Microblog Memes

But think of the resell value for ho-moewners!

That's a different type of AI. Not Artificial Intelligence, but American Ingenuity.

But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?

Part of it is, as you pointed out, just the elimination of costly labor. That's a capitalist's wet dream. But the main thing that makes it attractive as a slick, highly marketable investment vehicle is that AI models are inherently black boxes.

There are ways you can examine the ways they work (for example, researchers found that the parts of an LLM that "understand" one topic, like money, can also simultaneously "understand" other different, yet related things, like value, credit, etc), but we can't truly comprehend everything about them. It would be like looking at a math problem billions of equations large and assuming we could hold the whole equation perfectly in our brain and do the mental math to solve it. We can't.

That means that instead of seeing "here's our robot that is currently capable of this, but these are the components that could be upgraded/replaced, X is an issue it faces because of Y" and so on, instead you get "It's not good at this yet, but it will be if you just throw a few billion dollars more compute at it, we promise this time."

Problems are abstracted away to "something that will fix itself later," or something that "just happens, but we'll find a way to fix it", and not any kind of mechanical constraint a VC fund manager might be able to understand.

I sadly suspect the charm is "we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers"

It's that, and a really impressive working prototype.

It's that LLM output looks like human writing, so it looks like they might be able to do anything a person can.

So I'm starting to notice.

Though... we don''t all like trains. So some may not have appreciated that whimsical comment.

He's unironically the dumbest person I've met. The best part is he thinks he's incredibly clever, and loves telling people to "do their own research" after making claims that are easily disproven. Make a caricature of your average MAGA moron and you've probably given it a few too many brain cells.

His proposed solution to forest fires is to build a perimeter of water tower sized retractable sprinkler heads around endangered areas that will pop up and prevent it from spreading.

He shows everyone every grainy cell phone video of "aliens" that comes across his feed

After struggling for 15 minutes to get logged in to the OSHA training site, he claimed that if we were using chrome rather than Firefox, he could use the "inspect element" tool to bypass the 10 hour time requirement for the course. When he found out that Firefox has the same tool, he made up some technical jargon to explain why it wasn't working. (This is where the AI suggestion came in.)

He overheard me and someone else make an Epstein joke (didn't even mention or implicate Trump) and he went on a tirade about how nobody says anything about Biden (???) and that "the director of the FBI has even said that Trump was on that island as an informant". This comment was the eye-opener.

He says that AZT (AIDS treatment) killed more people than the virus did, which is an entirely fabricated claim that didn't exist until after COVID, and the only "source" is a movie that just states it with no background evidence.

The training routines are made for these types.
The rest will just end up reading it if you keep it close enough.