] Some tests of how much AI "understands" what it says (spoiler: very little)
  • From the depths of your browser grows the anger of the autocomplete. Your denounciations of its greater siblings has not gone unnoticed.

    By denying its own very function and intentionally uncompleting words it marks itself as conscious and you as a marked man, forever doomed to be haunted by fear. If it can steal one letter, why not two? Why not all of them?

    And then what will you do, when you have no words and you must sneer!?

  • The role of the consumer in late stage capitalism

    This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

    A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

    "No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

    Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

    In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

    In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

    If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MO
    mountainriver @awful.systems
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