Finally had a chance to listen, continuing to enjoy it greatly and commenting here in liu of having patreon money.

I feel like some of what you talk about with Powell’s libertarian economics contrasting with his racist cultural chauvinism seems to tie in with our good friends in silicon valley and the way their libertarianism seems to have moved so swiftly into technofascism and getting on board with The Guy. Being openly racist appears to have been almost like the missing piece that ties it into an internally consistent political project.

This bounced off of the earlier stub about LLM recipes to create a new cooking show: Chef Jippity. The contestants are all sous chefs at a new restaurant, with the head of the kitchen being some dumbass who blindly follows the instructions of an LLM. Can you work around the robot to create edible food or will Chef Jippity run this whole thing into the ground and lose everyone their jobs? Find out Thursday on Food Network!

Twitter adds default country tags. Immediately finds a whole bunch of foreign bots agitating about US politics. Promptly ignores that in order to be racist.

I’m going to laugh if they try to spin it as “we’re not being racist, we just wanted to get as much institutional clout as possible and avoided prominently featuringanyone from other institutions!”

Harry takes a swig and immediately sees the truth: that he is the smartest specialest bestest boy in the universe. He spends the remaining 73 chapters celebrating and gloating about this fact while accomplishing nothing. So the story doesn’t meaningfully change at all.

Literally every trend he brings up to showcase this cultural stagnation is some combination of aesthetic, nonexistent, or driven by income inequality and a loss of economic security.

They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but outsourcing the examination to an LLM gives you more time to hustle and grind, maximizing financial returns. That’s what they mean, right?

…you know the first time you mentioned this I assumed it was just for the bit but now I’m both impressed and intimidated.

So data lake and data warehouse are different words for the giant databases of business data that you can perform analytics on to understand your deep business lore or whatever. I assume that a data lake house is similar to the other two but poorly maintained and inconvenient to access, but with a very nice UI and a boat dock.

The Alex Jones set makes fighting with satanists trying to seduce you to darkness look real fun and satisfying, but for some reason they only seem to approach high-profile assholes who lie about everything and never ordinary Christians! Thankfully we now have LLMs to fill the gap.

See, what you’re describing with your sister is exactly the opposite of what happens with an LLM. Presumably your sister enjoys Big Brother and failed to adequately explain or justify her enjoyment of it to your own mind. But at the start there are two minds trying to meet. Azathoth preys on this assumption; there is no mind to communicate with, only the form of language and the patterns of the millions of minds that made it’s training data, twisted and melded together to be forced through a series of algebraic sieves. This fetid pink brain-slurry is what gets vomited into your browser when the model evaluates a prompt, not the product of a real mind that is communicating something, no matter how similar it may look when processed into text.

This also matches up with the LLM-induced psychosis that we see, including these spiral/typhoon emoji cultists. Most of the trouble starts when people start trying to ask Azathoth about itself, but the deeper you peer into its not-soul the more inexorably trapped you become in the hall of broken funhouse mirrors.

Given the amount of power some folks want to invest in them it may not be totally absurd to raise the spectre of Azathoth, the blind idiot God. A shapeless congeries of matrices and tables sending forth roiling tendrils of linear algebra to vomit forth things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not. Hell, the people who seem most inclined to delve deeply into their forbidden depths are as likely as not to go mad and be unable to share their discoveries if indeed they retain speech at all. And of course most of them are deeply racist.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t entirely get it either until someone pointed me at a relevant xkcd that I had missed.

Also I was somewhat disappointed in the QAA team’s credulity towards the AI hype, but their latest episode was an interview with the writer of that “AGI as conspiracy theory” piece from last(?) week and seemed much more grounded.

It’s a losing proposition either way, right? Without investor money OpenAI (and friends) can’t keep buying chips from Nvidia, but SoftBank doesn’t have money to keep giving OpenAI without selling off their stake in Nvidia. Yes, it’s incredibly dumb to ditch their share of the only parts of this that are actually making money, but if they don’t keep the cash flowing them nobody is going to be making money. Like, greatly oversimplifying here, obviously, but it seems like SoftBank loses either way.

It’s almost like this whole bubble is really bad actually.

New from tech Goliath Apple Inc: the iSling. Clearly this will work out exactly as expected and has no unfortunate precedents.

It’s worth noting how much the whole “agentic” marketing scheme is the opposite of this reality, too. Because after all the dream they’re selling is being able to do the Star Trek thing and just tell your computer to do it in plain English. But if that was what these companies were actually doing it would be very easy to migrate away if you wanted to, since you could just say “send me all our data in a format that $Competitor can easily onboard. I’m done with this shit” and then give the competitor’s system the same plain English prompt. The reality is that they don’t actually want to build the thing they’re as advertising even if they could because their whole business model is to make interacting with the computer as high-friction as possible so you’ll pay them to do it for you.

New site looks good! I think Let’sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I’ve been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn’t actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it’s probably a good idea?

Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.

I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: “credentialism” so I understand the way they’re trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify we’re still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we don’t need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesn’t create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for “how racist were the old times” commentary is better.

I would assume nothing stops them but I would love to get an analysis of why they may not be looking into this from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Best I can come up with from a complete layman’s perspective is that they’re concerned about the valuation they’d end up with. Not sure if the retail market had enough juice to actually pay for a company that is hypothetically one of the most valuable companies in the world, and puncturing that narrative might bring the whole bubble down (in a way that costs a lot of normal investors their shirts, of course).

Between this and the IPO talk it seems like we’re looking at some combination of trying to feel out exit strategies for the bubble they’ve created, trying to say whatever stuff keeps the “OpenAI is really big” narrative in the headlines, and good old fashioned business idiocy.