They changed the rules to target cosmopolitan gamer sock puppet accounts if I remember correctly.

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

Are we moving towards an AI jihad? A jihaid, if you will.

Hormuz doesn’t fit in the Dune: Planet Earth narrative for me. We should stop using oil for the sake of the climate yet we don’t. We don’t have to go through that strait with so much trade. We just don’t want to take the detour and price increases. The Dune universe depends on the spice for navigation and I think there isn’t another source. We are still so dependent on oil out of habit and/or stupidity. The mullahs really aren’t the freemen. They are more of a side arm of the Harkonen clan that was provoked by the thoughtless action of the emperor’s real estate developer triggering their typical c@![ish behaviour.

In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?

Yes.

Idiot (English) Idiot (m) Idiote (f, French) Idiot (m) Idiotin (f, German)

Why aren’t they automatically looking for business links between Slovenian domain vendors and the First Family? Melania is Slovenian after all and it would be such a misstep if not even her extended family got to profit from this one.

I wonder if the more modern mobile network protocols require slightly more power than the 2-3G of old. It’s probably a rounding error; it would run forever™ minus an hour or so.

I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.

What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.

Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”

It would probably be a miracle if you hadn’t re-farted some molecules.

Yes. The context was internet services.

Giving up Meta products wouldn’t be terrible. But it wouldn’t solve anything. The greatest environmental footprint is left by streaming, I think.

We should all get off the internet, yet here we are. Hypocrisy is the prequel to Idiocracy.

You’re formulating arguments why I’m wrong. With the greatest of respect, that’s defeatism speaking. Difficult? Yes. Checkmate? No. It may take a crisis to get this going; the New Deal didn’t come from nowhere either.

You cannot fix all of these issues at once. You probably cannot fix a lot of these issues without first improving education levels within the population. A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.

Term limits for SC judges to some odd number of years for any new appointees is something both sides will be able to agree on. If nobody tries though, of course it won’t happen.

The US has been checkmated …

I’m going to take issue with this statement. Nobody has checkmated the US. If we have to stay in this metaphor, the US checkmated itself.

One of the biggest mistakes was to allot the same number of votes to Rhode Island as to California in the senate. A more proportionate voting system would do wonders for half the issues you listed. Appointing judges for life is another one. Financing election campaigns like that is also mad. Nobody forced Americans to do business like that.

This isn’t a game of chess where checkmate is irreversible. The sooner folks stop formulating arguments why I’m wrong or why these are insurmountable hurdles, the better for all of us.

While I do agree that with the cult clown car people in charge of the executive right now, there is an added difficulty to passing legislation. The Epstein Act part 1 has shown though there are ways. So regulation on so-called AI is still possible and not late like the article seems to suggest.

What’s the point of this article? To highlight that the sausage maker that is a parliamentary democracy is slow? Or to show how narrow majority margins cause long delays in passing legislation? I can’t imagine it’s only the lack of knowledge about so-called AI. I imagine many members don’t know that much about tax law, the intricacies of the military, or drugs in general. Yet we don’t question their qualifications when they pass legislation on those subjects. We elect people to these bodies not on the basis that they are experts at everything but for their ability to look into issues and form an opinion that hopefully most resembles ours. They cannot know everything, no matter how much they pretend. If that is the standard we hold them to, you’ll only get braggadocios assholes who will stand for elections.

When has a legislature ever been on top of the latest developments, especially in tech? It’s pretty much always reactive. The seatbelt and crumple zone came after the introduction of the automobile. OSHA didn’t predate the industrial revolution. Section 230 came after the WWW. Not by much in the grand scheme of things but still. We are what now? 4-5 years into this madness? It’s not unusual not to have great regulations set in stone.

When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

Fools! That’s exactly what was missing from creating Skynet! The workers were replaced with slop bots, now management gets replaced by slop bots too! It’s slop bots all the way down! Run for the hills!

A memory wipe would make sense. Or they go back in time, say, to punch some more dinosaurs, come back, and there is just Bob at her station and nobody bats an eye because the timeline was changed. A reverse Sela (the RomYarLin from TNG) move. Because I’d like both of these solutions, I’m very positive they’ll find a far less satisfying one.

I think you could save this one still. People knew his name before he was elected leader because he was imprisoned by his racist government. That’s not really a good thing.

Aung San Suu Kyi, for a short time while in power before she tolerated genocide on her watch, would have sort of fit in the Mandela category as well.

Strange New Worlds is en exercise of writers writing themselves into exceedingly narrow corners if in the end they want to connect to TOS. They had a descendant of Khan on the crew, half the crew dated her, yet none of that comes up when they meet the actual Khan. I wonder how they will connect that story point.

During the wedding episode, nobody sees Trelane as Trelane. They see other people he inhabits. In the daily soap ep, only Pike sees him, and he isn’t around later. So they kind of got that right, I think.

The first coherent space opera was Babylon 5 where one creative mind oversaw everything and in the end wrote all the scripts. The reboot Galactica is another example. You could tell The Expanse was all made up by these two guys. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, a Stargate possibly. But Trek and also Doctor Who all change with their changing writers and over the decades. There are periods where certain people are in charge and there is stability in story and focus. But then their tenure ends and somebody else comes in. And if it all made sense and everybody loved it the same way we’d have nothing to bitch about.

Eight minutes can seem very long though.