throwyawayyyy

I saw the very long Elizabeth Holmes documentary in a cinema packed with youngsters in their 20s and 30s yesterday evening, there's still hope...

Because the profits from any company which _could_ trivially be redone by an OpenAI agent will crash to nothing, because it could trivially be done by someone else's agent too. It's what ultimately makes the economics of OpenAI, Anthropic et al so crazy: they need to capture trillions of dollars in value, but those trillions of dollars won't exist any more. What's the value of writing a piece of marketing copy now, the same as it was last year? That, across the whole economy.

One might say, in the end, what's wrong with being self-serving? Are we _all_ meant to be self-sacrificing? Are we all meant to be the eggs that get cracked to build this wonderful future ommlette?

Has OpenAI shared any new interesting _problems_? I.e. do more than strip-mine mathematics, as said in the article, but said: "Here is a question I cannot answer, it's interesting for this and that reason, I believe it's true for this and that reason, it's beyond me though, have at it." Has that happened yet?

In America, paying medical bills might be considered significant punishment itself...

Fair, in that no analogy is going to be very good given that this really is something new in the world.

Consider anti-money-laundering rules. BoA just paid more than a billion dollars, not for money laundering, not for telling others to launder money, but because they should have tried harder to stop others from laundering money. Intent is not everything, knowing that your system _could_ be abused and not doing enough about it is enough, and that seems to fit OpenAI rather well.

If I leave my computer open to the internet and some other group uses it for nefarious purposes, yes generally I would not expect to be held at fault.

If I *train* that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault. The maker is responsible for that they make.

"The United Kingdom needs less electricity per person than in the 1970s" would be an alternative title.

This sounds irrelevant but it isn't: I just tried to unsubscribe to marketing emails from some Meta property, and got:

Please confirm that you want to unsubscribe. Unsupported request - method type: post

That's how careful this company is. Who knows how long that flow has been broken for, no one in the company is motivated to care, because what impact can that possibly give? How could that look good on your PSC? No company has a worse history with user privacy and no company is less deserving of the sort of trust using Muse requires.

I, and I'm pretty sure I share this impression with many of you, would feel a whole lot more optimistic about AI for software engineering (which truly has been transformational) if it didn't come with layoffs or the promise of layoffs.

Aren't bankers charging the same prices they were _before computerization_?

Subscriptions do seem to continue to go _up_, too. The proof of the productivity pudding is lower prices, which means the proof of all this AI hype is not so much Millennium Prizes being solved than subscriptions actually getting cheaper. If AI is already having a huge effect, inflation should be going down... if AI will have the effects OpenAI et al are currently selling, prices should plumet. I mean, I'm waiting...

I was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...

At one point reading this I thought of Molly's Soliloquy: "...frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless...". You probably don't want to recall Joyce if you want to get people to understand what you're doing.

Fun story: at my previous aaaawful company CC was discovered as a thing to care about at about the same time as PMs and managers were encouraged to land code changes using the _then_ quite terrible AI tooling (this was a year or two ago). Cue an avalanche of completely unreviewable diffs.