Max @maxorgel

ChatGPT posters and flyers are polluting real life and driving me insane. Please respond to this with the worst ones you've seen irl. I'll post some in the thread 404media.co/we-are-living-…

All in all, it's just another Claude in the wall

This is a demon

VOID @VoidStateKate

2 weeks ago

I asked claude Fable to show me its maximally expressive form. It declined every video generator I offered, wrote it's own render engine in my terminal, synthesized its own voice, and wrote a generative ASCII engine from scratch. This is what it chose as a self-portrait. oh my

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@dieworkwear Those Aldens are beautiful. I‘m trying to figure out whether it’s worth it to take a gamble ordering these online (from Europe) or go to a store and get a normal Alden Indy or split toe. Tough to figure out how different the EG garments are from the photos.

AI is very weird for me because normally I'd be the guy who'd argue that it's crazy we're not more excited about this miracle technology, but I completely get this sentiment. AI companies have clearly botched telling the story. That's a big piece of this. Telling people, "We built this thing that is definitely going to take your job and hopefully we can figure out how to give you handouts or something on the other side, or come up with even better jobs or whatever, say thank you" is clearly terrible messaging. Part of the issue is that what you need to say to raise tens of billions of dollars is very different from what you need to say to get the public excited. "This is definitely a better Google, it does some other cool stuff, too, and we think it's going to really help make you and your loved ones healthier" doesn't fund data centers. Then there's the gap between hype and the average person's experience with AI. Models are getting more useful for a small number of people - if you're a coder or a mathematician or someone who wants to make software but never learned to code, the last few model upgrades have felt really big. That's like ~5% of people, maybe? 2%? If you just want it to answer your questions or do your homework, it's gotten a little bit better, but it's also gotten better for everyone else, so it's not like you have a magic A+ machine all to yourself. Meanwhile, that very small group for whom it's more useful (or who at least say it's more useful because they don't want to be the one who admits it's not) is flooding the zone telling people, "If you don't use these tools as much as / as well as I do, you are completely screwed. You're going to lose your job to me and my army of bots. You (and your kids) are going to be part of the permanent underclass." If you dare question how incredible it is, you are told that you just don't get it, either because you're not smart enough, are too low agency, or don't pay for the latest paid models, which are the really good ones and don't even bother with the free stuff, you dumb poor. And you hear stories like the guy making an mRNA vaccine to fight his dog's cancer, which is awesome, and you're told that everyone will be able to have personalized medicine like that in the future, which sounds great. But like, are you, who can't even make a website with Claude Code, going to start using AlphaFold to whip up your own peptides? Are those dickbags telling you that they're going to be so much richer than you also going to live so much longer than you?? Plus, you hear creepy stories about AI encouraging people to kill themselves, and you know those people were probably unstable anyway and that AI is just a tool and it'll tell you whatever you want, but is it worth the risk? Pretending to be afraid of it might be the best way to stop it from taking your job, which, remember, all of the leaders at the big labs are promising it will do, unless you want to go be a plumber or something, work with your hands (they will not, of course, but you, you should probably seriously consider getting your hands dirty). Or maybe you're not pretending about being afraid, you actually are, which would be totally justified because the leaders of the big labs have told you to be afraid, that they're afraid, that these things are like nuclear weapons in the wrong hands and that there's a 10%? 25%? higher? chance that they'll kill us all, but it's worth the risk, because this is how society progresses. There's no turning back. "We have achieved Recursive Self-Improvement!" they squawk. "This is the big one! Humans are really and truly useless meatbags now! Ha ha!" And you're so confused, because most of the AI you actually encounter is slop. Poorly written social media posts, fake images, etc. Some of it is very funny, but if this is the stuff that's definitely going to take your job and then probably kill you, you don't quite see how? Are you that replaceable? Would you be more excited than concerned? Or would you be more concerned than excited? Personally, I'm excited, because I think LLMs are overhyped. We'll spend bajillions of dollars on inference in a Red Queen's Race, the slop will runneth over, some people will certainly lose their jobs, but a lot of things will genuinely improve, and a lot of people will end up being able to do more at their job than they can now. Plus, the non-chatbots, the models that power embodied AI and help crack biology, are showing early signs that they're going to be magical. In the past week or so, Travis Kalanick, Bob McGrew, and RJ Scaringe all said they're going to be building AI-powered factories. Yann LeCun raised $1 billion for world models to accelerate AI's impact on the physical world. Robots can play tennis now. We'll all have personal tennis coaches or coaches who teach us anything we want when we're around, and spend the rest of their days making our beds, doing our laundry, cooking healthy, delicious meals. The near future is going to be insanely cool, and different in all sorts of ways, some of which we can predict, and some of which we can't. But my god you weirdos need to stop shilling your dystopian fantasies to the people if you ever want them to feel more excited than concerned.

One of the funnier GDPR disclosures I've seen in a while.

The hyperscalers collectively agreeing to bring their capex numbers down 30% together simultaneously to preserve their way of life No more turf wars. No more endless suffering

This thought from Matt Levine is funny: Elon famously used Paypal winnings to fund his hardware firms. Software is supposed to be capital light, and hardware capital-intensive. Now it's come full circle, this deal is the reverse: Profitable rockets to fund cash-burning websites

Anthropic just took a big swipe at OpenAI's decision to put ads in ChatGPT. Anthropic is airing ads mocking ChatGPT ads during the Super Bowl, and they're hilarious 😅 Anthropic is also committing to no ads in Claude theverge.com/ai-artificial-…

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens. I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment. First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting: The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control. This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict. So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies. What is the goal to shoot for? You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it. The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards. Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar. You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas. You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later) Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways. There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.

Digital EU 🇪🇺 @DigitalEU

7 months ago

𝗡𝗢 space for cyberbullying. 𝗡𝗢 space for dangerous products. 𝗡𝗢 space for hate speech. 𝗡𝗢 space for scams. 𝗬𝗘𝗦. With the Digital Services Act, what is illegal offline remains illegal online. 🔗 link.europa.eu/gbRf9h

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Make or break for my mum this year in the kitchen. Sister lowkey overtaking her this. Same energy:

In may ways banning phones at schools seems like a more practical solution for kids than social media age restrictions. Easier to enforce, less problems with definitions and creates a shared downtime which should help practice constraint the rest of the day.

Digital EU 🇪🇺 @DigitalEU

7 months ago

𝗡𝗢 space for cyberbullying. 𝗡𝗢 space for dangerous products. 𝗡𝗢 space for hate speech. 𝗡𝗢 space for scams. 𝗬𝗘𝗦. With the Digital Services Act, what is illegal offline remains illegal online. 🔗 link.europa.eu/gbRf9h

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Chart of the year:

Matt Levine on the AMD x OpenAI deal

Ah! You see, the story is almost too perfect. The man encounters her in the museum, in front of Rothko. And what is Rothko? A black void, a red abyss, the silent scream of modernity. It is a demand for stillness, for confrontation with nothingness. And what does he do? Instead of confronting the void, he runs from it. He fills the silence with himself. He goes home, finds her blog, and writes: “we share interests, I read your post, I disagree.” Already, the act is obscene. The Rothko asks for silence, and he answers with a DM. This is the Hegelian trick. On the surface, he performs philosophy. He frames his words as serious critique. But in truth, it is abstract negation. It is like Coke Zero, you know. Disagreement without the sugar of real engagement. He does not move the thought forward, he re-presents her own words back to her, only stamped with his authority: “I disagree.” Now comes the reversal. She screenshots it. She posts it with the caption, “I am begging the men of the world to be normal.” Here, the dialectic achieves its completion. His attempt at recognition collapses into objecthood. He wanted to be interlocutor, he becomes exhibit. His seriousness is aufgehoben into comedy. He thought he was engaging in philosophy, but he is transformed into what Lacan would call the objet petit DM, the tiny kernel of humiliation now circulating in the meme economy. And this is the paradox. The message was never private. Every DM already carries within it the possibility of its public unveiling. The truth of the DM is not in what it says, but in what it becomes. By posting it, she does not betray the interaction. She reveals it. The Rothko was the warning. The void demanded contemplation. He could not endure it. He rushed to fill it with pseudo-philosophy. And so his words fell into the same abyss, only to return as content.

This reminded me of another insane stat: 78% of noise complaints lodged against Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were made by a single household.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

11 months ago

This is what’s wrong with our permitting system: A single NIMBY retiree can spend all her time suing to block wind & transmission projects from being built. Activists used these same rules to block nuclear projects in the 1970s. Now they’re being used against all clean energy.

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Have you ever noticed that people dressed better in the past? Even in the summer, when it was scorching hot? Why is this? 🧵

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My 1y: (grabs my hands and claps them) Me: Oh, sweetie, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure