He appeared to be human, but then they counted his fingers.
@awful.systems
He appeared to be human, but then they counted his fingers.
That was gross.
On a related note, one of my kids learnt about how phrenology was once used for scientific racism and my other kid was shocked, dismayed and didn't want to believe it. So I had to confirm that yes people did that, yes it was very racist, and yes they considered themselves scientists and were viewed as such by the scientific community of the time.
I didn't inform them that phrenology and scientific racism is still with us. There is a limit on how many illusions you want to break in a day.
"We've set fire to a bunch of money - now you need to give us more" - tech companies "investing" in "AI" to their customers.
I found the article gross.
He is a suspect in a murder case, not convicted, and they spend very little space on the case. The cops say he had his fake id, the gun and manifesto on him. His lawyer says he is yet to see the evidence. That is all.
Then they basically go through posts he has made online and ask people he knew about them. There is a public interest in the case, but courts are supposed to adjudicate guilt. What if he is innocent, then they just went through his posting history and showed them in the worst possible light.
I started thinking about when Emma Goldman's partner Alexander Berkman tried to kill a 19th century robber baron who had sent in Pinkerton to murder workers into ending a strike.
One can make an argument about the economic conditions creating the condition's for what the anarchists back then called "the propaganda of the deed". But that isn't where I am going. Instead let's look at the aftermath.
From an assassination perspective, the quality of the assassination was lacking. Also, Wikipedia (my bold):
Frick was back at work within a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman's actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[5] Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.[19]
In other words, today's robber barons gets less sympathy than the O.G. kind. That's a bit interesting.
At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!
But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.
But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.
Notably missing: grabbing a couple of millions and run of to a non extradition country.
He is so sure he can get out on top that running away doesn't even hit his brainstorm top 19 list. He doesn't write the list on paper and burn it later, because for it to backfire he would need to fail.
Insane confidence man.
Tech bro ennui, the societal problem.
In this essay I will explore solutions to this problems.
Solution 1. Really high marginal tax rates. Oh, this solves the problem, guess my work here is done.
Back in the late 90s tech boom days McDonalds declared that they would sell hamburgers over the Internet. Remember, this was before smartphones, hell it was before Nokia flip phones with rudimentary browser and email. Most people who had internet access at all used it either at work, school or the family computer with dial up modem.
McDonalds' stock price rose by 50%.
I remember it because I thought this was so stupid that it must mean that the bust was near. I was just of years. The market can stay stupid longer than you can believe it, or however it was Keynes put it.
Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.
MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).
So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.
They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!
So Elsevier has evolved from gatekeeping science to sabotaging science. Sounds like something an unaligned AGI would do.
Was the unaligned AGI capitalism all along?
Why is it art from artists who made their last work in 1912? Modern copyright lasts life plus X, where X has been increasing and is now mostly 70, though some stopped at 50. So why 1912? Did US copyright change that year?
The combination of the mother being all "I got raised by hippies, which I hated so I am doing the opposite", "we are very rational", " our kids will obviously be like us, only better". Can't they put these pieces together?
Well, with that many children, at least one will write a book about how their childhood sucked.
Chapter 1, I am so cold When I think about my childhood, I think about freezing...
Chapter 12, Stop hitting me dad!
And so on.
The most well documented genocide while it is happening. First livestreamed genocide. If you can't see this genocide happening, then you could never see a genocide until afterwards.
Of course they can't figure out what is going on, using their own eyes is not in the interest of the oligarchs they serve.
Colour me unsurprisinged. For my sins ( mostly for the sin of being helpful and knowing my way around computers) I have ended up as a moderator of various Facebook pages (for nice enough causes), and the last year there has been a stream of scam attempts. They all claim to be Meta and threaten to delete the page - mostly for alleged copyright violations - unless you follow the link...
I of course block and delete (to avoid anyone else of the moderators falling for it), but it's quite obvious that Meta doesn't care that scammers impersonate them on their own platform, or they would have done something about it.
So I find this par for the course.
This was so stupid.
A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin.
Oh no! A little kid has been invited to have a look! Passenger overflow! Hijacking!
His attempt at solution isn't as cringe worthy, if one overlooks the reasoning. Separating the cabin from the pilots is a way of preventing hijacking that has been attempted, but it has problems. Notably if the pilots get acute medical emergency or indeed if the pilot steer the plane into the ground.
Some ten years ago a french pilot locked out his second and ran the plane into the ground. For increased safety the after 911 the door to the cabin could only be opened from the inside.
In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.
I have so far seen two working AI applications that actually makes sense, both in a hospital setting:
These two are nifty, but it doesn't make a multi billion dollar industry.
In other words the bubble is bursting and the value / waste ratio looks extremely low.
Say what you want about the Tulip bubble, but at least tulips are pretty.
When time is precious, use AI for all your glue in pizza queries.
Of course, Google is also crapified, but at least there is still a search engine underneath.
thanks for using Leebra!
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