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11 mo. ago
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Essay proclaiming broad stagnation is now well over a decade old, Thiel stands by that thesis, but hey, Thiel himself definitely isn't part of the problem! Invest in blockchain-powered AI gene editing today!

    I keep telling people that Thiel isn't some kind of boogeyman end-boss hiding behind Musk, because he's clearly just as loaded and incompetent as Musk, he only takes more care to keep it out of the public eye... but every time he pops his head up for some garbage like this, I am forced to reconsider that latter conclusion.

  • Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the "contempt" framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist "you can do/be anything!" cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (I'm tempted to use Neil Postman's term "technopoly," but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.

    Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.