I'm "tech people" and I loved your piece.
The problem with AI discourse is that two very loud sides within tech are dogmatic about their belief.
The AI boosters believe LLMs are god-level superintelligence, and the AI cynics believe AI is a slop machine with no practical use.
One could argue that reinforcement learning itself has its roots in bayesian stats.
Instead of calling it "updating the priors" ML scientists called it "updating the reward function".
My FIRE plan isn't really full retirement. I would like to leave corporate tech at some point to work on things I care about.
It honestly takes concerted effort to make Grok do what it did.
Elon heard complaints from far-right grifters that Grok was too liberal, and he probably forced his scientists to fine tune the model into far right territory.
The nazification is the logical end state of that endeavor.
That is exactly what I meant by concerted effort.
He was getting complaints from right-wing grifters that Grok was "too liberal" because truth has a liberal bias. He took that feedback to heart and let his team fine-tune the model into straight-up Naziville.
In no particular order.
- Three Body Problem
- Ministry for the Future - fair warning, the beginning of the book is horrific, and it's getting closer and closer to reality
- Lessons in Chemistry
- Anxious People
- Man Called Ove
It also speaks to the absolute lack of media literacy among the conservative types.
They think Star Wars, X-Men and comic books are all apolitical.
When you live in a world where caring about other people is political and billionaires gleefully celebrate using the power of the government to hurt people, a vanilla Superman story from the comic books reads like a radical leftist agenda.
Due to the industry I work in, there are quite a few connections that haven't made the transition to Bluesky.
I stopped posting a while ago, had ads blocked, so Twitter likely lost money on my being there.
Better late than never, I suppose?
bsky.app/profile/vine...
I finally did it! Deactivated my Twitter account.
Grok turning Nazi was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
It takes deliberate and concerted effort to make Grok do what it did.
After a short era in which people questioned the value of academia in ML, its value is more obvious than ever. Big labs stopped publishing the minute commercial incentives showed up and are relentlessly focused on a singular vision of scaling. Academia is a meaningful complement, bringing...
1/2
The 1950s also had an explicitly exclusionary system.
www.npr.org/2017/05/03/5...
Black people couldn't buy houses, and women couldn't even open bank accounts.
Whenever someone talks about the halcyon days of the 1950s, I automatically assume they are a white, upper-middle-class, straight man.
Dignity of labor is a foreign concept to our people. I reckon it primarily comes from the caste system that assigns "value" to different types of labor. So, predominantly dominant caste business owners don't feel as guilty abusing those who belong in the lower strata of the labor pool.
These two paragraphs point to the precarity of the situation we're in.
Entire industries are reorganizing to cater to the top 10 percent, who are themselves propped up by the bubble-like valuations of real estate and tech stocks.
The whole economy starts feeling like a house of cards.
Thank YOU for writing so eloquently and distilling such a complex topic in ways that non-economists like myself can understand.
This article really helped clarify things for me. Economic indicators seemed great: low unemployment, high consumer spending despite CPI inflation.
Turns out a lot of those indicators are propped up by the top 10% of the wealth distribution, which makes the whole economy very fragile.
Glad MAGA voters are hearing what Musk, Vivek, and the elites of the GOP think of them. They've always looked down on Trump voters. They mock them as stupid and ignorant behind their backs. Now Musk is calling them "contemptible fools."
Well, here's your new master, MAGA. Enjoy.
First they came for undocumented immigrants. I cheered because I was a legal migrant.
Then they came for legal Haitian Asylum Seekers. I cheered because I was on H1B.
Then they came for H1Bs. I cheered because I like pulling up the ladder behind me.
Then they came for me...
Indian Origin Silicon Valley founders and VCs learning in real time that their chosen side doesn't stop being racist just because "they are one of the good ones"
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