marcta

"That will never happen to us" - until it does.

If I hire an artist to draw something for me, I don't get to say that I drew it.

The salesperson comes in and says they've sold a big order of x units based on having a web portal that can set the temperature.

This just means that number 1 is also corrupt. OP is talking about the scale of none to complete corruption, not the relative rankings of all countries.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

-- Winston Churchill, 10 November 1942

Maybe a better word would be "corrupting". Lobbying causes people to act in a way that is contrary to what people expect at face value, since it changes the incentives: if we assume that politicians choose what is best for them personally, their actions change from "what makes me popular with the most voters" to "what gives me the most money and power". This is often (not always) to the detriment of the voters themselves.

That doesn't always work though, since citizens aren't given a vote on every policy issue[0]. Also, in the UK at the moment we have had a long stream of unelected governments, which make policy that isn't in the last manifesto that had a vote.

[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.

Are we getting to the point where every API can be reverse engineered too? If so, that's not safe either.

Sure; but writing to an LLM is not "in private". That's the point of the original post.

> with Altman the only one worthy of the seat of power

How does that make sense, if Altman is unable to control OpenAI's agents at the moment?

Don't leave it on a cliffhanger, what really happens?

Why is arr.filter().map() better than arr.reduce()? Doesn't arr.reduce() only loop once through the array?

I think the point is that once it becomes a crypto key, stock price, weather observation, whatever, the datum ceases to be random and becomes arbitrary.

Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?

Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?

In fairness, a false positive is better than a false negative.

Presumably the big scary sysadmins have access to the *.cloudflare.com DNS records, and marketing just needs to push this thing right now and can't wait, so it's easier for them to buy a new domain with a shiny new TLD than wait for pay.cloudflare.com to be authorised.

cloudflare.com/pay probably has a similar chain of approval: if every marketing idea had its own top-level route, it would get pretty crazy with such a big company.

A similar thing happened in the Falkland's War: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/bbcs-treason-battle...

May I interest you in Jevon's paradox: if a thing becomes cheaper or more efficient, usage tends to go up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?

Schrödinger's basilisk?

50% of the population are below average intelligence.

Why would you look for sawdust? That's a waste product. You would motivate everyone to stop producing actual furniture, and just buy the biggest bits of wood to turn entirely into sawdust. Which is textbook Godhart's law.

This is what's happening here, you have people setting up two chatbots to churn useless tokens at each other, making only sawdust.

I contend that tokens per se are actually a waste product, or at least non-value add. The end user doesn't actually care how many tokens were used to make a thing. If you could get the same result with fewer tokens, that would be an improvement.

Why should a radiologist have to debunk AI slop? They have enough to do already. That's the same mentality that is frustrating open-source repositories with sloppy pull requests, and saying "here, sort this out for me".

I was going to say the same. Also, if you go to shops like Screwfix or Toolstation (in the UK), you have to give your postcode and name to them before they sell to you. I tried opting out once and they refused to sell to me. I give them fake postcodes and names instead now, but it's very invasive and completely unnecessary.

Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.

The G in AI GPU stands for "grift"

There is a reason that luggage has to be weighed. If you watch Mentour Pilot, there's a not insignificant number of plane accidents (and outright disasters) that occur due to the plane weight being calculated incorrectly, and thereby running out of fuel.

https://www.evionica.com/blog/blog/how-much-the-passenger-we...

Some "ai is bad" arguments come from the threat of losing one's livelihood, which is a monetary concern.

Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.