It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Let's see what that link provides:

"This category explores how manipulative groups regulate and dominate their members’ actions and behaviors through strict rules, rewards, and punishments, limiting individual autonomy."
Hijab, burka, yarmulke, baptism, circumcision, the wearing of 'mixed' clothing

Examining the tactics of manipulative organizations to control information flow through censorship and propaganda, restricting members’ access to outside perspectives.
- I give you the Church of Scientology

Focuses on psychological techniques used by such groups to shape beliefs and attitudes, suppressing critical thinking and promoting conformity.
- I give you the Mormon Church

Explores how manipulative organizations manipulate emotions, fostering dependency and loyalty through love-bombing, guilt, and fear-based indoctrination.
- "If you're bad you won't see your family in heaven" really hard to say that's anything other than fear-based coercion

I am by no means an expert on religion(s) but to say religion isn't a cult is to whitewash it into respectability. Hence, 'A large *popular* cult'

You're so close to getting it lol

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

You could ride a long for while claiming to recognize people but have poor name recall by saying "Hey! It's you!" to everybody, but then they could slip in someone you could not have ever met.

def Religion: A large popular cult
def Cult: A small unpopular religion

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.

you joke but we did exactly this with our gas service. I noticed in the summer that literally 2/3 of our bill was fees, with only a gas water heater running.

Put in a heat pump hot water heater and turned off the gas from March/April to Oct/Nov. They really aren't used to people cancelling service lol.

Yep. I play a game and ask people who their State Reps are. VAST majority of people have no idea.

You get the government competence proportional to your involvement in it.

Same with HOAs. People scream about them but literally never attend the meetings or bother to stand for election themselves.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

It's a very apt 1st world analogy of 3rd world problems. It's not a 1:1 analogy.

Rural places wait decades for the 'modern world' to reach them...just like suburbia waits hours for the Cable guy.