1attice

Thanks for pointing it out, dang. But if dark absurdism isn't permitted in 2026, I clearly have no mouth for the scream.

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Yes, probably. Americans love this stuff

Devil take them all.

Iceweasel

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How brave to call out Big Mural on HN! Ha, take that! Go woke, go broke! /s

I nod along with Howey here on every point save one. Namely, it is simply false that the apocalyptic narratives are full-cloth marketing products that are cynically engineered and used.

For better or worse, the hold that Yudkowski-flavoured big-R Rationalism holds over us all is significant. Academics (like Cal Newport) seem committed to belittling it as a sort of cult-sex-flavoured philosophy fan fic, and writers (Zitron, Howey, Doctorow) seem equally committed to a cui-bueno wake-up-sheeple take.

But my position is: no matter how florid the polycule, or naive the argumental ligaments, or potentially lucrative the bezzle, it is still worthwhile taking the stated intellectual commitments of the people making the tech.

Take people seriously. And, unless you really, really, really know for certain that they are operating in bad faith, you are to regard yourself as stuck with their putative sincerity.

This is the "principle of charity" familiar from undergrad philosophy classes, and it is an epistemic moral value worth holding onto in 2026.

With all due respect, this example is obsolete anecdata. I doubt the cruise ship was using Astra, for example, or Fable. Or really anything past GPT 3

Interesting. Yet as someone approaching the first of those two last numbers, I would say that that isn't very old at all

Google the man.

Citation required

Yet the market can remain irrational for much longer than we can reason about.

The numbers are, as you (and Ed Zitron) point out, bananas, and the financial house of cards will collapse -- but there is enough fin-de-siecle chaos happening right now that anything is possible.

AI seems to be particularly useful in murdering people, so, for example, if there were another globe-wide hot war, it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.

In which case, the "bezzle" continues until the state collapses, whenever that is (depends who wins the war ;D)

The original sin of any modern forecast is proceeding from reason and sensibility. Now is the hour of the batshit.

Just so. Thanks Drew. Good to to find another one that can see ;) They live!

Why do you presume undercover agents wouldn't be in this dump?

This is because it is valley jargon and we are all saturated with it. You may not have heard it before, but it is structurally close to similar concepts, eg "frontier model", that you got there without noticing.

It was still shit tier comms for communicating with the whole planet, but yes, for the inner loop, it was succinct and clear.

Valley neuralese

Yes that's why I run GrapheneOS, Google is very capable of inserting its own backdoors

The bicycle -- a simple method of transport powered entirely by humans -- used analogically to prove a point about [clears throat] automation.

I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.

*breaks, and also, your conclusion ignores the words typed by the article's author in the piece you presumably read, where it is reported that Astra did it mostly on its own.

Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better

Yeah but I bet the steering wheel is on the wrong side. ;)

Although both continents are presently losing themselves to fascism, quantity still has a quality all its own.

Thank you for this

Vice Media is in economic collapse so I wouldn't be surprised.

> Pretty obvious it was trained in copyrighted material and just vaguely recycling it back.

You can just say "screenwriter" and yes this is a valid job. Not anyone's fault the kids want to hear the same story every night

I tip my hat to you sir, I had missed that

Not what I was actually pointing to, but thanks; I'll pass the critique along to my old MA thesis advisor. ;)

I never expected a machine to be better at articulating complex thoughts with a spare number of semantic coordinates, but then I never expected to find out that my poetry was golfing in the latent space

Discovering that poetry was cognitive compression is alone one of the latent findings LLMs unlocked.

You can so easily imagine this shit being read in a 90s slam poetry coffeehouse. Trust me I was there

It can imagine what yourself report that you cannot :)

Sure, but can you help me with Navier Stokes