asolove

They are relying on training data of humans talking about how hard these problems are. Same way an un-reminded Claude gives estimates for work that are as if a human is doing it by hand, but then will drop them by 20x if you remind them it’s going to do the work.

The way people become corporate Cassandras is by doing the hard work for a while and building a mental model that is more influenced by the grit of the real work and unfiltered customer feedback than by the group discussion.

You could train a model to just read the group discussion and say plausibly sounding things. But if its input is just the group discussion and, as the post suggests, git history and competitor web searches, you can disagree, but you can’t have the orthogonal mental model that produces the “you’re not even wrong” style responses that corporate Cassandras produce. You’d need an AI that actually does the work and maintains private opinions it doesn’t reveal to its prompters.

More importantly, this post seems to ignore the real role of politics. It’s true the bot itself doesn’t have a promotion to worry about. But if its goal is influence, then it will need to take into account the reactions and unpopularity of its ideas. Or if not, it will get itself ignored or turned off. Politics is just how decisions happen, not a problem that goes away!

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

1. If you are proposing something even stricter than previous antitrust rules, great. But getting back to antitrust itself is actionable is step 1.

2. You don’t have to prevent every case before it happens so much as just stochastically go after the worst ones to make it less economical for people to go take on debt to have huge swaths of consolidation. Letting the market work, after pricing in that egregious monopolies will be broken up, is kinda great and better than minutely scrutinizing every tiny deal for long-term consequences.

The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.

Yes it does.

Today on X, people are having fun baiting Grok into saying that Elon Musk is the world’s best drinker of human piss.

If you hired a paid PR sycophant human, even of moderate intelligence, it would know not to generalize from “say nice things about Elon” to “say he’s the best at drinking piss”.

I also have an OM System camera (OM-5) and never get corruption this bad but occasionally got one row of green pixels at the bottom of a photo during import to Photos. I thought I was crazy, but this motivates me to change up my routine and check if it was Photos all along.

You can know almost all you need to know about this article from this sentence:

> This is even more true today, when the intersectional grid draws rigid lines between “oppressor” and “oppressed” that Baldwin, despite the animus against white America that ballooned as he aged, was far too subtle a thinker to accept.

If you think that the inline definition of "intersectional" is an accurate one, the rest of the essay follows. You may or may not learn anything, though if this prompts you to read "Go Tell It on the Mountain", that would be a great outcome.

If you actually know anything about theory, then you'll see the rest of the essay as rhetorical shadow-boxing with something no one is actually saying.

$5 says this is one support rep (or AI tool) just getting it wrong.

This part is so important:

> The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.

Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far.

And adults who aren’t authorities over them except insofar that they have cool talents the kids want to learn.