alwa

This AI analysis frustrates me in a different way than others. Mainly: is anything surprising or important about this? Why does this matter? Do these raw stock price data illuminate anything interesting about the way corporate strategists think about their options?

I don’t really know or care how accurate or rigorous the analysis is (then again I’m obviously unskilled in the art of technical trading). What I’m missing is: does anybody really care about what’s being traced here?

As a relative outsider, I assume raw stock prices to be largely indicative. That is, their informative value is relative to that particular stock over time. And thus I imagine the $1-warning thing has more to do with the exchange specifying a minimum increment, a range of resolution in which their bids and offers allow enough nuance for the market forces to do their work. If the thing’s priced at 2 cents and I can only bid 1 cent or 3 cents, that’s not super useful or informative since it involves a 50% change in value on either side.

The new and specific facet of my AI frustration here, is that, true or false or accurate or hallucinated, the analysis leaves me none the wiser about whether I’m totally off base with those priors.

My specific discomfort feels a little different from asking the article to do something beyond what it’s setting out to do—it’s more that it feels like a psychic’s “cold read.” It could exist in a world that works the way I think it does, or in a world that works any number of different ways, and it would still feel like a plausible thing for somebody to have undertaken.

Rewrite it in service of… what exactly?

I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.

One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.

Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.

Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.

Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…

Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.

Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…

I would go so far as to preserve the complete, forensically-vouched data image that the original prosecution relied on. The good, the bad, and the ugly. At the offender’s own expense, as you mention; for as long as they want to keep paying before they bring their lawsuit (or not).

If the claim is that some of the material there evidences police abuses of some sort, you can’t really let the offender pick the stuff they feel supports their claim and wipe the stuff that might weaken it.

And if there’s criminal material mixed in with the other, non-offending data that the offender claims they need, it seems like you kind of need some kind of adjudication process on an item-by-item basis.

They’ve clearly worked out a way to manage custody, access, and review for the purposes of the initial prosecution. Let the offender fund it under the same terms until they either fish or cut bait. Maybe if their claim of police abuse works out, this might be among the costs the court could award.

For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.

The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.

For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:

> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.

That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.

Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...

Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…

Bugzilla bug in question:

https://.mozilla.org/showbug.cgi?id=2083449

And what’s more, the average human’s counterparties are exquisitely tuned to exploit the gaps in that natural endowment. But the tools to improve discernment are the same as they’ve always been, just as pushups and crunches lead to physical fitness.

I’m not sure how exactly that generalizes to LLM behavior, but to you as a human cultivating discernment, I imagine it implies that anything Internet-mediated (and unvetted by you) is less reliable than it used to be.

Same as always: Develop a healthy sense of skepticism, cultivate a stable and diverse network of sources whose credibility you understand, don’t trust what you read, and certainly don’t trust synthesis unless you know how it’s made?