tl;dw is that you should say “please” as basically prompt engineering, I guess?

the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it’s an all-knowing benevolent information god, it’ll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?

I don’t see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.

like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on “pretty please, don’t make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred” to a prompt…is that going to solve the problem?

short answer: no, not really

long answer, here’s an analogy that might help:

you go to https://yourbank.com/ and log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.

when you press “Send”, your browser does something like send a POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with a JSON blob like {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "ACME Plumbing", "amount": 150.0} (this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it’s close enough for the analogy)

and all that happens over TLS. which means it’s “secure”. but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop’s wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.

(if your threat model is instead “someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password”, no amount of TLS will save you from that)

but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "Bob's Shady Plumbing", "amount": 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob’s Shady Plumbing.

that request is also over TLS, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren’t logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.

I have an admittedly archaic definition of “coverage”: reporting via the written word.

here’s an interview with her, from last year in Current Affairs: Kat Abughazaleh on How Right-Wing Propaganda Works

Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what’s going on in the right’s media ecosystem, and we’re glad that Kat performs this valuable public service.

Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee’s indoctrination program, the “right-wing Amazon”, Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right’s media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains.

the right-wing media ecosystem she covers is inherently video-based. Fox News has text articles on their website but they probably get next to nothing in views compared to video clips on their website or their actual TV news shows.

and so media criticism of that right-wing ecosystem is also going to be inherently video-heavy. maybe you could have a text article interspersed with video clips, but that’s pretty unwieldy.

I honestly had no idea there were people doing serious reporting on there.

I’m also “old man yells at cloud” about TikTok…but you probably remember the original, early-2000s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, right? how they’d show video clips of a politician saying something, and 5 years earlier saying the opposite, etc? and how, for its time, that was a breath of fresh air? that wasn’t text-based, but it was still “serious reporting”, right? journalism is speaking truth to power. you can do that in any medium.

I’m not on TikTok, but I’ve seen enough clips shared on other platforms to know that TikTok has everything. if there wasn’t someone doing left-leaning journalism on TikTok, someone would step in to fill the void.

and it’s not necessarily all shortform video - here’s an hour-long video on her YouTube channel: The Dangerous Reality of White Christian Nationalism

but for better or worse, shortform video seems to be what gets actually watched. the video above has 82k views. meanwhile, 4 minutes on Why Conservatives Hate Being Called “Weird” has 116k (and that’s just YouTube, I suspect Instagram and TikTok views of the shorter videos are significantly higher)

I’m picturing a bunch of FBI agents with two side-by-side printouts, the list of Epstein’s clients and a list of Trump campaign donors, cross-referencing them in order to make sure “sensitive information” is redacted.

oh, this one’s pretty easy, actually

a normal AI tells you it’s safe to eat one rock per day

an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it’s smart enough to only do that once a day.

Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI’s “agent” back in January

he called it “promising but frustrating”…but this is the type of shit he considers “promising”:

My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?

It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.

At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.

After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn’t able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”

they’re gonna revolutionize the world, it’s gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now…but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it’ll order them from Iowa.

click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, “Don’t Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success”

their pricing page is here.

I’m paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there’s also a 5 USD/month tier but I’m sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.

so it’s not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I’m happy to pay it because it’s a business model that I would like to see succeed.

I’ve been using Kagi for ~2 months, after a friend gave me a similar invite code. this news from Google affirmed my decision to pay for Kagi once the 3-month trial is over, instead of going back to Google.

Tay any% speedrun

although I suppose “only one day after launch” doesn’t break the record:

It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.

but it’s great that the billionaire owner of the LA Times is trying. this sort of innovation is why billionaires like him are so important.

a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax

to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:

you’re paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.

and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn’t cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.

even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.

at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin’s current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.

right-wing hypocrisy is so common that pointing it out is a cliche, but I still think it’s important to highlight here

in 2020, the NYT published an op-ed from Tom Cotton saying Trump should send in the military against the protests after George Floyd’s murder

it caused a huge and predictable backlash, and the editorial editor published a defense of why they did it

We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.

this was always the excuse for platforming the right-wing in supposedly “liberal” newspapers. we need to listen to different viewpoints. have the debate. teach the controversy. marketplace of ideas. if you don’t like it, then you’re “close-minded” or live in an “echo chamber” or whatever.

(the NYT’s long history of publishing transphobic bullshit comes to mind as well)

but then the ratchet clicks one notch tighter, and you have Bezos announcing that they will only publish op-eds that are in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”. they won’t publish competing viewpoints, because you can always find those elsewhere on the internet.

this argument would have applied equally in 2020, of course. Tom Cotton was a sitting Senator. he can publish his opinions on his Senate website, he can easily hold press conferences, etc. there was no need for the NYT to publish it.

when it’s a supposedly “liberal” newspaper, they claim they have an obligation to also publish the “respectable” conservative voices. but when a paper decides to be explicitly right-wing, they don’t even pay lip service to claiming they’re publishing “both sides”.

here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value

it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant

judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:

Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line

Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value

Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws

here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella

there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:

Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.

right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.

around 15 minutes in, the host asks:

You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?

Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?

and Nadella responds:

Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?

I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.

When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.

that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.

also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:

A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Through Scale’s data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.

As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE’s research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity’s Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems’ expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE’s data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.

did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?

unfortunately, “is such-and-such a crime?” is an overly simplistic way of looking at it

a) is there a law that forbids it?

b) are there law enforcement agents who are willing to enforce that law, by arresting people who break it? (or writing citations / court summonses)

c) is the rest of the criminal legal system (prosecutors, judges, etc) willing to pursue charges against those people?

the answer to A, in this case, is very clearly yes - from 18 U.S. Code § 912:

Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

and that basically doesn’t matter. if some right-wing chud wants to cosplay as an ICE agent for the purpose of terrorizing immigrants, the FBI is not going to lift a finger about it, and the US Attorneys (federal prosecutors) working for the Trump-controlled DOJ certainly wouldn’t bring charges if they did get arrested.

Representative Andy Ogles’ push to allow Trump to run for office in 2028

some fun facts about Andy Ogles:

Nov 2023: He doesn’t report having checking or savings. So where did Andy Ogles get $320,000 for his campaign?

May 2024: US Rep. Andy Ogles falsely claimed $320,000 campaign loan, instead calls money a ‘pledge’

Aug 2024: FBI agents execute search warrant on Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, NewsChannel 5 confirms

Jan 8 2025: Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles stalls FBI investigation with behind-the-scenes court battle

Jan 24 2025: Facing FBI investigation that Trump could halt, Andy Ogles proposes allowing third term for president

Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.

congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.

but also:

HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.

this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)

I think it’s interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy

the topic of this thread is the genocide in Gaza, Biden’s complicity in it, and the response to that from Democratic voters.

as is typical of Biden apologists, you’ve tried to minimize it, and deflect from it, by bringing up non-sequiturs.

I haven’t taken the bait, and tried to avoid letting the thread about genocide get derailed into a thread about section 403b1 of the Inflation Reduction Act or whatever.

and yeah, I’m sure that’s very disappointing. my thoughts and prayers are with you in this difficult time.

maybe you’ll get the response you’re looking for if you started a thread for “let’s talk about all the amazing things in Biden’s four years that didn’t involve children having limbs amputated without anesthesia”

But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.

yeah, Biden was an amazing president, if you ignore the genocide that he supported.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler boosted the German economy by acquiring more farmland. Slobodan Milošević probably had some ideas about progressive tax policy or something.

genocide denial isn’t just “I deny that genocide is happening”. it’s more pernicious than that. it can also take the form of aggressively changing the subject. mention that 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust, and some Holocaust deniers will dispute that directly, but others of them will jangle “lots of other people died too” keys in front of your face as an attempted distraction.

I have a pro-Israel friend, when I talked to him about how Palestinians in the West Bank are forbidden from collecting rain water he didn’t deny it, he just changed the subject to talk about the incredible advances that Israeli scientists have made in water-efficient irrigation techniques.

I’d urge you to consider that your comments have the effect of this sort of “soft” genocide denial, most likely without you intending it at all.

This is all by way of response to you saying that Democrats don’t actually do anything, more or less, they just run around making things worse and asking for money and votes.

yeah, you completely misunderstood what I’m saying.

this is a framing of the problem that I often see from apologists of people like Biden - that his critics want him to “do more”.

as if politics can be simplified down to a big dial with “do nothing” on one end, and “do lots of stuff” on the other, and critics simply want the dial turned higher.

in this oversimplification, if you can paint criticism of Biden as “he should have done more” then that criticism can be refuted with “no, look at all the things he did”. which is what you’re trying to do here. I say Biden has no principles, and you try to refute that with “no, look at this bill that he signed”.

what I’m actually complaining about is Biden and other Democrats doing the wrong thing.

Biden approved a bunch of oil drilling. I would have preferred him to do less. less would have been an improvement. less would have been consistent with the Democrats’ supposed principled opposition to climate change.

Biden approved (and expanded) a bunch of weapons shipments to Israel. again, I wanted him to do less.

the “do more” vs. “do less” framing of politics is so simplistic that it would get you a bad grade in a high school civics class. the actual question is, when Democrats do something, what are they doing and why are they doing it. is the thing they are doing good or bad.

Biden took the biggest action on climate change ten times over

oh wow, are we at the “bringing up non-sequitur talking points” point of this debate already?

Jan 2023:

Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years.

Feb 2023:

The Biden administration cleared the way on Wednesday for a controversial Arctic oil project, recommending that drilling proceed in an undeveloped section of the Alaskan tundra.

While the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, suggested that the project move forward with a more limited footprint, the changes would still allow ConocoPhillips, the company behind the development, to extract the full volume of oil it is targeting.

August 2024:

In a sit-down interview with CNN on Thursday, Vice President Harris said she wouldn’t ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of her position during her first presidential run.

The Democratic nominee attempted to explain why her position has changed from being against fracking to being in favor of it.

like I said, climate change is a complete non-sequitur from the conversation we were having - but if you look at it beyond a surface level, it still underscores the point I was trying to make. Democrats’ opposition to climate change isn’t based on principles, it’s based on “say whatever we need to say to get elected”.

and reduced income inequality for the first time in I have no idea how long

sigh. sure, let’s play this game of non-sequiturs.

from the Census’s own website:

Using pretax money income, the Gini index decreased by 1.2% between 2021 and 2022 (from 0.494 to 0.488). This annual change was the first time the Gini index had decreased since 2007, reversing the 1.2% increase between 2020 and 2021

which sounds great, until you scroll down…

In contrast to the 1.2% decrease in the Gini index calculated using pretax income, the annual change in the Gini index calculated using post-tax income increased 3.2% from 2021 to 2022.

so yeah, income inequality decreased…if you use a statistic that doesn’t matter in the real world (income before taxes). but inequality increased if you use a statistic that reflects actual people’s actual pocketbooks (post-tax income).

and even using the misleading pre-tax figures, the supposed decrease in inequality was from high incomes decreasing slightly, while low incomes stayed the same:

The 2022 data suggest that declines in real income at the middle and top of the income distribution drove the decrease in the Gini index.

At the 90th percentile, 10% of households in 2022 had income above $216,000, down 5.5% from the 2021 estimate of $228,600.

However, at the 10th percentile, 10% of households had income at or below $17,100 in 2022, not statistically different from 2021 ($16,890).

so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality…but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don’t have “help poor people” as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.

if a campaign had a principled stance of improving material conditions for poor people, then it probably wouldn’t do things like have Uber’s Chief Legal Officer as a campaign advisor. but I’m just a random guy on the internet and not a Democratic campaign strategist, so what do I know.

attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters.

this is inadvertently a perfect summation of the problem.

you’re framing “what position should Harris have taken on genocide in Gaza” entirely in terms of would it have gained or lost her voters.

a 1938 poll asked people in the US if they supported allowing more European Jews to move to the US. 71% said no. advance that page by two slides, a 1942 poll found 93% of Americans supported internment of Japanese immigrants, and 59% supported internment of American citizens with Japanese ancestry.

opposition to genocide…is sometimes politically unpopular.

have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror, the one where the British PM gets blackmailed into fucking a pig? there’s a somewhat-minor plot point in it, that I think got overshadowed by the rest of it. the PM is getting the results of real-time polls on Twitter, and based on the poll results he’s constantly flip-flopping about whether or not he’ll fuck the pig.

Republicans have principles. they’re all bad principles, to be sure, but there are things they consistently believe in. Democrats have no principles. they’ll campaign on anything they think will get them votes.

Republicans are anti-abortion. Democrats are pro-choice…except when they campaign for anti-abortion Democrats

Republicans are anti-immigrant. Democrats are pro-immigrant…except when they try to campaign on “border security” out of a misplaced belief that they’ll win over “moderate” xenophobes"

Republicans are in favor of big business fucking over regular people. Democrats defend regular people…except when someone like FTC Chair Lina Khan goes after businesses connected with Democratic party donors

If your opponent was overtly in favor of ethnic cleansing, and you weren’t

“overtly” is doing some pretty heavy lifting there

if Trump was “overtly” in favor of genocide* what was Biden’s position?

the Israeli military was (and is) committing genocide, with US-supplied weapons, and Biden insisted on continuing those weapons shipments (including in his lame duck period, when he could have stopped them without political backlash, if he actually cared to).

he repeated the genocide-denial talking point that the death count from the “Hamas-run” health ministry was artificially inflated.

at best, you could maybe say Biden was “covertly” in favor of genocide? he would certainly deny it, but actions speak louder than words, and there’s a lot of actions that he took that were complicit in the genocide.

meanwhile, Trump on the campaign trail was somewhat “covert” as well. from March 2024:

“You’ve got to finish the problem,” Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday when asked about the war. “You had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president.”

When asked on the program whether he supported a cease-fire in Gaza, Trump demurred, avoiding an explicit position on Israel’s military effort that has now also left more than 30,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The likely 2024 Republican nominee has not provided his own position on U.S. or Israel’s strategy throughout the five months of the war.

if you’re politically savvy, it’s not hard to read between the lines and understand what “finish the problem” really means. but that’s still a dogwhistle. it’s still “covert”.

the point that I think those Uncommitted activists were making is that Democrats had an opportunity (and I would argue, an obligation) to be overtly against genocide. and to back that up with actual action, and not do some wishy-washy “we think death is bad. also we’re sending Israel another multi-billion-dollar military aid package” crap.

this is a widespread, ongoing problem with Democratic campaigns - don’t just point at the other guy and say “he’d be bad, so vote for me” but make a positive case for “I’d be good, so vote for me”.

* I try to avoid the “ethnic cleansing” euphemism