3RTB297

This is true across every topic. Anything at all that someone can put into an LLM and get out an emoji-laiden wikipedia article sized post to slap on a heavily SEO-ed website is absolutely flooded with it.

My parents live on a rural property, and I'll help them do research on things like livestock practices or occasionally "prepper" related things to give them a sanity check before they spend money. I have to weed through a dozen or more obvious ChatGPT-created pages that are the first page or two of results on every search engine before I get to anything a human has touched. The vast majority of the LLM-created pages are either massively verbose and vague, or often wrong. But they're getting clicks. Very often, when asking an LLM the same question and to give citations, I'll get a combination of useless, irrelevant sites with no connection to the material, maybe one of these LLM-generated sites, and maybe one online forum.

I'm not aggressively pro-AI, I'm in the middle, but stuff like this has me worried that we're looking at the equivalent of the Dark Ages all over again. But instead of simply no one bothering to write anything down as was the case in the early Middle Ages, it's going to be the task of searching for real human work and thought in a sea of aggressively spammed LLM-generated slop pages.

Dark? That's just business as usual in a large chunk of the world, across every industry. Ask any company with a large, multi-continent presence and you'll get stories for days about this kind of stuff.

Can the dictator turn off the power? Turn off the phones? Turn off the internet? Close the ports of entry? Hold food hostage? Hold your shipment hostage? Stop fuel imports, production, and distribution? Nationalize anything and potentially everything? Run off or genocide entire ethnic groups? Yeah. And it happens often enough that examples are easily found of most of these (note: turning off power and stopping fuel imports are possible, but would simply piss people off, so it's usually bad politics).

Not sure what's dark about how the world works. Doesn't make it right or just, but that doesn't mean it can't be how things are.

I think their comment was more about user and consumer movement, plus both desire for, and need to utilize, frontier models to get the task done.

With the token budget sticker shock and end of the honeymoon phase, just a guess, but I expect a significant market share might start to look at open weight "not quite frontier" models and outsource compute alone and have greater control over the model rather than outsource everything. Which will also be a trend that peaks and folds as it's discovered it takes a lot of human work to get what you need. Maybe then settling into a pretty standard tier of medium-quality contractors that specialize in LLMAAS for cheap, running open weight models.

Which isn't to say that AI has plateaued, but rather that budget-friendly, functional options might undermine the importance of frontier models sooner rather than later.

To be fair, those are usually cases where the reason they turned off the internet is entirely unrelated to anyone doing something questionable, and more about personal political whims as security theater. As long as you keep the bribes flowing to the dictatorship, you aren't at risk of being shut down for what you're doing.

Yeah, it's like conch. If it's not cooked low and slow, it's like chewing a bicycle tire. It takes a good 2-3+ hours to do it right.

Or it's 4 paragraphs in to the article:

>He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night.

I know people don't want to hear it, but when cooked correctly, wild-caught African land snails are actually delicious. They do take some work to scrub the foot pad, and you want to cook them for a long time to both soften them up, and obviously to ensure there's no parasites left. But in a Ghanaian spinach soup - amazing.

I say wild caught, because farmed snails are fed wilted lettuce, and taste like wilted, rotten lettuce.

I mean this in the best way possible: This reminds me so much of Microsoft Bob if it had survived to 2016.

The car wasn't registered in my name, it was registered with my parents and I was an authorized driver. Realistically, it's a question for the insurance company I imagine. Can an authorized driver have a driver's license from another state? Seems like an odd geographic limit for a national insurance company to make.

Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.

It's important to remember that factory-made clothes are not that old as a thing. And it's only been a few generations where nearly all clothing is expected to be factory-made (even though most factories are still humans quickly pumping out items), let alone carry brand names on them like you're a nascar.

And thinking of clothing as akin to open source software is fair. Before the industrial revolution, all clothing was hand-made, almost entirely at home or by a friend, or a tailor if you had money. From the end of the 18th century until pretty much the 1980s, sewing patterns were the paper version of open source software. Could be copied infinitely, forked and changed, traded and borrowed, or created from scratch if you knew what you were doing. Magazines included them to boost sales, just like how software magazines used to include pages of code you could try at home - no license needed.

Fabric stores were commonplace for a century or more, and big box stores reserved a huge amount of floor space for fabric sales up through the 90s. Patterns were trivially inexpensive, and picking your favorite material for the pattern was how you could personalize it.

Sure, but then the whole scenario is pretty anthropocentric. It's Star Trek aliens that are bipedial humanoids because they're played by humans and the story is just using aliens to explore the human condition. It's human drama, not inter-species relations.

Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.

To be fair, it's only privacy-violating if you have access to a way to lookup who owns the blue Toyota Corolla with license plate 1ABC234. The Driver Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to disclose PII based on a license plate

A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.

Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.