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Capitalists want control over labor the way that kings wanted gold, and Sam Altman is an alchemist promising no more complaining workers

Just because alchemists often did practice chemistry doesn't make alchemy real.

This is the great naivete of computer science: by imagining itself to operate on domains rather than on discourses about domains, it renders itself incapable of seeing the discourses themselves, or the social controversies that pull those discourses in contradictory directions

Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world.

Why does the awe attenuate? I agree with Altman that many of OpenAI’s applications “feel like magic,” in the sense of a particularly amazing card trick. The first time you see it performed it’s absolutely astounding, but with every subsequent performance you become slightly more aware of the patter and the occlusions hiding the sleight of hand. Eventually the trick is explained to you; even if you yourself couldn’t pull it off, you can see its structure and its weaknesses. Watching it now, you’re still impressed--even astounded--by the technical skill of the magician and intricacy of the trick design. But the sense of pure, baffled awe you felt at first is increasingly inaccessible.

It’s slop--incorrect, unwanted, and unnavigable L.L.M.-generated bullshit, forced into experiences that don’t really need it.

Experts have been warning the public for decades about how industrial animal farming can make disease more likely

the conditions under which we create our food is making us and the animals around us sick

We have a regulatory bubble of agriculture in the United States,” Hayek said. “They’re exempt from all sorts of laws that every other business is obligated to follow, including clean air and clean water.”

they focus great energies on supplicating to this immense imaginary demon (thrilling! terrifying!) instead of integrating with the culture at hand (boring, and you get yelled at)

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet

But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?

Just agree with everything the hostile Republicans say, and hope they applaud you at the end