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It also reminds me, in a very similar way, of William Gibson's "Hinterlands". Some people are just hell bent on flying into the Alien Coordinates That Make You Crazy or Kill You but Sometimes Give You Cool Stuff you Don't Understand, from William Gibson's short story Don't Fly Into the...

That’s great! I unironically hope you find those things interesting and AI has opened them up for you. I’m not trying to be snarky, but - along the lines of my attempted point upthread - has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?

Have a lot of good conversations about what you learn?

Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.

It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".

Well, you saved me writing a similar comment, and I like your blog too. (BTW I completely agree with your musings on what we might do with all this hardware, post-bubble. I actually started and... not quite abandoned a "sci-fi-ish short fiction" series on my own blog trying to think through those applications in my own industry.)

In my own writing it's like, I'm mostly trying to put something out in the world that I, and sometimes my friends, enjoy. The rambling is not exactly the point, but not exactly not the point either. If other like-minded people find it, great. Once somebody tipped me a thousandth of a Bitcoin or so, and that was fun too.

So I think this (AI-written) thing is mostly interesting because of some of the comments, in which commenters lament Cringely putting out this kind of stuff in the lead-up to his death, which they also manage to verify with an obituary.

It's not the middle though, it's a rejection of that binary entirely. (I feel the same way as GP and also resent - not you per se, but we hear the more aggressive or reductionist version of this all the time - the world being framed such that the only possible reason we could have qualms about handing off understanding to the machine is that we just were too up our own butts in love with for loops.)

That seems like an OK future to me? The AI-addled can have their fun, the rest of us can eventually step in to pick up the pieces. I know it can seem bleak at times but the knowledge hasn't evaporated, it's just that (IMO) the less-AI-enthusiastic are stepping back a bit to let the energy spend itself. And "LLMs can't become superintelligence" doesn't imply "self-improving machine intelligence is impossible", for that matter.

It's wild to watch speciation in real time. (Quick, interpret that according to your chosen side.) I do not know who will "win", but the real-time divergence between the commentary here and, say, other "programmer news" sites is incredible to live through. This reminds me of mid-2020 days of COVID and the level of, eh, confidence going around about masks or lockdowns or vaccines.

Ah yes, the infamous Houthi hypersonic glide vehicles. Only lacking in guidance software.

The kids are alright! This list gives me great hope and it’s amusing to see the usual TESCREAL crowd lose it over at LessWrong over how they should be more worried about post-singularity runaway basilisks and less worried about enshittification, deskilling, and inequality.

Ah, but what if one of your "clones" is actually the wicked and persuasive "All-Defector" in disguise? (No, really, I agree with your analysis but if you haven't read "The Quantum Thief" you might like it.)

I don't know, I kind of admire this. I've always held a core value of "cooperate with all clones of myself in prisoner's dilemmas", and while I'll hopefully never have to put that to the test, I like seeing that these models have some ethics. (Is this "alignment"?)

I… yes. That’s a reasonable interpretation of the current state of the world even if I reject the “no choice” framing. But you’re the one calling his stance “easy”?