mountainriver

Chatbots are coming for the traditional jobs of gurus, astrologers and tarot-readers.

They removed the citation, but did they keep the definition?

That was gross.

On a related note, one of my kids learnt about how phrenology was once used for scientific racism and my other kid was shocked, dismayed and didn't want to believe it. So I had to confirm that yes people did that, yes it was very racist, and yes they considered themselves scientists and were viewed as such by the scientific community of the time.

I didn't inform them that phrenology and scientific racism is still with us. There is a limit on how many illusions you want to break in a day.

Pondering where we are heading, I think the tech monopolies will get larger. The companies in a monopolistic position can raise the prices, right now officially because they have added new shiny AI functions nobody wants. After the crash they will raise prices to recoup losses. Microsoft is already rising prices across the board.

The companies that makes their products worse and more expensive and can't recoup losses through monopoly, well they crash and/ or are bought up. The result is a more monopolistic tech sector, leading to more monopoly rents, worse wages etc.

When I was younger and more idealistically hopeful, I would have added that this would give incentives for switching to FOSS. These days I just think the now even stronger monopolies will work even harder to co-opt or squeeze out any competition.

From topic and lack of citation I just assumed that they had an LLM write it.

I was going to write that it was good that you didn't say "um" all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say "um" too many times.)

The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.

The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it's better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?

No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the "like and subscribe", so that is probably good.

I'm thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

"But if I don't get the supplies I can't save the town!"

"Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no"

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

"Keep wearing", so is he saying that Musk et al "keep doing" "stiff-armed salutes" (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?

I know one shouldn't expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. "You heard nothing!"

Not only that, calling the field "AI" is built in hype.

• I work in the field of intelligent machines.

• Oh cool, so you can build intelligent machines?

• Hell no. We just call the field that. For reasons.

Edit: my dialogue dashes became blocks. Must be an intelligent machine changing them or something.

In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.

In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.

Let's get ready to rumble!

That is cool.

I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.

You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.

But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn't have a treatment.

We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of "Hello World!".

Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn't mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don't understand) so it won't crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.