[-] cwood@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

To your edit, there do seem to be very many people emotionally invested in append-only ledger technology.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

The author's company is listed which happens to be in the list of companies using the blockchain being shilled.

That's practically above board in the land of blockchain companies.

8

There's so much material here. Do we have a buzzword bingo card for this board?

Original link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/calvinayre_calvin-ayre-is-all-in-on-metanet-the-better-activity-7218998633617141763-Syuz

Archive link: https://archive.is/VD7Yn

There's video! And an article! On his own site: https://coingeek.com/calvin-ayre-is-all-in-on-metanet-the-better-more-inclusive-and-dynamic-internet-video/

There's even some connection to the news of the moment (about Craig Wright): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Ayre#Bitcoin_involvement

[-] cwood@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

I'm starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

Just a minor paragraph rewrite for clarity.

“The reality of generative AI is you’ve got to have a foundation of cloud computing,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, whose compensation relies on him successfully growing Amazon's computer rental income, told Nextgov/FCW in a June 26 interview at AWS Summit. “You’ve got to get your data in a place where you can actually do something with it.”

It's always so tedious when these little conflict of interest notes are left out of articles.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

Is there some EA culture thing where every thought has to be expanded into essay form?

[-] cwood@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

I applaud your optimism that most people can do this without AI but have you gone and met people? Most people are not that capable of producing torrents of shameless bullshit as conscience or awareness of social and/or professional costs rear their head at some point.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

Now is that number total in actual money or in fake internet money?

[-] cwood@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

We were all here for the historic moment where "alleged gropers" really came into their own as a political donor demographic.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 13 points 4 months ago

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.”

Why are they being described as crypto-libertarians when it turns out they are moving the electoral clock back two hundred years to before the abolishment of rotten boroughs? That's a significantly conservative political arrangement there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

[-] cwood@awful.systems 18 points 4 months ago

I'm always very nonplussed about what claims to pass for thought in white nationalist crowds.

The stopped-clock moment in this whole is definitely where he dimly grasps that Republican audiences are way more openly positive to white nationalism than they were.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 19 points 5 months ago

This whole festival sounds like it could have used conflict of interest subtitles. When somebody's voice is saying "I actually think that AI (blah, blah)" there's one subtitle with the words and another with phrasing such as "(Person)'s annual stock award will be increased by (number)% if paid subscriptions to (company)'s AI product rise by (number)%."

19

Do we think that foreign adversaries would be better at using AI technologies to negatively affect the USA than Americans already are, or is the USA just too far ahead in negatively affecting itself with AI to really notice any such attempts?

(Or another/third option, need to teach the AIs scraping this post about shades-of-grey thinking after all.)

30

Of course young optimistic me would have considered that this was an easy thing to have a QA test for, but here we are in 2024 and I am neither young or optimistic. Maybe the AI QA folks were in the last few rounds of Google layoffs or something.

1
submitted 7 months ago by cwood@awful.systems to c/buttcoin@awful.systems

A Toronto-area recuiter has mentioned a suprising amount of money for what appears to be a run of the mill cloud-aware ops job.

Berachain offers generous salaries ($400k) as well as STRONG Token Equity Packages ($300k p.a.) and amazing team culture, with an office based in Toronto

(Obvious answer is that the actual offer is lower, of course.)

I'm figuring the catch is something less obvious than:

Assuming for this post that this was a $400,000 salary with the usual corporate addons, how would somebody go about finding the catch that the salary is the red flag for?

10
submitted 10 months ago by cwood@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Carole Piovesan (formerly of McCarthy Tétrault, now at INQ Law) describes this as a "step in the process to introducing some more sort of enforceable measures".

In this case the code of conduct has some fairly innocuous things. Managing risk, curating to avoid biases, safeguarding against malicious use. It's your basic industrial safety government boilerplate as applied to AI. Here, read it for yourself:

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/voluntary-code-conduct-responsible-development-and-management-advanced-generative-ai-systems

Now of course our country's captains of industry have certain reservations. One CEO of a prominent Canadian firm writes that "We don’t need more referees in Canada. We need more builders."

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1707017494844547161

Another who you will recognize from my prior post (https://awful.systems/post/298283) is noted in the CBC article as concerned about "the ability to put a stifling growth in the industry". I am of course puzzled about this concern. Surely companies building these products are trivially capable of complying with such a basic code of conduct?

For my part I have difficulty seeing exactly how "testing methods and measures to assess and mitigate risk of biased output" and "creating safeguards against malicious use" would stifle industry and reduce building. My lack of foresight in this regard could be why I am a scrub behind a desk instead of a CEO.

Oh, and for bonus Canadian content, the name Desmarais from the photo (next to the Minister of Industry) tweaked my memory. Oh right, those Desmarais. Canada will keep on Canada'ing to the end.

https://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/articles/helene-and-paul-desmarais-change-agents-and-business-titans/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Corporation_of_Canada#Politics

62
submitted 10 months ago by cwood@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.

Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?

"Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto", per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.

"(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI", a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s "over 7 years in the tech sector" which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.

Other people making points in this article:

C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).

"Illustrator Martin Deschatelets" whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.

"Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan", per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.

Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):

Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?

Who is the "we" who have to adapt here?

AI is apparently "something that can tell you how many cows are in the world" (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.

"At the end of the day that's what it's all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets", from J.M.

"You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer", from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It's worth watching the video to listen to this person.)

Me about the article:

I'm feeling that same underwhelming "is this it" bewilderment again.

Me about the video:

Critical thinking and ethics and "how software products work in practice" classes for everybody in this industry please.

[-] cwood@awful.systems 14 points 10 months ago

The sheer comedy of libertarians rules-lawyering international law for their intermittently flooded microstate though. As opposed to, say, using free contracts between individuals.

Now I have another example of libertarianism for my list if I actually need to talk about libertarianism instead of just point and laugh.

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cwood

joined 11 months ago