while true; do fortune; done is a good way to spit information out fast.
bitofhope
joined 2 years ago
Why was this a thing?
Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.
That was a wild ride of an article. It's also a good showcase of why it's usually not the best tech that wins, but who can secure the funding and the marketing.
A social app for uploading and swiping through short videos is not technically all that impressive. It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to scale and implement well, but it wasn't exactly science fiction in the early 2010s. He was not the only one around that time with a similar idea, anyone remember Vine? Ultimately, Snapchat and TikTok (née Musical.ly) had the bigger backing and more successful marketing. Maybe ten years from now the same idea will have been reinvented and people will point out what TikTok is today.
I remember the signs of a new AI spring from 2015 when DeepDream was in the news. It's entirely expected that a techie serial entrepreneur with an Open Source mindset would have tried to foster open collaboration in a potential new and exciting AI renaissance. For all his techbro tendencies I think his goals for his Open AI project seem laudable enough and he's entirely correct in blaming OpenAI for not living up to its name. It's not the biggest issue we should have with OpenAI -- being transparent about their research and open sourcing their products wouldn't make them environmentally sustainable or morally fair to us mortals who have to abide by copyright law -- but it's a legitimate point.
This, as it happens, is the nearly identical contention of Musk, in a federal lawsuit filed on Aug. 5 accusing OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of deceiving him into giving $44 million to a nonprofit that isn’t.
It did in fact come from the *chans, but what I'm wondering is how it became a thing. Anons making wild leaps of logic after being told some people don't experience verbal inner monologue is still a couple steps removed from the kind of right wing mainstreaming of the weird idea that most people supposedly lack sentience.
I guess the supposed appeal is in the implicit dehumanization and racism.
In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.
I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.
If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
I think I'll start using "metacognition" in a derogatory way. What a metacognitive post.
The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that.
Funny how all the people saying this always include themselves in the select few sapient ones.
Where does this NPC meme even come from? It's one thing to think most people are stupid or conformist or susceptible to propaganda, but believing a large fraction of the population are "mindless zombies following a script" goes beyond simple arrogance to straight up delusion.
Yea, most people don't think about some things I care about as deeply as I do. As if that means they don't have their own internal life going on.
Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that's not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone's editing session in vim, that's an XPath.
JSON has its issues but at least it's only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.
I think we should require professionals not to use the thing currently termed AI.
Or if you think it's unreasonable to ask them not to contribute to a frivolous and destructive fad or don't think the environmental or social impacts are bad enough to implement a ban like this, at least maybe we should require professionals not to use LLMs for technical information
Ahh, of course it's from a spam blog. I was trying to come up with a reason for this picture to exist, the purpose it might be trying to serve, and all I could come up with was "a placeholder header image in a lorem ipsum blog template".
Well that's a mystery solved. I can now stop wasting my precious life thinking about this image.