exasperaited

Right. Be the person on your team who just fucking doesn't because you'll learn your problem domain while everyone else is doing unpaid tool testing work for AI companies.

One day these things will actually do what they are supposed to do with a measure of consistency that doesn't involve GRIMOIRE.md or whatever and you can use them then. And most of the early mover advantage will be gone, because LLMs will not be the winning technology.

In the meantime be the person who learned the lessons of social media: popular isn't the same as good, appropriate or sensible.

> So are animals, but we've used dogs and falcons and truffle hunting pigs as tools for thousands of years.

Dogs learn their jobs way faster, more consistently and more expressively than any AI tool.

Trivially, dogs understand "good dog" and "bad dog" for example.

Reinforcement learning with AI tooling clearly seems not to work.

I understand you're trying to be helpful but the number of "you're holding it wrong" things I read about this tool — any AI tool — just makes me wonder who vibe coders are really doing all this unpaid work for.

Ignoring the much more obvious explanation that they simply buggered off to do their own thing and there was nobody around to bang a plate with a fork.

If you have never played the backwards-lifetime game, you should.

Take your current age and work backwards that same number of days, months and years before your birth. Every year something else remarkable is added.

At my current backwards age, World War II is the best part of two decades away; the UK is still recovering from World War I. Rocket 88, the first rock and roll song, won't be written for nearly another three decades. Women still can't vote in the UK, the Wall Street Crash is several years away.

When my father (who knew one of the most important men in medical history in his younger days and who was working in medicine not long after the NHS was founded) died, his backwards age reached back before the germ theory of modern medicine.

Another interesting game is to use your "oocyte age" — about 32 weeks before your mother was born is roughly when the oocyte developed that led to your egg. In my case this too is before World War II started.

He sang probably the greatest song in musical film — Hushabye Mountain in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfdRr7MWax4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeCBVerpYj8

If you have never seen this film, I don't care how old you are, you should watch it. It is overshadowed by Mary Poppins but it is a work of art — a funny, charming, astonishing visual feast of a film and he is magnificent in it. His performance as the jack-in-a-box alone is worth an Oscar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_l2ii_25tc

They relatively recently essentially doubled in price in Lidl in the UK.

Some sort of confluence of Brexit and cocoa prices must have fundamentally broken Lidl's ability to purchase Ritter Sport in huge bulk and discount it.

I managed to use it as a brief entreaty to the chocolate cortex of my will-power-less brain that I should maybe not buy it again because it's now too expensive.

But now I've mentioned it...

Well it is that but I think it is also that it is, at some informational level, fundamentally incoherent and unreal. It looks fine, but it is not anything. It has no intent in the art strokes (which I think always shows in geometry), it has no reality in the lighting of a photo.

It may be, I concede, that I see more AI-generated photos than other art types (AI generated photo fraud is a serious issue in a corner of the web I frequent) but I tend to find that I literally can't remember what they look like long after I see them.

Same exercise, focussing on faces specifically:

- try to visualise Taylor Swift's face. Or that of Rachel Weisz or Ming-Na Wen, or Sarah Silverman, or Alfre Woodard.

- now try to visualise the face of Tilly Norwood.

Obviously if you don't know who any of these people are, you can't do this exercise (which is why I included Taylor Swift). And if you don't know what Tilly Norwood is, you can't do this exercise.

But if you've seen a lot of content about Tilly Norwood, can you visualise the face in the same way? Is it memorable? It is not.

It is my contention that these images actually have something very undefinable missing, that my brain needs to find them worth memorising. I have seen many "AI models" now and I can't remember any of "their" faces.

> Or maybe the next great story teller to create something meaningful that touches people in ways that change their mental model of the world.

How many pieces of AI art can you actually remember? I mean, call to mind in the same detail as you can remember a photograph?

I think AI generated imagery is fundamentally compromised somehow in this regard: something subliminally uncanny, no matter how realistic, makes them harder to recall.

For this reason I personally doubt AI generated art will ever have a profound effect on people. Because it really seems to lack the mechanism.

And nothing of value was gained.

Personally I dislike Lindt in every way: they have dodgy safety and labour standards and are verboten in my house.

Supermarket stuff: Tony's Chocolonely salted caramel (from the Netherlands) is super, and Ritter Sport Cornflakes is nice. Lidl has a white chocolate I could eat in huge quantities and I don't even really like white chocolate that much.

For British brands — Duffy's and Damian Allsop. I think Damian Allsop's water ganache chocolate is possibly the best in the world.

Which is odd, because to us Brits and to Europeans, essentially all American mass-produced chocolate tastes and often smells like vomit.

ETA: I am making no claims that Cadbury Dairy Milk is world-class chocolate, by any means (though I dislike Belgian chocolate even more). It's quite cheap and slutty chocolate, which is a small part of why we like it. But internationally, you guys have the worst chocolate, hands down. Nobody thinks it's better but you guys.

ETA2: I should add that I think one of the post-US-acquisition Dairy Milk recipes, the Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy bar, is the best thing they've made in a generation, and I include in that the gorgeous Australian-recipe Caramilk that they tried to make a thing here and largely failed at.

> Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.

Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?

(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)

went to prison.

In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.

I find it fascinating that he's had the benefit of the doubt for soooo long.

This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.

Human capital is even worse!

Maybe you should do some research on that quote.

Because there is literally no evidence he ever said it. It's a widespread but false attribution, as I outlined in another comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239664

This attribution leads to a truly fundamentally broken reduction of what Mussolini actually thought fascism was (though his own definition of it was largely pseudointellectual drivel).

But even then, "corporatism" doesn't mean "capitalism" at all.

> Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences

No it fucking doesn’t.

OK... drum roll please!

I suppose you mean this famous quote:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"

I have news: this is bullshit.

This quote is literally falsely attributed to Mussolini. There is no evidence whatsoever that he said it. It's also somewhat at odds with things he did say (though most of that was pseudointellectual gibberish) and the way he ruled.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Benito_Mussolini

It's simply wrong. It is one of the great falsely-attributed quotations that will not die.

https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...

It's central to the 21st century misunderstanding of Fascism and it is the convenient misattribution that will not die. (Also what I was referring to up thread)

And what "corporatism" means, in a Fascist context, is not what western readers think it might mean. It is a term talking about collective organisation, not capitalism.

It's part of why the word "fascist" is so completely blunted to the point of uselessness in US debate.

> but fascism is by definition capitalist.

I think it is you who should look up the definition and history of fascism.

Fascism usually exists in a capitalist context — but "by definition"? No.

> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.

But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.

I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.

But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.

Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.

I would not, as a broad matter of policy, talk about "good faith" in any sentence involving a claim made by Matt Walsh, who is both a bad faith actor and a fucking liar.

Grooming of a person in a non-abuse setting involves deliberately changing the environment around an individual who does not yet feel they could be someone's successor or confidently exhibit the qualities or experience needed.

Again: it is an active, targeted process aimed at someone who does not necessarily know they are being changed.

Grooming has never been as broad a concept as you are talking about such that it just means changes in the moral or social landscape that some find undesirable.

It has always meant a form of targeted attention (even in the literal sense of care and attention to a specific animal). Social liberalisation you do not care for is not grooming.

I won't keep you any longer.

OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...

The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.

This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.

That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.

Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.

But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.

Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.

The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.

I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.

I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

There were four of us.

You are broadening this out to the point that is absurd and would excuse cracking down on almost any liberalisation, in a way that is kind of prurient.

Honestly it's rather creepy and I hope you one day consider what you are saying.

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.

The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.

Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.

Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?

If you're going to broaden the definition of grooming so absurdly to include normal things in culture you just don't like then it seems like you should allow people to conclude your intent is to diminish the seriousness of things that actually are grooming.

Trends and beliefs based on culture, real or otherwise, are one thing.

The allegation is grooming: that one group of people is actively persuading another.

> Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics.

This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.

Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.

It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.

As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.