An article I would write if I were confident I wouldn’t dox myself and lose my ability to eat: “AI as a postmodern Malthusian trap. Tech has forgotten the laws of entropy.”

I’m not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldn’t find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mile’s walk.

It’s true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isn’t in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured aren’t exactly top choices to begin with.

Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.

Also no, you won’t find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so I’m not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.

The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of “fact” scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.

Oh hey. I remember this. I was confused at the time how it seemed to almost come out of left field, and how some of the names ended up on the same letter.

Now I recognise all those names from the Epstein files, although some were only mentions rather than direct participants.

Correction: two guys. One to drive, one to close the door

This snippet at the bottom of the NASDAQ link partially explains why:

Engineered by Benzinga Neuro, Edited by Pooja Rajkumari

The GPT-4-based Benzinga Neuro content generation system exploits the extensive Benzinga Ecosystem, including native data, APIs, and more to create comprehensive and timely stories for you.

That’s fair, the propaganda is intense and I often forget that my upbringing on a strict diet of cynicism is not something others have to experience.

Another research poet drops, this time Zoë Hitzig from Open AI https://archive.is/dfuzP Are research poets a thing I just didn’t know about?

She’s quitting because of the introduction of ads, but falls short of either realising or just admitting that OpenAI never cared about safety - they cared about hedging expensive legal risk.

Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?

Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?

Is this a political long play to maintain her desirability as a future hire?

Someone should write both a paper and a poem about that.

Especially for a guy named Sharma living in the US. It doesn’t take too many footsteps outside the Bay area for him to be in literal physical danger right now.

He also less cryptically posted his plans and resignation letter. (Edit: memory lapse) xcancel version of resignation letter post. Tl;dr moving to the UK (understandably) and doing a poetry degree (I didn’t accidentally critique someone into quitting, did I?)

Honestly, I hope he finds both what he’s looking for and also what he’s not looking for but still equally needs. For example, a personal perspective not entrenched in institutional ontological frameworks.

I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?

Perhaps something like this: https://lemmy.world/post/42528038/22000735

Deferring responsibility for risk and compliance obligations to AI is bound to lead to some kind of tremendous problem, that’s a given. But the EU has been pretty keen lately on embedding requirements into their newer digital-realm laws about giving market regulators access to internal documents on request.

This is not to suggest it’s anywhere close to a certainty that an Enron will happen though. There is still the exceptionally large problem of company executives are part of the power structures which selectively target who to prosecute, if their lobbyists haven’t already succeeded in watering the legislation down to be functionally useless before they’re in force. So it will take a huge fuck up and public pressure for any of the countries to make good on their own rules.

Given that almost all the media heat from the Trump-Epstein files has been directed at easy target single public personalities, completely ignoring the obvious systemic corruption by multiple corporate entities, I don’t have high hopes for that part. But if the impending fuck up and scale of noncompliance is big enough, there’s a chance there will be audits and EU courts involved.

I read both of these and what struck me was how both studies felt remarkably naive. I found myself thinking: “there’s no way the authors have any background in the humanities”. Turns out there’s 2 authors, lo and behold, both with computer science degrees. This might explain why it feels like they’re somehow incredulous at the results - they’ve approached the problem as evaluating a system’s fitness in a vacuum.

But it’s not a system in a vacuum. It’s a vacuum that has sucked up our social system, sold to bolster the social standing of the heads of a social construct.

Had they looked at the context of how AI has been marketed, as an authoritative productivity booster, they might have had some idea why both disempowerment and reduced mastery could be occurring: The participants were told to work fast and consult the AI. What a shock that people took the responses seriously and didn’t have time to learn!

I’d ask why Anthropic had computer scientists conducting sociological research, but I assume this part of output has just been published to assuage criticism of trust and safety practices. The final result will probably be adding another line of ‘if query includes medical term then print “always ask a doctor first”’ to the system prompt.

This constant vacillation between “it’s a revolution and changes our entire reality!” and “you can’t trust it and you need to do your own research” from the AI companies is fucking tiresome. You can’t have it both ways.

Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.

Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I don’t know how much of that was because of Chomsky’s presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.

At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring

Glib jibes aside, I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that aren’t just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. I’m horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.

So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein

But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so

How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?

Who needs pure AI model collapse when you can have journalists give it a more human touch? I caught this snippet from the Australian ABC about the latest Epstein files drop

The Google AI summary does indeed highlight Boris Nikolić the fashion designer if you search for only that name. But I’m assuming this journalist was using ChatGPT, because if you see the Google summary, it very prominently lists his death in 2008. And it’s surprisingly correct! A successful scraping of Wikipedia by Gemini, amazing.

But the Epstein email was sent in 2016.

Dors the journalist perhaps think it more likely is the Boris Nikolić who is the biotech VC, former advisor for Bill Gates and named in Epstein’s will as the “successor executor”? Info literally all in the third Google result, even in the woeful state of modern Google. Pushed past the fold by the AI feature about the wrong guy, but not exactly buried enough for a journalist to have any excuse.

That depends on if you consider the “inferior” to be human, if they’re even still alive after the eugenics part.

In retrospect the word quarterlies is what I should have chosen for accuracy, but I’m glad I didn’t purely because I wouldn’t have then had your vivid hog simile.

Amazon’s latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called “Project Dawn” internally, and the public line is that the layoffs are because of increased AI use. AI has become useful, but as a way to conceal business failure. They’re not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, it’s because they’re just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people they’re firing, referencing a blog post they hadn’t yet published.

It’s Schrodinger’s Success. You can neither prove nor disprove the effects of AI on the decision, or if the layoffs are an indication of good management or fundamental mismanagement. And the media buys into it with headlines like “Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency” that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company that’s supposed to be a beacon of automation.

Now I’m curious what replacing the word “girl” with “boy” in the same prompt would return. Would they also be hypersexualized from the inclusion of “stockings” and “braids” which can just as easily be fetish categories as innocuous physical descriptions, or is it mostly the female dataset that puts it into the porn realm?

Terrorism seems cheap when you put it that way

I love how they include a “blast radius” summary for each. What a great little website!