I was trying to explain what AI alignment is to my mom, and I ended up using the behavior of companies like OpenAI, and how they’re distorted by profit motive as an example of a misaligned decision making system. And I realized that late stage capitalism is basically the paperclip maximizer made real.
This is a very good article. I think AI models have more to teach us about epistemology than people want to believe right now.
That sounds like some very cool engineering. I hope it sees as little use as possible, but I’m glad you’re prepared.
I’m concerned that this would require a continuous supply of water at a flow rate that might not be realistic.
I don’t think it’s secret. A lot of OpenAI’s business strategy is to warn of the danger of their own project as a means of hyping it.
OpenAI, despite having produced a pretty novel product, doesn’t really have a sound business model. LLMs are actually expensive to run. The energy and processing is not cheap, and it’s really not clear that they produce something of value. It’s a cool party trick, but a lot of the use cases just aren’t cost effective at this point. That makes their innovation hard to commercialize. So OpenAI promotes itself like online clickbait games.
You know the ones that are like, ‘WARNING: This game is so sexy it is ADDICTIVE! Do NOT play our game if you don’t want to CUM TOO HARD!’
That’s OpenAI’s marketing strategy.
They start at $70k. And they are actually still losing money on each sale.
It’s largely marketed as a recreation/sport vehicle. It’s for going camping and off-roading.
That isn’t too say that it can’t also get you to and from work, or even be used for constructive uses. But at the price and feature set, I think anyone would agree it’s designed to be a fun luxury first and foremost rather than a practical tool.
Whew. I’m glad he’s happy with his purchase. I can’t ever imagine having enough money that I could drop that kind of cash on a toy, no matter how neat I think it looks.
Haha a bike.
I hold out hope, actually, that as the right-to-repair movement continues to grow, eventually repairability and control will become more common consumer interests, in the same way that vehicle safety wasn’t something people thought about when buying a car before the 70s, and now it’s one of the main influences when buying a car.
Once people start caring – and again, I believe this is the direction we’re heading – it will become something manufacturers have to design for.
This is modestly interesting. My brother worked here before they had layoffs about two years ago, and had a generally favorable opinion of the company and leadership.
Fundamentally, while I think RJ seems like a sound businessman and technologist, and I like the company’s taste a bit, I will never be able to reconcile his views with mine. He very openly views cars as computers and software and services that happen to move you around, and I would like it to be a machine over which I have as minimal a relationship as possible with the manufacturer after I acquire the product.
Still, I wish them luck.
This is actually a misrepresentation of the law.
The law bans school districts from requiring teachers to report if students start experimenting with different pronouns.
Teachers can still report this to parents. There is nothing barring them from doing so. The only change is that they aren’t policed by their school district.
Technically, this is actually the classically conservative position!
This whole thing is extremely stupid. Parents should take care of their own shit. You want to know what your kid is thinking? Talk to them. Demanding that the trusted adults in their lives who DO pay attention to them narc for you is a weak-ass move for parents who run to the nanny state to help them raise their kids because they don’t know how to manage their own damn family life.
To add to this, I’ve been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I’ve never given any thought to the name. It’s all capitalized. I didn’t think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.
I’ve used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we’re not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.
I’d say to any and everyone, “You know, you don’t have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there’s this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don’t have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?”
I didn’t even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people’s attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.
This is a great article.
I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.
The answer is disappointingly pedestrian, I think: it’s where the clicks are. What’s he supposed to do? Post it on Vimeo and ask people to support him on Patreon?
No conspiracy needed. Lemon doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Oh! I actually already use Calibre to convert formats. It makes sense I guess that it also strips DRM. Cool!
How do you remove DRM?
I just buy books without DRM. I’ve heard about alternate licenses, but I just don’t buy those ones.
I generally agree. I think there are no great answers, but the expert they interviewed makes good points. The main point that resonates with me is the network effects: if everyone feels pressured to begin using tools because they feel like everyone else is on them, it’s very difficult for any parent to constrain their kid’s use.
Age prohibitions aren’t very restrictive because they’re difficult to enforce. They’re basically just advice and a legal tool to go after the very most flagrant business targeting minors.
As for the positive effects: that’s a great point. I want my kid to have access to explore cyberspace in the same way I want them to have access to explore our city and nearby wildlands. I want them to have as much freedom as possible while teaching them to recognize and avoid danger. I think in all these cases, exposure with supervision before gradually increasing unsupervised access to areas that have become familiar is the only strategy to achieve that that in aware of.
Sadly, it’s another hustle. If you spend enough time on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TIkTok, you may see ads for “business opportunities,” which include a bunch of ways to spend lots of wasted time on things that will supposedly give you “passive income”. A lot of them consist of stringing together crude tools to supposedly run a business without actually running anything. For instance, you can learn how to set up a business on Amazon where someone else manufactures your products and Amazon stores and ships them, and supposedly you’re now a business owner. Obviously, it doesn’t work.
One version of this is becoming a “published author” by having stuff written either by ChatGPT or what are essentially slaves in the global south, and then self-publishing it as ebooks on Amazon.
Again, there’s no real money or sense of accomplishment, but people are desperate, and so people try it.
That sucks. Not surprising, though. I hope the NRLB will fix their broken complain process. Right now, enforcement takes so long it’s a joke.
This article doesn’t really answer most of my questions.
What subjects does the AI cover? Do they do all their learning independently? Does AI compose the entire lesson plan? What is the software platform? Who developed it? Is this just an LLM or is there more to it? How are students assessed? How long has the school been around, and what is their reputation? What is the fundamental goal of their approach?
Overall, this sounds quite dumb. Just incredibly and transparently stupid. Like, if they insisted that all learning would be done on the blockchain. I’m very open minded, but I don’t understand what the student’s experience will be. Maybe they’ll learn in the same way one could learn by browsing Wikipedia for 7 hours a day. But will they enjoy it? Will it help them find career fulfillment, or build confidence or learn social skills? It just sounds so much like that Willie Wonka experience scam but applied to an expensive private school instead of a pop-up attraction.