I say this as someone who’s not particularly a fan of AI and tries to use it very sparingly.

For me AI is not so much about productivity gains. Where I find it useful instead is to push me past the initial block of starting something from scratch. It’s that initial dopamine rush that the article mentions, from seeing an idea starting to take shape.

In that sense, if I compare projects by time spent on them with or without AI after they are completed, I too would probably find there were no productivity gains. But some of these things I would never get started at all by myself.

If you are a senior developer in a corporation, you know what you have to do, you are an expert in your domain, you rarely start something really new (and when you do, it is only after endless discussions and studies on tools, language, tech stack, architecture). AI is probably not a great help for you.

But even in corporate life, there are a lot of things that are inportant but that you constantly set aside: from planning your career, to honing your communication skills or whatever it is that you could certainly learn to do (with time and dedication) but for some reason you keep postponing because you are not already an expert at them and it takes motivation to learn. That’s where AI found its niche in my life.

I think the generally unspoken hope is that democracy in the US is not completely fucked and that the transition to full-on fascism can still be reverted after Trump’s political or physical death (both of which seem ever so close).

I will give him my Nobel prize too if he stops invading (and threatening to invade) countries and finally stops that one russian invasion. It’s really shiny!!

Gangster starts war with some of its closest colleagues

I laughed when I read the list of organization names and saw “Education Cannot Wait”. Because I mean that one had it coming: it’s so clearly anti-MAGA!

Loophole. They didn’t cross their heart and hope to die. The only way is calling them out with Liar Liar Pants on Fire

As a EU-an, It’s a good plan, but I don’t want my city bombed and our President kidnapped.

Being a bubble does not mean the service they provide is useless. It means that the service is never generating enough profit to repay for the huge cost of providing it.

Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?

Because these AI companies are currently burning through literally a good chunk of all the cash in the world and they will eventually need to make even more gigantic profits to repay that cash. And the only one that is currently making money from AI seems to be NVIDIA, by selling the hardware that powers the AI giants.

I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.

Microsoft could write an AI agent to filter threads based on context you don’t like. Come to think of it, Megagenius Elon Musk already has one he wrote to censor anti-Israel posts on Trump’s Truth Social. There, I think I got them all… Happy holidays!

Not an expert at all, but I think to an extent this already happens with the current system in most countries, and it would probably need to be done much more now. Not that Automation pays more taxes, but that having employees generally qualifies companies for tax breaks.

For instance, when Amazon said “we’re going to open a new HQ”, Cities and States tripped over themselves to try and give them the largest tax breaks. But that was under the assumption that the HQ would give jobs to tens of thousand of people, not to 5 data scientist and a massive, energy-hungry data center.

And yes, you CAN run Doom on it. But turns out it’s not a great idea

***k

Hey, how do you know my password?

Underestimating China isn’t wise, but always using China as the new Boogeyman to get even more trillions invested in “national security” is getting old fast. “Secret reports” my ass. If you’re reading it on the internet it’s most likely plain old FUD.

You’re right, meddling with elections in other countries has been done pretty often (see how many times the US appear in this list on wikipedia ) but sitting Presidents usually pretend to be politely looking the other way.

What’s different now is that Trump likes to put his name on everything, preferably in big golden letters, and he can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. In the news it’s hardly ever “the USA” now; it’s “the Trunp admin” or just “Trump” doing everything.

Oh, now he’s concerned that Roblox is bad for kids? After he bought Trump?

…out of the overwindow?

Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.

But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.

Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.

Oh, new intelligence has just emerged that your country’s government is supporting a terrorist organization that sending drugs to the US! /s

I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:

• algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it’s “The Algorithm” in capital letters like “The Social Media Algorithm”; then it becomes evil
• machine learning - been out for decades, hasn’t destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
• machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. “Machine intelligence” performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we’ll give it a pass)
• artificial intelligence - machine intelligence’s evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it’s the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists

One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.

Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords