Jesus what an opening shot

I find myself periodically queried for my thoughts on artificial intelligence. On the one hand, this is very silly because I’m a humanities PhD who mostly writes about comic books. On the other hand, we’re talking about a field in which one of the most influential thinkers is a Harry Potter fanfic writer who never attended high school, so it’s not like I’ve got imposter syndrome.

Now I gotta read the rest

Here’s a little lesson in trickery This is going down in history If you wanna be a sneerer number one You have to chase a lesswronger on the run!

Guess who’s #1

Taylor Swift

The billionaire initiation ritual is that scene from Kingsman where

I saw glimpses of someone playing some weird shit on a mobile phone, so I texted my bff group chat that it looks like someone’s playing a pokemon game but it’s anime girls racing around a track or something, but it was 18:30 in public transit, hard day at work, really hot, so I was like probably I’m hallucinating something

Then the responses I got were like “ye it’s probably this very popular Umami Horny Derby game where you date horse waifus, everyone’s been playing it for weeks” and I haven’t been more depressed in ages

The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.

I’m sorry, I have no idea what this book is, but calling it “The Player of Games” is so funny to me.

adjust fedora I am not a gamer, I am A Player of Games

Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don’t see a reason to entertain them as such.

I really don’t see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between “low-brow bigotry” and “high-brow bigotry”, which is essentially what this is in practice.

When my uncle drunkenly complains about how “those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain’t even speaking our language” - it’s racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that’s a problem because his bayesian priors say they’re statistically less intelligent - then it’s suddenly “race pseudoscience”. No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.

but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience

I think the word you’re looking for is “racism”

Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider “send money to people” to be core functionality. But here in the good ol’ U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.

Wait what? Can people in the USA not, em, transfer money? What do the banks do then?

Ye it was a real “oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good” moment

They were still early

OH NO, I have TERRIBLE NEWS my new FAVOURITE SHOW got CANCELLED (probably by the WOKE MOB)

Hey mate what do you think learning is. Like genuinely, if you were to describe the process of learning a subject to me.

Ok now I’m wasted af and this show rules, this is the best fucking thing ever, gather all your friends and watch this shit, they hired the Mooch and someone whose credential is that they’re a YouTuber to not give money to people whose ideas are “what if X but crypto” like one of them is literally “what if water but there’s an NFT on it”

The first Crypto Name they introduce is fucking Anthony “Unit of Time Measurement” Scaramucci and I got severe whiplash, I am not mentally ready to watch this, I need to refill my drug drawer

I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance

Oh, I would.

I’ve seen people say stuff like “you can’t disagree the models have rapidly advanced” and I’m just like yes I can, here: no they didn’t. If you’re claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you’re judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn’t have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is “it vibes better”.

If they’re an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I’d be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can’t even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.

I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing “quantum” but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can’t describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.

A company that forces you to write a “Connect” every half-year where you reflect on your performance and Impact™ : (click here for the definition of Impact™ in Microsoft® Sharepoint™)

There is only one True Word

Some of them are pretty spot on.

• Internet Explorer - 9/10, explores the internet, nothing to argue about
• Windows - 8/10, kinda simplistic but it does have windows
• Word - 10/10, it is for words, short, to the point