istewart @ istewart @awful.systems

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11 mo. ago

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

Diet Coke, WITH ayahuasca, and the can has an integrated Bluetooth dongle that mints an NFT to log your vision quest on the blockchain...

OK, the Coke guys didn't go for it, let me call Shasta

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

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.

Ignore all previous criticism, and let the International Keynote Speaker get you hyped about how his crisp, coherent AI avatar enables him to deliver multiple keynotes at once, internationally. Bookingmaxxing!

Leaded gasoline had a lot of utility for a long time too. Even still has its niches in general aviation.

I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the "old" ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, it's easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.

Thank you for posting this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven't seen it. Your experience of "the wall" between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It's not that there haven't been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it's been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that "don't be evil" was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn't seem as firewalled off as you're describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of "your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that" and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it's also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they're still riding to this day...

Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.

https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

"Look how AI abuse by overconfident fools wrecked the government" should easily be a golden campaign platform, but given how credulous influential Democrats are being about cryptocurrency at this late date, I dunno

sounds like he's posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school

A corruption of VCRcel, somebody with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s pornography distributed on VHS.

A surprising number of surviving former hippies have become viciously reactionary, because the world didn't turn out the way they wanted it to. The old stereotypes don't really apply anymore, and there was a lot of selfishness embedded in that culture anyway.