Why the fuck do we need yet another social media company that mines personal data for profit? Jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon might be commendable if it weren't for the fact that, once again, the whole purpose of its existence is to harvest personal data from users.

These tech ghouls need to fuck off. I don't care if you think this data is sensitive, or if you promise to respect people's privacy. Don't collect it and turn it into engagement bait. I'm so fucking tired of this shit. There's something seriously wrong with people who feel this constant need to share these details about themselves with others.

I must emphatically agree. The best way to avoid government surveillance is to not collect the data in the first place, and a critical component to that philosophy is to not have in place systems that facilitate data acquisition.

It doesn't materially matter who is doing the mass surveillance--whether it is a foreign or domestic state actor, or a multinational private company, or local law enforcement, or some AI model. Accountability is absent, and this results in abuse.

Naturally, I would be remiss to not also mention the responsibility of the surveilled population, who largely fails to appreciate the scope and ease with which everyone and everything is being tracked. So many consumers still buy Ring cameras, gladly upload their most private personal images and correspondence to cloud servers, and post their entire lives online because they've become addicted to social media engagement. And parents have left their children to fend for themselves against this privacy invasion onslaught. I lay the blame for this behavior squarely at the feet of the Big Tech companies, but the consumer also bears responsibility.

What you are describing is a medical device, not a consumer electronic device. The regulatory framework would be different; such devices would need to obtain FDA approval after demonstrating efficacy and safety. We already do this for hearing aids, for example, and it is also why companies that added hearing assistance features into their wireless earbuds, and ECG/SpO2 measurement capabilities in their smart watches, also had to secure FDA approval to make those marketing claims (even though these are not prescription medical devices).

Makers of "smart" glasses rely on the economies of scale to support the development costs of this technology; therefore, they are unlikely to want to restrict the marketing of these products to individuals who would use them as a medical device, as this market is substantially smaller. Of course, that doesn't mean it is ethical to bring such products to the wider market, nor does it mean they must develop or allow for the development of this technology in order to support the medical needs of the smaller market. Two things can be simultaneously true: (1) if not regulated, such technology would primarily be used by perverts and assholes intent on violating others; and (2) the technology would be useful and/or life-changing for people who have certain impairments.

Personally, I think these devices should require a doctor's prescription and be regulated as a medical device. A CPAP is (rightly) regulated as such, and it doesn't even have the kind of abuse potential that smart glasses have. We as a society need to push back hard on the Big Tech panopticon that has been foisted upon us. Laws regarding privacy are antiquated, written at a time when recording devices did not have the fidelity, miniaturization, digitization, data retention, and network connectivity that current devices possess. The concept of "no expectation of privacy in public" is out of date. We ought to have the right to not have our every interaction, movement, and excursion livestreamed for engagement, our likeness posted online without our consent for strangers to judge and mock and take out of context. We ought to have the right to a basic degree of dignity without needing to avoid public spaces because everyone and everything is recording us. And I do not trust any company whose business model is founded upon tracking and aggregating this data in order to sell it to third parties, to act in that interest, let alone make a medical device.

While I agree that some people are being prescribed GLP-1s that probably should not be (in the sense that they could achieve similar efficacy through non-pharmaceutical interventions such as diet/exercise), I think for a significant majority of recipients, the metabolic effects of this class of drugs is profound and their benefit far outweighs the risk. Of course, we see clinically significant reductions not only in HbA1c and stronger blood glucose control for T2DM patients as well as prediabetics--as these are the originally intended drug targets--but we also see concomitant reductions in cardiovascular risk, significant reductions in obesity, improved activities of daily living, and an interesting inhibitory effect on non-appetite related cravings (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and drug use) that was not originally foreseen.

To say that these drugs are too risky and overprescribed based on rare but serious side effects is to dismiss huge benefits for a population of patients whose comorbidities were uncontrolled and essentially had one foot in the grave.

Again, I want to emphasize that GLP-1s are not for everyone, not even for everyone with obesity or T2DM. They have profound effects on the metabolism. We knew this ever since exenatide was developed over a decade ago. That's why they are prescription only. You need to have a doctor evaluate your use on a regular basis. People need to understand that we are all unique in our response to drugs, and that the "average" person doesn't exist. That's why we do clinical trials and postmarketing surveillance--which is also how we caught this particular risk.

Nobody (except anti-science assholes with an agenda) argues against allowing chemotherapy for late stage cancer patients even though they are cytotoxic. You weigh the risk against the benefit. If chemotherapy means one might get 6 months more life, even if it's not pain-free, that's up to the patient to decide. To paint it with a broad brush and argue for denying anyone such treatment because a small fraction of patients won't respond or will experience serious side effects, is barbaric and insane. Yet people hear about some rare but serious side effect in a drug with literal life-saving potential, and demand it be withdrawn from market. That's equally insane.

Yes, there are people who are getting access to this class of drugs who probably don't need it. This phenomenon is not unique to GLP-1s--it's just particularly noticeable in this case because of our society's emphasis on physical appearance. But to suggest that the incidence of obesity was lower in previous generations as some justification for restricting access is wild. It offers no solution for the social, cultural, and economic reasons for the rise in obesity in the first place, so it rings hollow to say GLP-1s are overprescribed while staying silent about the predatory practices of the food industry and how they manipulate the consumption habits of people; the dismantling of physical and dietary education programs in schools; the lack of funding and political resistance to providing healthy school meals; the existence of "food deserts" and proliferation of fast food in economically depressed areas; etc. Medical professionals have been watching this trend with horror and have been repeatedly telling everyone to diet and exercise for the past 50+ years, to no avail. It's not like they haven't tried. The insinuation that the vast majority of obese people are obese by choice and/or lack of sufficient self-control, is an old, old trope that serves no one and needs to die. It doesn't make any sense in a society that is so fixated on superficial physical appearance that people are actively shunned for being overweight.

So typical that you would blame the creator of the work, rather than the corporate managers who (1) negotiated and agreed to the acquisition; (2) did not purchase the work outright and instead only licensed it on an annual basis; (3) sold you a device using such a license and did not adequately disclose to you that the content that came with it might not be permanent.

Yes, go ahead and blame the artist to deflect from your own failure as a consumer to understand just what you bought. You think you own something just because you paid for it? Who is to blame for that? You're just another ignorant sheep who only cares about their own wants. Of course you wouldn't understand what it means to have a spine.

It's good publicity for him to pull the licensing and explain why. I've seen so many comments from Roku owners who say they'll really miss the fish. And it sends a message that integrity is more important to him than money. People really need to see more examples like this, because all we ever seem to hear about these days are people who are all too happy to sell out and harm others for their own benefit. Whether he'll be rewarded for holding to his convictions is yet to be seen. But we need more of this energy, because every time we see exploitation and corruption go unpunished, it hardens us against the idea that we should behave with integrity in our own lives. After all, if you see criminals get away with their crimes, why should you go out of the way to be nice to anyone else? In a world without accountability, being nice only draws a target on your own back. And so a pernicious cycle begins.

Some folks think that there's a choice involved: you can "choose" to stand up for what you believe in, or you can "choose" to sell out. For people with integrity, it's not a choice--it's a bad turn of events, one in which you are forced to act. If someone came up to you and offered you $80k for your child, you'd probably scoff. It's not something you'd even bother to entertain (or at least, I should hope you wouldn't, if you were human being of any conscience). The point of my example is not saying that a screensaver is as important as a child; it's that if someone were to make that offer and then people heard about it and characterized that offer as a CHOICE, you would find it completely offensive. That's not a real choice. That's how people who have integrity regard being asked to compromise their morals.

So if the Republicans had won, would they be saying any of this shit? They sure as hell weren't doing any of this before the election. But now that "Ram Altman" is afraid of regulatory pushback, now he's interested in being a good corporate citizen? Fuck off with your backpedaling lies, just like how you claimed you were "taken out of context" when you wanted to own all the world's RAM supply.

The fact that they weren't doing any of these things in the first place is already an admission of guilt. Imagine if you, a regular citizen, didn't pay your energy bills, polluted the water in your town, and played blaring noise 24/7. Your ass would be in jail. But because a rich billionaire is doing it and giving kickbacks to local officials, they're untouchable. Even if these empty promises are kept--and we know they won't be--they represent the bare minimum legal obligation to operate. None of it is some magnanimous gesture of corporate goodwill. It's what ANYONE ELSE would need to do in order to not be shut down and prosecuted.

I keep hearing from people that AI/LLM is inevitable and that, like all other technologies, anyone who refuses to use it will be left behind. GFY. That attitude is what contributes to these companies' power. You don't NEED any of it because you didn't HAVE any of it 10 years ago and your life was no worse for it, and in many ways, it was demonstrably better. But now you've gotten a taste of convenience and suddenly AI is indispensable? You know what that is? Addiction. You sound like a drug addict. Stop outsourcing your brain to these corporate ghouls and the business cases for these data centers will vanish. Same thing with online privacy. You hate how Meta manipulates speech and weaponizes your personal data against you, but not enough to give Instagram full access to your photo library and metadata, not enough to give Facebook all your contact info, because you are addicted to that small convenience. For fucks sake Zuckerberg renamed his company META, as if it wasn't already obvious what his entire business is about.

The only way we stop this technofascist future is to stop falling for the convenience trap, and to stop perpetuating the lie that we can't live without the shit they keep pushing on us. And a huge part of that lie is the fear that we will be "left behind" if we don't participate.

Much of the present-day debate regarding the use of LLMs and generative AI centers around topics such as necessity, accuracy, intellectual property rights, utility, efficiency, economics, worker protections, environmental impact, and future developments. But very little, it seems, is focused on what I think is really at stake, which is the centralization of authoritative truth.

If we regard such models and algorithms as "tools," then yes, there are advantages as well as disadvantages. We can discuss the benefits in productivity/efficiency/knowledge synthesis/discovery as much as we can discuss its impact on the labor market. We could also add in the context of where the training data came from, and whether the originators of such data possess rights to its use in this manner. We could talk at length about how data centers impact the environment in which they are built as well as the energy demands they make. We could endlessly speculate on various predictions for this technology as it might impact the human civilization long-term.

But what I would like to do is make a simpler statement, which is that at its core, these models--and in particular, the way they are being commodified and therefore utilized--represents a fundamental regression of the democratization of human knowledge. Some may say that, by assembling such vast quantities of information in this manner and then making it accessible to the world through the internet, we are improving access. After all, people who are not artists are using it to generate "art"; people who are not programmers are using it to "vibe code" computer applications; and in general, people who are not previously taught in a domain of knowledge through traditional means are using it to appear to attain a certain degree of competency. This is a seriously flawed argument; one that does not become more persuasive if the LLMs become more accurate, more knowledgable, or more capable.

What I mean by "democratization" is not simply about access to knowledge. It is about who controls that access, who curates it, who says it is the truth, who is accountable for the consequences of its use, and who teaches the critical thinking skills that facilitate its interpretation. In all these respects, the entities who have created and commodified these models are failing miserably, and if we look at their behavior, all of the evidence very clearly points to sinister motivations--that is, the failure is intentional. These people do not want you to think and reason and learn for yourselves, because that threatens their ability to sell that capability to you, and more importantly, to be the ultimate arbiter of truth.

It's a red herring to argue that individual humans are more fallible in their judgment, less objective, less knowledgeable in scope; thus are more prone to believing lies. The accuracy argument is misdirection. The point is, if we don't have the capability to interrogate and question, if we leave that to the machine, who is pulling the levers on that machine? And in a rather frighteningly perverse way, it may actually be preferable to have a human in control of that, as megalomanical, authoritarian, and evil as they may be, than having the machine in control. But this is my point--we shouldn't be letting this kind of centralization of power to occur in the first place. I don't want a dictatorship of knowledge, whether or not an oligarch trillionaire or the machine itself is in command of it.

So yes, I object to this technology, in as much as I object to, say, making nuclear weapons. People can point to "positive" examples of the technology--we've heard the arguments that these weapons keep us safe through a policy of mutually assured destruction; or that the underlying physics have given us nuclear energy, therapeutic radiation for treating cancer, and all kinds of other knowledge about the universe we live in. But will any of that matter if those weapons are used? Now ask yourself who has the power to use them, and what their motivations might be. When faced with the evidence, should we not be similarly skeptical of LLMs/genAI?

When someone says "I don't care" in this context, it isn't an expression of indifference, as if the issue doesn't have any material impact on them. It's an expression of DISDAIN. For example, when someone says "I don't care what Trump thinks," it is reasonable to infer that they mean that his thinking is fundamentally wrong and unworthy of discourse. That he is not someone whose thoughts are to be respected or regarded with any value.

We DO need to stop these arrogant sociopaths. And we do that by refusing to buy into the explotative ecosystems and false narratives they push on us. But let's not read too literally into what is a common expression of frustration and twist its intended meaning.

Why should I care what this dumb asshole thinks? If he takes up entire world's supply of RAM, then with what devices will we be able to presumably pay for the privilege to access his AI models? Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

What is this CEO disease, where they all think that just because they run a company, that they are suddenly subject matter experts for every domain of knowledge that built said company? Like, somehow just by being in a leadership position, they suddenly have the knowledge of all the engineers, developers, and technicians who built the product, as if they built everything with their bare hands? And what is with this mass delusion that so many people--shareholders included--buy this absurd narrative?

Fuck this guy and fuck his arrogant "I'm the leader so I'm a visionary who can say and do no wrong" attitude. Put them all on a spaceship and blast them out of the solar system.

But that's exactly my point: if all you want or need is competence, then according to the professor's own admission, an AI will do that. No need for your job, no need for grants, no need to teach. What is the purpose of teaching future generations if an AI will be better at mathematics than you ever can be?

And what I am saying is that either (1) the framing of AI as being the hyper-competent replacement for everything intellectual that we do is fundamentally flawed, and/or (2) it is necessary to understand, for the well-being of our own species, that "competence" and "results" are not the end-all and be-all of a task.

If we fail to appreciate the importance of doing and learning things for their own sake, and to find satisfaction in that process, then we will cede the task of thinking to machines. We can already see early signs of this. And the consequences of this short sightedness is catastrophic.

Let's be clear about the nature of education. Before a student reaches a particular level of self-discipline during their formative educatoinal years, homework is assigned because it is an effective mechanism to have them practice the concepts being taught to them, and to do this outside of the structured classroom environment. This activity promotes the crystallization of learning objectives and prepares the student for the next lesson, which builds upon the previous.

After a student becomes largely self-sufficient, the homework model becomes less about enforcement through grading, and becomes more about preparing the student to manage their own academic development outside of the lectures and office hours. The student goes to class because they understand they NEED to be there to learn, unlike a child who must be TOLD to be there.

In this regard, whether or not homework is graded, and whether or not a student feels a need to cheat or take shortcuts with homework, is really just a reflection of the student's maturity and sense of responsibility for their own intellectual development. Typically, a professor should not need to police what a student does on their own time; what matters is the ability to certify that a student has met the learning objectives--and that is done through examination.

So, what I find disturbing is not the question of whether this professor should grade his students' homework, or whether the students are using AI to do their homework for them instead of actually learning the material. As the old adage goes, cheaters are only cheating themselves--at least, that's what I would still like to believe.

No, what I actually find most disturbing is this apparent disconnect in the professor's views on the future of AI as they pertain to professional mathematics, and the impact of AI use on the education of humanity. He predicts that AI will be better than professional human mathematicians, and I think this belies a deeply mistaken perspective on the purpose of learning and doing mathematics, one that I am extremely surprised that a working professional mathematician would make.

Even if AI models far exceed the human capacity to prove theorems, will it ever FEEL enjoyment and excitement about doing mathematics? Because if it can't stir something in you, then why do it, and why bother teaching it to others? Why would you ever need to teach another student, if you could just always ask a computer instead? In fact, why will anyone in the future ever need to learn anything, if AI will be the replacement for our brains?

I am a human being and I feel. I dream, and I love. I love mathematics, and it is not simply the result or the answer that I love, but the entire process. The struggle, the failure, the questioning and working away at it until at last, there is UNDERSTANDING. And the flaw that I see my fellow humans are making, over and over, is this crazy focus on RESULTS. ANSWERS. GOALS. They seem to have forgotten how to enjoy the process of doing things, whether it is the restoration of a classic car, or composing a musical score, or deciding what to cook for dinner.

I mean, why spend months and months on taking apart a 1957 Buick engine, lovingly cleaning every component, repairing and sometimes manufacturing replacements, and reassembling it? Why, when you can have a new electric car that is far safer and more efficient, with more functions and conveniences? Let me be clear; I don't work on classic cars or have any experience with automotive mechanics. But even from my outsider's perspective, I instantly know, at a visceral level, why they do it. It is for the love of the process; to take this machine and build it with your bare hands so that you have a complete understanding of it; and that this machine is an embodiment of engineering, aesthetics, and a symbolism of the freedom of movement.

That's what AI will not, and will never, do. It can't fall in love with the process, because to do so is what it means to love learning, and is part of what it means to be human. And for a professor of mathematics to not appreciate this is, to me, very misguided, and does not bode well for the education of future generations.

One other thing I forgot to mention. I'm skeptical that this "AI startup" actually did what it claimed to do, but since I have no evidence either way, I reserve my judgment until more details are given.

If the startup can't or won't provide evidence, that in itself is suggestive of some kind of fraudulent behavior meant to hype up the company, a la Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes. But in so far as the underlying scientific principles are involved, the strategy seems plausible. I just don't know if this company actually did it.

So I only remembered a little bit of the virology of phages from what I learned in school--namely, that they infect bacteria and that they are everywhere. And when I saw some of the early comments posted here that were big on knee-jerk reactions and scarcasm but small on actual science, I decided to read the Wikipedia article.

Phages don't infect eukaryotes; they only infect bacteria. And phage therapy has been successfully used to combat antibiotic resistance in humans, although the problem of resistance in general remains. This makes sense: bacteria replicate rapidly and have relatively little in the way of proofreading mechanisms, so when there is selection pressure, they mutate and develop resistance very easily, even to phages. So engineering a phage to target an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain might work in the short term, but unless there's a way to cultivate phages that are able to adapt in response to (and not simply target) that strain, the strategy is intrinsically self-limiting.

To those comments drawing ill-informed comparisons to engineering viruses that infect humans, know this: phages are literally everywhere on this planet. They are far, far more abundant than bacteria, and most people can appreciate how ubiquitous bacteria are. You already have phages inside of you, and in fact, they form an entire ecosystem. Same thing with bacteria--you have bacteria all over and inside your body. You have more bacterial cells coexisting on and inside you than you have your own cells. And what's more interesting is that these phages seem to be protective by helping to maintain a balanced microbiome.

The concern I have with engineered phages is not that they would be harmful to the environment or to us, or that they could mutate to be harmful. That is extremely, extremely unlikely, because such a concern doesn't reflect an understanding of how phages actually function in real life and how they co-evolve with the bacteria they infect. If anything I would be concerned about spreading bacteria that become extensively resistant to antibiotics and phages. Thus we need better education about what phage therapy is, and to ensure that study participants are adequately informed of the potential risks and benefits. The direction such therapy would most likely need to take is quite similar to CRISPR and other gene therapies, in that it would need to be a form of personalized medicine. If we can develop computer models to help perform this personalization more efficiently, then I'm for it; such an approach may also prove useful for treating cancer.

Precisely. I alluded to this in my previous comment, but you give very simple and specific examples of this phenomenon.

Other examples with significant impact:

Ability to borrow money is almost nonexistent for the poor, except for usurious rates such as in payday loans or credit card interest. An absolutely astonishing percentage of Americans carry a balance on their credit cards from month to month, and pay interest on that balance. And the poorest Americans can't even access credit. This inability to borrow at a favorable rate impacts major purchases that would, in the long run, save enormous sums of money, such as financing a home or an automobile. A home builds equity and doesn't enrich a landlord. A car lets you commute to better jobs and saves time otherwise wasted on public transit.

Fines, fees, and consumption taxes as a proportion of income are vastly higher, and there is no legal recourse. Late on your credit card payment because your employer didn't pay you on time? The bank doesn't care and you don't have money to sue your employer, not to mention they might just fire you. Sales tax is extremely regressive; 8-10% makes no difference to the well off, but regularly stops the poor from being able to afford basic necessities--and many state/local governments continue to seek increases in sales tax in order to make up for budget shortfalls as a result of their own lack of fiscal discipline.

What bothers me is how the wealthy class is always quick to point out how much "assistance" is given to the poor, but when it comes to the poverty tax and actually having an equitable playing field in economic affairs, they are dead silent. And the middle class eats up this narrative, because they don't want to believe that they have more in common with the poor than they do with the rich. Most Americans are one health emergency away from bankruptcy. Most cannot afford to lose their job. Yet so many believe that they should direct their anger at the poor for "being lazy and taking the benefits their taxes pay for," when the truth is that the truly wealthy have rigged the financial and political system to pay almost no taxes and steal far more tax dollars than all of the poor are ever given.

It is a kind of mass delusion perpetrated by the rich in order to sustain their wholesale theft of the wealth created by the entire working class, and the fact that so few of us have woken up to this reality is what makes me want to scream.