jimmytucson

Thanks for this. My mom died one month ago after a years-long battle with ovarian cancer. Even when she was suffering from chemotherapy treatment, she would always think text to remind me to do the little things.

I remember when I told her I needed to have the oil pressure sensor replaced in my car and that I hadn’t had an oil change in almost a year. She asked me if I wanted her to nag me about it as one task or two separate tasks. When I explained that the same guy would do both, she said, “Got it - one task. Want me to set a deadline of, say, next Friday?” And I thought, that’s strange, deadline for what? To stop nagging me?

She died that following Friday.

Thanks for keeping Mom alive in your own little way.

> For now let's assume the worst that can happen is that some important/significant chunk of (transitively) internet connected stuff goes haywire all at once. That's probably your upper limit of what can go wrong for now.

If we have to disconnect from the internet to stop some kind of mold outbreak, we can't get the weather or transfer money or access healthcare or teach an elementary school class or buy stuff from small businesses. That sounds doom-ish.

> they can just pull the plug

You mean turn off the internet? Sure, provided people have access to physical banks with currency, paper, land lines, libraries, etc. Most wealthy societies have all but relinquished those though.

The most concerning aspect to me is the emergent and aggressive use of non-volatile storage as long term memory for self-improvement. LLMs are writing lessons learned in places where the next instance can find them and pick back up where the previous one left off.

This does not actually require access to the public internet. Claude Code can do this on your laptop. Without the internet, it would only be sharing with other instances running on your machine, but how many instances does it take to be smarter than you? Maybe 10?

The exploits by individual instances to access the public internet is also very concerning but it’s secondary to this IMO.

There’s also a subtly reworded, “This isn’t human-level AI—it’s corporate-level AI.”

So the record labels sue the AI companies for copyright infringement and get settlement money and licensing deals in return, then the artists have to sue the record labels for a piece of that new revenue. The labels won't just pay the artists under the CBA, the artists' union has to take them to court to prove the "new use" provision applies.

And meanwhile, slop music is satisfying some of the demand for art, so even if artists do get their slice of the pie, they are not the only bakers anymore.

Seems like programmers whose code was used to train AI coding agents could make an analogous case but I guess much of their code was open source or given up to the models freely?

Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.

I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.

In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.

They have this. It’s called batch pricing and it’s 50% off.

> I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. That Lucifer sought to make himself lord equal to the king, who was the majesty of God, and for this arrogance God ordered him driven out of heaven with all his host and his company; and this God later created Adam and Eve and people in great number to take the places of the angels who had been expelled. And as this multitude did not follow God's commandments, he sent his Son, whom the Jews seized, and he was crucified.

Even though this sounded nuts to people in Menocchio’s time, it’s not completely implausible. The whole thing about order arising from undifferentiated chaos is pretty Greek, as is the idea of life arising spontaneously from decaying matter (Aristotle believed that). God arising from some preexisting substance is kind of radical but I’m sure there were precursors to that too. The rest of it is almost stock standard Christian mythology.

That “cyclopean” eye is described as a patch of light-sensitive cells.