techorange

It feels like the only way out of this is some massive long lived catastrophe that is unignorable. Like way beyond 9/11. Great depression or world war 3?

I took this class on Trauma, and I remember the thing that stuck with me the most was a quote in the syllabus about how war focuses people, and gives them something external to focus on.

Apparently this is a pretty broad idea, so much so someone wrote a book on it?

https://www.amazon.com/War-Force-that-Gives-Meaning/dp/16103...

Are there any examples in history of cultures being so divided and coming back together in organic ways? I guess my own argument has been that we were probably similarly or even more divided during the 1960's so maybe that answers my own question?

Though it feels like it has a different quality to it now. Maybe somehow less extreme but much deeper?

The mythology in Silicon Valley is interesting, on the one had I do think that Elon Musk is a once in a generation entrepreneur who’s built these amazing companies (even if he’s a bit over his skis at the moment)

But I don’t believe the crafted narrative that Elon Musk is some super engineer sleeping on the floors of the factory, pushing things through with unique engineering insights, I think most of the job of a CEO is political, and I acknowledge how important that contribution is (probably plenty of political work to do from the floor of the warehouse)

But it is interesting how carefully people like Musk, Jobs and Dorsey curate their images to make you think their contributions are more practical and less political.

And I believe that even though everyone is transparently aware of this, if the illusion were to drop on one of these CEO’s it would probably tangibly impact their careers.

Like there’s more power in everyone maintaining a false mythology than just acknowledging the true contribution of a CEO.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

But they’re programming grok not just to regurgitate what it sees online, but to be maximally truth seeking, even when politically unpopular.

People compare the birth of AI to the birth of the computer and the internet, saying that the next 50 years in AI development will necessarily explode in productivity. But it feels different to me. In part because —- does it actually create new capabilities or just replace some like search, maybe more efficiently.

Also, there are negatives to efficiency without new capabilities. If it’s easier to find exactly the thing you want to buy, maybe you do a lot less “window shopping” / impulse purchasing? It’s already pretty easy for me to find and buy like 99% of the things I want to buy on Amazon, making that more efficient would only help me on the margins, it at all.

In 2016 it seems like there was really this idea that there was a Reckoning that there was this big group of white working class ignored by the Democratic Party and Trump had successfully catered his politics to try and help that constituency.

And in 2024, maybe Trump was seen as weak enough that. A bunch of billionaires could come in and coopt that movement to their own ends, completely leaving behind the coalition that made Trump popular in the first place.

There’s a part of me, maybe in retrospect watching this happen that empathizes with the original goals of MAGA and is sad to watch them completely abandoned.

I think there’s a lot of variance in essentially people’s constitution. Marc Andreesen used to say the ideal lifestyle was like 12 hours of coffee followed by 6 hours of alcohol daily. That would kill me.

But for the first I dunno 25 years of my life, I didn’t workout, smoked, drank 2 liter mountain dews and ate like crap, and I felt and looked great. I basically just kept doing that until I couldn’t, and I think some people that goes on for longer than others.

One of the happiest people I knew was a total hedonist, who dranked, ate and smoked himself to a heart attack in his fifties. And he had much more energy than me, a guy who ran marathons. He used to run circles around me at work(a physical job, catering) and would often ask why I worked out for energy/strength. He didn’t understand the point.

My greatest aspiration in life (yes, hyperbole) is to retire and get rid of my smartphone, and I can imagine it’s just going to be harder and harder as time goes on. I went into a restaurant recently and asked for a menu and they looked at me like I was from another planet.

I mean, I think anthropomorphism is appropriate when these products are primarily interacted with through chat, introduce themselves “as a chatbot”, with some companies going so far as to present identities, and one of the companies building these tools is literally called Anthropic.

I’m really excited about this device but haven’t read many perspectives on this that think it’s little more than vaporeare. Anyone have any contrasting perspectives or do we just have to wait like a year to see what happens. Does the founder have a track record?

The article opens with Musk’s claim that:

[grok is] “maximally truth-seeking… even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”

There’s a thread on Reddit, where when asked who in the world is most deserving of the death penalty, Grok responds by saying Donald Trump

And when you ask it to generate an image of the person most deserving of the death penalty, it produces an image of Donald Trump.

Grok has since been patched, to prevent this. But it makes me observe:

It feels like the folks who speak out most against AI alignment, are also those most concerned about aligning AI against sort of woke ideology.

It makes me suspect that when Musk says “maximally truth seeking” he means an objective truth, and not the truth that aligns with his world view. Is this an excessively pessimistic observation?

I mean, if Mark didn’t so clearly spend the past few years working on his image, I might agree with you, but seems odd to ignore.

I've generally speaking considered myself an athiest, and I don't think that theism is the only way about this, but as I've gotten older, I've sort of chosen to... let's say practice a belief in God, as a way to sort of filter the world in opposition to the existentialist idea that if we truly stared into the abyss of our existence we'd go insane.

I think it's useful to have a moral grounding or framework when overwhelmed by the goings on in the world. Something about trying to understand that there is a core goodness or moral foundation outside of the tangible chaos we experience everyday.

I think like there needs to be a balance between "question everything" which can (not necessarily is) a risk of atheism or anti-theism) and "question nothing".

What are you getting at? Didn’t you answer your own question?

“Apple recalls 2 billion iPhones for security fix!”

I mean, the more we use the word, the more people will figure it out right?

Also, it seems like we should differentiate between a software update that puts new features in your music app and one that fixes power steering.

> I think this is going to be the first large-scale "test" for lack of a better word of Trump's base. Because if voters didn't want this it's gonna hurt.

I assume they’ll roll this out in a way that provides plausible deniability. Maybe roll it out over ten years or otherwise keep the pain limited.

Wouldn’t this increase the risk, for say people who were retiring in 2008-ish?

I’m really not trying to be overly negative here, but I read an article recently that said, maybe counter intuitively that intelligent people were more likely to believe conspiracy theories, because their mind can quickly fill in the gaps.

So I do wonder, does maybe AI’s lack of emotion make it implicitly more rational, or is AI likely to develop similar biased thought patterns the more intelligent that it gets.

Or put another way, is AI maybe more likely to hallucinate extremely probable responses to more complex scientific questions, that send scientists on wild good chased.

It’s interesting they thought the Amazon name would be a draw. I’m not a huge gamer or anything but my gut instinct would be that the name Amazon would be something to overcome to appeal to a fickle subculture like gamers.

> Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?

Decidedly not

So, in response to public health officials being wrong about X, we get new public health officials who are wrong about Y? I totally understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like they tried to explain that this was a bad campaign, they just ended it.

I didn’t find it misleading, but maybe the context on the word campaign is different for me?

Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.

It’s so interesting that, like if Musk wanted to rest in his laurels a bit that he would still be known as one of the greatest innovators/entrepeneurs of all time, but yeah, I think two things are true that he is and that he’s way over his skis in almost every way and has no clear path to fix any of it.

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of this ship.

Are they going to look into X/Twitter banning far right influencers like Laura Loomer?

I’m curious if this all ends in a vaguely misguided ending of Section 230.

“Now at least I get to watch horrible people get a dose of their own medicine”

Doge is not being this careful, in fact I’d argue that Doge will disproportionately impact people not on your target list.

All the “horrible” people you don’t like are going to be “punished” with lucrative contracts in the private sector while line workers, most of whom may agree with you suffer

Ironically USAID might help Americans more than foreign folks, and disproportionately Trump’s own supporters - if the money is being spent to buy American products, particularly food, that is then shipped overseas.

This is sort of the group that interests me the most, there is some notion of the government as sort of an employer of last resort in some areas which is a progressive/liberal idea, though id imagine with the areas most impacted by offshoring these jobs are disproportionately in red / Trump supporting states.

And even if you’re ok with getting rid of these jobs, the biggest impact might not even be the loss of these jobs but the loss of the consumers who had these jobs spending money in their local communities.