BlueMonday1984

New piece from Brian Merchant: Deconstructing the new American oligarchy

looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted.

Adding insult to injury, they'd likely also have to contend with the fact that much of the harm this AI bubble caused was the direct consequence of their dumbshit attempts to prevent an AI Apocalypse^tm^

As for the upcoming AI winter, I'm predicting we're gonna see the death of AI as a concept once it starts. With LLMs and Gen-AI thoroughly redefining how the public thinks and feels about AI (near-universally for the worse), I suspect the public's gonna come to view humanlike intelligence/creativity as something unachievable by artificial means, and I expect future attempts at creating AI to face ridicule at best and active hostility at worst.

Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect we'll see active attempts to drop the banhammer on AI as well, though admittedly my only reason is a random BlueSky post openly calling for LLMs to be banned.

Quick update on the CoreWeave affair: turns out they're facing technical defaults on their Blackstone loans, which is gonna hurt their IPO a fair bit.

We're seeing it in action right now, tonight in this very thread:

I'd bet good money they vibe-coded the whole thing. Its AI, the whole point is to enable laziness, grifts and laziness in grifts.

Here's the link, so you can read Stack's teardown without giving orange site traffic:

https://ewanmorrison.substack.com/p/the-tranhumanist-cult-test

Stumbled across some AI criti-hype in the wild on BlueSky:

The piece itself is a textbook case of AI anthropomorphisation, presenting it as learning to hide its "deceptions" when its actually learning to avoid tokens that paint it as deceptive.

On an unrelated note, I also found someone openly calling gen-AI a tool of fascism in the replies - another sign of AI's impending death as a concept (a sign I've touched on before without realising), if you want my take:

ZITRON DROPPED

AI bros are exceedingly lazy fucks by nature, so this kind of shit should be pretty rare. Combined with their near-complete lack of taste, and the risk that such an attempt succeeds drops pretty low.

(Sidenote: Didn't know about Samizdat until now, thanks for the new rabbit hole to go down)

Is there already a nice term for “this was published before the slop flood gates opened”? There should be.

"Pre-slopnami" works well enough, I feel.

EDIT: On an unrelated note, I suspect hand-writing your original manuscript (or using a typewriter) will also help increase the value, simply through strongly suggesting ChatGPT was not involved with making it.

I tagged it NSFW because the previous thread was tagged NSFW.

Trump administration’s blockchain plan for USAID is a real head-scratcher

Taking a shot in the dark here and saying they're implementing blockchain to enable corruption and fraud.