kafkaesque

> Whatsapp has this problem before AI

Yep. So does AT&T. Real scenario that just happened to me yesterday:

Spectrum is charging me $110 a month for internet. I go to the AT&T site to check if they can provide fibre internet in my area. No matter what address I enter, it says to contact them. I tried neighbouring addresses and, at one point, I even gave AI a try to see if I could get tips. Nothing worked.

I called the number the AT&T coverage page asked me to call (apparently a customer service number). I was "first" in line, but it took them over 15 minutes to get to me. Weird but sure.

This isn't even the kafkaesque part.

I finally get on the phone with someone and he says "Hello, can I get your name?" I give him my first name. He says, "I need your full name to bring up the address." I say, "You don't have my address. I don't have an AT&T account and I'm calling to ask if you provide fibre internet in my area." He says, "I understand. But I need your full name to look up the address." I say, "I don't understand why you would need my full name." I gave him my name again.

He hangs up on me.

Not much different to a useless cycle of talking to a bot, especially when AT&T apparently encourages to move on as quickly as possible from a call if the rep knows they won't close a sale and as they try to improve their "average handle time"

I'm not saying AI wouldn't exacerbate this, and this is reason to believe that this scenario would only be worse under an AI-controlled environment. Certain parts of our society will just become even more closed off and shut people down even faster and with less human effort. Even if AT&T was able to somehow identify my real identity through some governmental totalitarian identity system, I don't think this would change

Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).

1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)

2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later

3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it

Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them

I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by

Saul Goodman?

So, you ask an LLM "what does this code do?" and it spits back a long list of things.

Is the fear that it is (maybe wilfully) misinterpreting the code, being too general, not going into specifics or is just not smart enough to catch all the nuances, privacy issues and hidden mistakes? Is it a token issue? A combination of all this?

The difference is she was a mayor of an American city. She was an elected official in direct contact with CCP officials, and while the examples provided are more or less trivial, I would hope that she would be investigated. A US official has access to certain private information and it's not far-fetched to conceive she could be disseminating private information about, at the very least, local politics

The Orwellian nightmare is nigh

I can relate! Someone who is very dear to me suggested we go to a one-day pottery class and the idea had never entered my mind. I actually ended up loving it. We're both introverts, as well, and she enjoys doing things that don't require other people (she likes to surf, as well). There's something about doing something physical by yourself (that isn't exercising) that's creative that I really like, but before the class, I hadn't realized it.

I actually play instruments, as well, but this feels totally different and almost stimulates a different part of my brain. I was much more relaxed doing pottery and I saw instant results that I could track whether I was doing something right or wrong (even though the "right" and "wrong" was driven by my own personal idea of them).

Do you think you'll end up sharing any of your pieces to the public?

The idiom is, "Do as I say, not as I do."

Yet here you are trying to convince folks why this doesn't lead to poor morals, low self-awareness, and a lack of trust in doctors. We are talking about a doctor, of course, not just an average nobody. And we are talking about a doctor with 6 million subscribers. His influence is wide.

Last I checked, a doctor is not the same as a politician.

I'm not sure why you are drawing a parallel to a good doctor that smokes.

I never said "Doctor Mike" is a bad doctor. I have no idea if he is a good or bad doctor.

Further, an ad hominem is when a person attacks someone's character without any base.

I wrote specifically about him not being at the forefront and questioning his values, as displayed by his actions during the pandemic. His actions were literally not in line with Covid guidelines. Those are guidelines that were formulated by hundreds (thousands?) of doctors, all of whom sought to be at the forefront of medical science during a pandemic.

As another user said, MRI scans not corresponding to brain activity is not really news, and in at least the part of the US I live in, MRI scans are not so easily recommended, especially since they're not covered by health insurance.

Dr. Amen should be called out, of course, but it doesn't mean a doctor is at the forefront for doing so.

> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering

This reminded me of something from my alma mater.

At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).

Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.

Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.