The AI bubble keeps radicalizing me further by letting me know that there exists a class of people who are able and willing to pay $300 a day to have a stupid chatbot expose their PII to hackers and maybe set appointments for them just so long as they don’t have to interact with a poor person for whom that would be a life-changing amount of money.

Quick, someone nail your 95-page blog post to the front door of lighthaven or whatever they call it.

The accountability sink backfires since in order to sell this they have to acknowledge how much of a role they play in the process, rather than being simply a platform that connects applicants to openings and doesn’t make decisions.

It makes me think that they’re sufficiently poorly designed that it’s treating the reset as a temporary communication issue. I wonder if you could use this to their detriment by configurating the server to silently drop the connection rather than RSTing it. From your server’s side it should look fairly similar, but from their side they actually have to spend the time putting together and sending the HTTP request before getting shut down.

Yeah. There’s something altogether disgusting about people looking at the sheer amount of resources and infrastructure that we as a collective society are pouring into this crap and lamenting that not enough people use them as goddamn toys, even though those are also the only people who don’t seem to hate every interaction.

If you take the raw words and ignore the context it’s not too much worse, save the first person narrator, but with the context of the author it’s goddamn horrifying.

Particularly if you want to opt out of this craziness right now, it’s getting quite hard. Some projects no longer accept human contributions until they have vetted the people completely. Others are starting to require that you submit prompts alongside your code, or just the prompts alone.

My dude, the call is coming from inside the apartment.

At this point I think we can safely classify “Gas Town” as a cognitohazard. Apparently this whole affair has proven immune to conventional parody, but has itself hit a point of such absurdity that it’s breaking through the bubble.

So it looks like the ongoing slow-motion train wreck around Greenland ties back to our very good friends in the technoligarchy. This is the only explanation I’ve yet seen for the insistence on outright annexation.

We had to do the same when my wife’s ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.

A spectre is haunting your workflow

Hell, that’s the whole thing with these LLM-based business/product structures, isn’t it? The models are very good at creating something that looks right, leading to people being absolutely blindsided when they fail to actually do the thing that boosters and salesmen pretended they were doing.

Given that these are statistical models that function probabilistically, it seem like the obvious attitude to take would be to assume it’s a question of when they fail and do something wrong, rather than if. But accounting for that inevitability undermines most if not all of the actual economic value of these things because it turns out it takes just about as much time, effort, and skill to monitor and check these things as it would to just do the damn work yourself. But as soon as you start giving these things permissions to operate independently you are setting up a time bomb and putting duct tape over the timer. You will get fucked eventually.

Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.

It’s a transparent attempt at normalization. They open up last year with the marketing blitz to get it out there, but by now they’re trying to make the slop bubble into the new status quo. In the same way that of course you pay your annual subscriptions to whatever or put up with whatever DRM scheme, online tracking cookies, surveillance capitalism, and whatever else you want to bitch about, of course you now have AI shoehorned into your every interaction with your computer. The slopification of everything is a fait accompli, and so of course this vital economic service needs to be protected and sustained.

My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.

God this is bleak. Also, I was refreshing my memory of recent Venezuelan history the other day and noted a concerning parallel. Part of the ongoing economic crisis in that country happened because of economic policies that completely hollowed out the economic basics and covered up for the damage with the money they were making from oil sales during a time when the war in Iraq had caused prices to spike to nearly an all-time high. When prices fell both Chavez and Maduro focused on protecting their position by covering up the problems through price and currency controls rather than fixing them, which led to spiralling inflation and massive food insecurity. I don’t know, something about godawful economic policies and corruption that get papered over by temporary and unsustainable economic conditions seems particularly worth remembering in light of the current situation.

I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.

Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.

From the name alone I assumed it was going to try and turn the whole universe into an endless field of 3/3 elk tokens.

That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.

The number of times I’ve been listening to QAA and thought “dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context” when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.

Remember it’s only tyranny when the government does it. Otherwise it’s just sparkling feudalism.

Actually having made that joke I feel obliged to link a post from historian Brett Devereaux about, among many other things, what the ancient greeks meant by a tyrant because “building personal power by subverting and corrupting the actual state” was even more key than power being invested in one individual.

The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.

This distinction feels meaningful in the year of our lord 2026 for some reason.