The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman

This entire blog post is sneerable so I encourage reading it, but the TL;DR is:

We're already in the singularity. Chat-GPT is more powerful than anyone on earth (if you squint). Anyone who uses it has their productivity multiplied drastically, and anyone who doesn't will be out of a job. 10 years from now we'll be in a society where ideas and the execution of those ideas are no longer scarce thanks to LLMs doing most of the work. This will bring about all manner of sci-fi wonders.

Sure makes you wonder why Mr. Altman is so concerned about coddling billionaires if he thinks capitalism as we know it won't exist 10 years from now but hey what do I know.

I found this footnote from Sam Altman's blog amusing in light of your comment:

*By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness…

Bonus: He also appears to think LLM conversations should be exempt from evidence retention requirements due to 'AI privilege' (tweet).

Now I'm all for privacy, and this is a good reminder that 'the cloud' is not as private as maybe it should be. But clearly AI privilege is not a thing that should exist.

Smol bean Sam Altman 'politically homeless' after Democrats no longer believe in trickle down economics enough for him.

Dude came up with an entire "obviously true" "proof" that music has no value, and then when asked how he defines "value" he shrugs his shoulders and is like 🤷‍♂️ money I guess?

This almost has too much brainrot to be 100% trolling.

Today in linkedin hell:

Xbox Producer Recommends Laid Off Workers Should Use AI To ‘Help Reduce The Emotional And Cognitive Load That Comes With Job Loss’

https://aftermath.site/xbox-microsoft-layoffs-ai-prompt-chatgpt-matt

including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI's,

"You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters 'A' and 'I' prepended? Scary!"

through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.

Gosh darn it don't tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of "agent" already well established in web standards.

Alright that's it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing (note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don't open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)

https://bsky.app/profile/pixeldoesthings.bsky.social/post/3lswcbtkwec2t

The one human-written slop text I've read in my life was a textbook for a philosophy 101 class. The text was wordy and meandering to the point of being almost unreadable.

The whole department was corrupt though. The textbook was written by the dean, expensive, and was filled with exercises on perforated pages that had to be ripped out and turned in (no photocopies allowed, and hence no secondhand market for the book). The teacher also showed obvious favoritism towards Christian students and found a way to make the entire class about god.

So anyway that's why I never minored in Philosophy.

Before LLMs came along no one cared what tools I did or didn't use at work. Hell will freeze over before I let a text predictor write code for me even if that eventually costs me a job. I'm the sort who can't stand any sort of auto-completion or other typing "help", much less spending all my time reviewing LLM output.

Sure maybe the "Showcase" link doesn't do anything, the "Watch video" link goes to a password protected file, and none of the "Learn More" buttons do anything; but at least they tell you who invested in them as the very first thing on the page!

Also haha I clicked on the blog and this was at the top of the first post:

Here's a Substack post draft that introduces videogameai with a compelling and engaging tone suitable for readers interested in games, tech, or the future of creative work:

New use case for AI found: extracting money from venture capital without actually doing any real work.

We should improve society somewhat.

Yet you participate in society. Curious!

Yeah I saw that but had completely forgotten about it in the meanwhile because I have the memory of a goldfish.

In the grand scheme of things there are worse controversies, but I would so love an enthusiast browser that is, well, "woke" rather than one having a faint stink of techbro worldview about it.

Wait Ladybird is anti-woke? Sigh am I going to have to make my own browser?

(I know I know I'm a lot better about posting about wanting to do cool stuff than actually doing it, hazard of having a full time job)

I think an actual building. Though Forest City is not exactly prime real estate.

There's some pictures here: https://www.ryanchern.com/posts/network_school (and probably a few other sites scattered across social media). I could geolocate it better than that but I'm currently on shitty mobile hotspot internet.

I'm using the term a bit loosely to mean "libertarian citadel except with techies". Though I think the phrase is technically supposed to mean a nation that starts out as an online community.

Anyway for some reason these weirdos all have this idea that if it wasn't for all those pesky regulations and people they could usher in a glorious new sci-fi and/or cryptocurrency society. Like look at this example: this B-list CEO in the apartment rental business thinks he'll be the ruler of a fiefdom that brings about AGI, Quantum Computing, a nuclear energy revolution, bladerunner style flying cars, and sci-fi materials. It's delusional; or at best grift.

The canonical example of network state is Balaji Srinivasan's Network School. He owns(?) a building in Forest City, Malaysia (or as he calls it: an island in an undisclosed location off the coast of Singapore). But in a broad sense it's useful to consider everything from Sidewalk Labs to California Forever to the M.S. Satoshi as thematically in the same sort of ballpark.

More network state nonsense is afoot: https://frontiervalley.com/ https://www.thenerdreich.com/startup-seeks-trump-ai-emergency-for-california-tech-city/

They (who?) have publicly drafted an executive order because they want to take over the Alameda Naval Air Station (a superfund site).

Edit: Per the twitter account the weirdo behind this is James Ingallinera.

Every time I see one of these AGI meltdowns I'm reminded of this anime / manga:

I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the people who think it's impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.

Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?

This is just naive web crawling: Crawl a page, extract all the links, then crawl all the links and repeat.

Any crawler that doesn't know what their doing and doesn't respect robots but wants to crawl an entire domain will end up following these sorts of links naturally. It has no sense that the requests are "complex", just that it's fetching a URL with a few more query parameters than it started at.

The article even alludes to how to take advantage of this with it's "trap the bots in a maze of fake pages" suggestion. Even crawlers that know what they're doing will sometimes struggle with infinite URL spaces.