Why are you borrowing like $3,000 a credit hour to use ChatGPT? Take some fucking humanities courses so you don’t grow up to be like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk challenging each other to an MMA match. This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.

Being able to use software everyone uses isn’t a marketable skill. Learn some shit. You’re an adult now.

Pretty sure Palantir got the “Keep Americans Divided” contract and not the non-profit radio stations that do Tiny Desk concerts and have to do fundraisers all the time to keep the lights on.

I had better than 20x20 vision when they gave us eye-tests in high school and I’ve often gotten, “Holy shit, you can read that from here?” I always chose screen space over font-size even on small laptops but I recently had to dial it back a notch for the first time. The optometrists come for us all, eventually.

My vision still seems fine but it takes longer to adjust and focus. Like I have a digital clock I used to glance at to check the time and now I have to squint for a few seconds and wait. It’s sort of like a phone camera auto-focus where it sorts things out but it used to be immediate.

It’s actually pretty reliable. It’s left wing, to be sure, but during the BLM protests, for instance, they had actual reporters on the ground and were live-streaming everything. They’re transparent.

I don’t know where to place it on the “reliable” spectrum. From what I’ve seen, their articles are sourced and edited but live streaming from a chaotic situation is sort of like being a “war correspondent” where it can be impossible to know what’s happening. So, it’s probably important to get more context later as more comes to light. But I’ve never seen them lie deliberately or anything.

I don’t know the term for it but maybe “guerrilla journalism” or something like that. They’ll send a dude on a skateboard to the middle of a riot while other reporters are in the “press zone” and covering police press conferences or whatever.

I didn’t think they should use A.I. yet at all. I don’t think the shitty version of machine learning of today is ready for engineering giant explosive things. As someone else pointed out, document management for regulatory filings and stuff is (hopefully) the use case. I don’t care if it’s used in that way.

Basically, I think today’s “A.I.” should be treated as alpha software. It has a ton of potential but there is a lot left to do, especially on things involving human or even critter life like rocket science, self-driving cars, or military applications where “edge cases” are life or death situations. (I don’t think it should be used for military applications until it’s really fucking mature tech but it’s already apparently being used for that so the cat’s out the bag there.)

That makes sense. Like you, I’ve generally found that LLMs are incredibly useful for certain, highly specific things but people (CEOs especially) need to understand their limitations.

When it first came out, I purposely used ChatGPT on a trip to evaluate it. I was in a historic city on a business trip where I stayed an extra few days so I was traveling alone. It was good at being a tour guide. Obviously, I could have researched everything and read guidebooks but I was focused on my work stuff. Being able to ask follow-up questions and have a conversation was a real improvement over traditional search.

That’s obviously a limited use case where I was asking questions that could have been answered in traditional ways but I found that to be a good consumer use case. It knew details that wouldn’t necessarily be in a Wikipedia article or Guidebook that would take me 15 Google searches to answer. Just my own little curiosity questions about an old building or whatever. I cross-checked things later and it didn’t hallucinate. Obviously, a very limited use case but it was good at it.

What the fuck is SpaceX using a large language model for?

I suspect it’s more likely that Meta won’t exist in any recognizable way in 2035 than anyone makes a huge profit on A.I. in the next decade. There will be advancements, to be sure, and compute will (hopefully) get cheaper and more efficient but 2035 seems like an Elon-Musk-level optimistic timeline.

I’m sort of agnostic on A.I. I don’t like it for much now but certainly see its potential. But look how long it took for The Internet to be universally adopted. And that’s assuming researchers even can solve the really hard last 20% of problems.

But someone smarter than me once put it better:

https://xkcd.com/678/

How the turntables have turned π radians. Maybe. We’ll see.

It has always been thus. Something like 20 years ago, edits from Congressperson’s DNS entries kept getting caught editing their (or more likely their boss’s) profile without knowing how to hide their identity.

Paying the Apple tax is a known part of the deal. It’s not always worth it for an individual but it is nice having an Apple Store in every major city (at least in the U.S.). I got my mom a MacBook because she lives 45 minutes away and I was sick of being her tech support for an operating system I don’t use regularly.

I got my stepdad a Chromebook last year when he asked me to fix his laptop. I said sure and then it was this giant 32 bit antique running Windows Vista. I was just like, “I would rather buy a Chromebook than connect this thing to my WiFi network.”

I use all the operating systems, by the way. I have Arch on my Steam Deck, I guess. More of a Fedora man myself but to each their own. I ain’t judging.

I forgot about Dre but I was fairly comprehensive.

In fairness, I poisoned one food item in every music executive’s house as punishment for them being thieves.

I admit I didn’t watch the video — I’ve trained YouTube’s algorithm well at this point and don’t want Tesla content — but what the fuck is a predictive odometer? The tires roll a certain distance. We’ve had odometers for like 75 years.

I’m glad I’m too old to use Slack but for video games. I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than have more notifications.

/s

They could just shut down Meta and it would take a week for everyone to adjust.

I don’t want to know who any of you people are. None of us saw anything. And if so much as a squirrel asks, I’m asking for a lawyer.

Probably but they’ve designated others to do it. Like a trusted organization (Wired or The NY Times) can verify people. Some of the developers seemed hostile.

But who gives a fuck about a blue check anyway? Even before Elon, it was a gag on Twitter when some fucking moron who interned at Reason or some shit got a big head about it and wrote as a clown to be laughed at. “Some personal news, I’m now the assistant associate dipshit at the newspaper they try to give you for free when you get on the subway.”

I’m glad we’re putting all our eggs in this alpha-ass-level software (with tons of promise! Maybe!) instead of like high speed rail or whatever.