My understanding is that most professional podcasters start off more or less like this, start getting a Patreon or some light sponsors going in order to fund actually decent equipment, and then look at the numbers one morning and realize that actually they could just do this for a living.

I mean, giving inflated titles and grandiose plans is part of the sales pitch. Y’know, for the cult.

Like, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. The problem isn’t that the people who want to be cult leaders are able to attract a lot of people who are preinclined to be cult followers and those people suffer the associated psychic damages. It’s that even the less culty parts of the rationalist subculture seem to produce a weirdly high number of wannabe cult leaders, even if they don’t conceptualize themselves that way.

I’m sure glad that the people screwing over literally everyone else on the planet for their own benefit aren’t going to screw over us, the investors. Surely there’s no way they could screw over the people who have been giving them a functionally blank check for nearly a decade.

Insert surprised Pikachu face here

Rather than use an LLM to churn through however many zillion tokens and parameters and do an ungodly number of matrix multiplications, maybe consider thinking about the problem and writing the relevant “if()then;” blocks yourself!

You know, like a caveman (according to these same bosses a few months ago).

Seriously. Instead he announced he was going to be throwing somewhat less money into that specific dumpster fire and the investors decided that was worth 4%.

I will confess that my initial reaction was from a partial reading since I got derailed ranting about the silicon valley attitude towards neurodivergence and how much damage it’s doing to us, and basically right after that bit it starts taking a much more (appropriately imo) cynical tone that was honestly refreshing.

Let this be a lesson to those of us who must learn, I guess.

In other news, Cade Metz’ latest piece is actually pretty critical, especially by NYT standards, but you wouldn’t know it from the headline.

“A.I. Agents: They’re Fun. They’re Useful. But Don’t Give Them the Credit Card.”

Ask for it to be password protected.

I think I’m having a stroke. Or at least I hope I’m having a stroke and that this unparodiably dumb piece isn’t any more real than it sounds.

Did someone tell him that Perun had cut the “here’s why the US doesn’t have enough boats to escort all the traffic through the strait and would need a coalition to have any chance of success” part from his latest video, or is that just a deeply ironic coincidence.

Isn’t that new Chris Pratt movie I keep seeing the first 5 seconds of a trailer for basically this, but mixed with a Minority Report knockoff?

I’m more concerned that the writer could listen to this, presumably multiple times on his tape, and still wrote the rest of the piece like these guys are acting in good faith. Regardless of the unanswerable question of whether they believe their own hype, they are clearly saying things for a purpose of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement rather than out of any concern for other people, and that is where the story should be. Even the guys most ostensibly interested in protecting humanity are still, when they think the mic is off and the journalist is out of the room, joking about how they’re manipulating the press into saying what they want.

• On pages 17 and 19, Whiting cites “T.C.A. § 29-12-119,” but we cannot find a section 29-12-119 in the Tennessee Code Annotated

lol. lmao.

On page 4, Whiting states “it is well settled that the First Amendment does not protect speech that knowingly asserts false statements of fact. United States v. Alverez, 567 U.S. 709, 721 (2012).” Alvarez states the opposite: “This opinion . . . rejects the notion that false speech should be in a general category that is presumptively unprotected.” Id. at 721–22 (plurality opinion).

Oh. Oh no.

• On page 1, Whiting states, “This Court has made clear that , [sic] ‘[T]he mere fact that a plaintiff did not prevail does not mean that the claim was frivolous.’ Adcock-Ladd v. Secretary of the Treasury, 227 F.3d 343, 350 (6th Cir. 2000).” Adcock-Ladd does not contain the quoted language, and it is not about frivolous cases.

This specific confabulation appears at least 5 times. I’m not sure if Whiting was copy/pasting from something ChatGPT spat out or if ChatGPT was at least consistently inventing the same bullshit.

Looking for a bit of context I found this local news piece and it certainly reads like the guy is a crank who kick-started this whole thing by trying to protest the crime of public safety during a global pandemic.

Although citing fake cases violates Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38, Rule 38 alone is not “up to the task” of sanctioning this conduct, Chambers, 501 U.S. at 50, because Rule 38 allows only for the imposition of costs and attorneys’ fees, Sanctions § 33. But we think other sanctions are also appropriate, so we employ our inherent authority

Not a lawyer, just a bit of a law nerd, by this is a big deal, especially the fact that courts have been repeatedly using their inherent authority sanction on people who fuck this up. Courts do not routinely invoke their inherent authority like this. Also this footnote is interesting:

Ghostwriting is when one person writes the document while another person takes credit for it without acknowledging the true author’s identity. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 741 (4th ed. 2000). Legal authorities generally discuss ghostwriting for a pro se litigant, see, e.g., Duran v. Carris, 238 F.3d 1268, 1272 (10th Cir. 2001), but we see no reason why rules regulating ghostwriting should apply in only the pro se context. The primary concern with ghostwriting is that the true author would escape liability for his conduct, see In re Mungo, 305 B.R. 762, 768 (Bankr. D.S.C. 2003); Ellis v. Maine, 448 F.2d 1325, 1328 (1st Cir. 1971), and that concern is just as acute when a lawyer ultimately signs the ghostwritten pleading.

It sounds like they’re looking for an angle to hold the LLM operators (OpenAI/Anthropic - or at least whatever company wraps the models in the necessary bits and bobs to make it a product they can sell to stupid asshole lawyers) as ultimately accountable for these filings, just as if they were a SovCit guru providing materials for one of their griftees to submit to the court without ever actually putting their name to the record where the might face consequences. I’d need to do some research to speculate on what that might mean, but it should give everyone operating in this space pause.

I’m still reading the appendix that goes into the specific hallucinations but it sounds like they’re pretty absurd based on the tone of this order.

Given the ubiquity of explosive drones specifically I feel like we need that calendar cartoon with March 2026 being torn off to reveal July 1864

I also appreciated this followup

I mean, some of their before/after images are much more impressive than the RE one, but the general look is less like a revolution in capacity and more like someone took some time to find the right Instagram filter.

Also after taking a look at Starfield’s steam page for comparison I’m pretty sure that all the “before” images were taken on lower settings for existing texture quality and lighting. Like, even in areas where the DLSS gives an improvement the original game doesn’t look as bad as presented here.

Also the discourse has been ongoing since at least Skyrim’s original release whether or not the increasing fidelity of game graphics was actually making games better, or just more expensive to make and play. And that was before transformer models entered the picture and started cooking the world. I’m glad nVidia got some new jerk-off material, but even if it works exactly as advertised that’s all it is at this point.

This was my thought the whole time: if the political will existed, we could probably already do everything that AI is supposed to “enable” here. Some of the work people would choose not to do would end up being actually important, and the market in its infinite power would need to find a way to get that work done, whether that’s paying more to invent new types of automation or compensating people enough that they choose to do it without the threat of starvation and homelessness (or finding new ways to exploit people to do it, but I believe there’s a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but that’s the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will there’s no reason to expect any change in productivity to change the current arrangement. At best the people working any jobs that get eliminated are discarded as obsolete, lose their ability to participate in the market, and are eventually handled by the criminal justice system or otherwise removed from consideration.

I mean she was undoubtedly too much of a lefty for the Thiel set to ever admit her influence, but I feel like that’s the exact type of vibe she’s trying and mostly failing to evoke.

I swear every time his stuff floats through here I end up standing as I read it and wildly gesticulating at my living room or ranting extemporaneously to my basement about something it made me think of or feel. After reading this piece I hope that comes off as more complimentary to his work than showing myself to be a freaking weirdo.

“Do you think there’s a reason why the DSA didn’t allow you to use Signal or other apps on your government phone?”

“No.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE “S” STANDS FOR YOU IGNORANT CHILD??

Just gonna file this on my mental list of reasons I didn’t go into law.