Only comment along the lines of my earlier comment, but I forgot to mention that the Chinese government is also too good at keeping secrets. Seems quite possible to me that the Chinese AI we should be worrying about is not public. Especially not in the stock market sense.

Fusion? Where?

Whoops, I meant great-grandparent, but when this gets posted it will be great-great-grandparent. I mean the joke by Junta. That's where I'm suggesting the Funny should go.

That should have been obvious, but it went off my scale in relation to stock prices. A thousandfold drop? Impressive crash.

Mod grandparent very funny.

Why does it need to be quoted against censor mods? What was offensive about your attempted joke? Or who have you offended who has mod points to waste?

In solution terms, I have a stupid idea. How about if they only change things when enough people agree to donate actual money to make the change in question? That means any new feature should be considered rather carefully including the real costs of testing it. They could also collect donations to keep things the same, as in keeping crucial servers running for the next year. Actually, the key stuff should be funded several years in advance. Actually strikes me as a nice thing knowing something will keep working for a certain period of time...

Whole branch needs a bunch of Funny mods, but I think the peak funny was probably the suggestion about the gas giants. We want Helium, not Hydrogen.

But there are still no Funny comments on the story. So sadness?

A comment about your sig, but I better quote it because some folks change theirs frequently:

I prefer to thing of them as the cowardly orange-nosing Rumplicans mostly focused on grabbing the money and running away versus the delusional and feckless Dumbocrats dreaming of flying elephants. Advantage who? Certainly not the citizens.

Pretty sure you're going for funny but I'm missing the joke. Dropping the "k" means something special in this context? Will it kill the joke if you explain it? [Almost certainly.]

My concern is different. I think stock markets have become a kind of dark joke as far as "capital allocation efficiency" or even "maximizing shareholder value" are concerned, but the Chinese situation is different. I'm worried that the Chinese government insists on a high level of control over the stock market, especially when it comes to the timing of major fluctuations. In particular, I think they may not care much about burning some FinTech speculators, but they might be thinking in terms of burning America's AI industry by exploiting the political situation as it exists right now.

These are speculations above my pay grade and outside of any official certified qualification, but my uncommon sense says that sometimes it's rational to want things that went up vigorously to come down gently. I actually think that's a big chunk of what happened to the Chinese real estate "industry" a few years back, and now the Chinese leadership may be thinking about killing two birds with one stone by controlling the timing of this... Call it a mini-crash? Anyway, controlling the timing in favor of collateral damage to their main competitors in the AI field. I'm strongly expecting this contagion to spread to the American stock market which is much more focused on AI speculations, and the timing is beyond suspicious. I think Xi may dislike the YOB underneath a veneer of diplomatic and enigmatic smiles, while the YOB has only been concerned about driving stock prices up as high as possible as quickly as possible. YUGE vulnerability there, and crashing the American stock market just before the election might be a good thing in Xi's perspective... We'll soon see if they've got a better grasp of the timing of the stock market game than the YOB's sycophants. Maybe I should visit a prediction market to see what's going on inside that insane failure of FinTech?

In general I'm deeply suspicious of economics, but this seems to be a scenario where economics may be coinciding with ekronomic thinking. Remember that time >> money and then this could be a timing game that is going to make a lot of virtual money disappear... And then pop up elsewhere? Perhaps somewhere in China?

Funny how time works. Related recent thought on the aging:

Young

Changes average out for net positive result.

Mature

Sum of changes comes out around zero overall.

Old age

None of the above.

And then you die, when you stop the changes and stop having nice days.

But this is SUCH a hilariously funny story. The P in IPO must stand for Panic. "We gotta grab the money NOW because our AI told us the bubble is gonna burst RSN!"

No idea where they think they can run to once they've grabbed the money. Even funnier since the money has become a virtual fantasy. Maybe the P could stand for phantasy as in phantasy money? (I love how broken English spelling is.)

I guess I should try to clarify, but I'm not optimistic about making it clear.

I think Claude behaves as though there are implicit personality variables, but I am not clear how they get set. The history of the interaction is important, but I suspect some of it is random, and there is probably part of it that is indirect, related to the path that has been pursued through a particular solution space. The important effects, though I must say my experiences are (deliberately and intentionally) limited, affect how Claude balances between guessing and asking for clarification.

I do think a lot of the hacking of genAIs could be interpreted as playing games with the settings of implicit personality variables. However at the same time I do not think the genAIs are human beings and the do not have personalities in any human sense. However, insofar as we can understand their behaviors, it may make sense to think of some of their behaviors as related to patterns that resemble patterns of human personalities. Sometimes we even have names for those traits, but I'm sure that the genAI cannot really be described that way. Maybe I'm really talking about a UI issue?

NAK

In June, over $500,000 worth of bourbon was stolen out from under the nose of a warehouse in Phildelphia. The first paragraph:

Later in the story, the explanation for how this happened is nearly identical to these tech thefts:

Newman said investigators believe the theft may be tied to a "complex ring" targeting high-value consumer products. The perpetrators appeared to impersonate an existing trucking company, using a company name, phone number and other details to gain trust and secure the load, he said.

"They basically try and look like, sound like ⦠a legitimate trucking company," Newman said. "They spoof the company name, they spoof the trucking dispatcher."

In the company's news release, it said the theft appeared to have been carried out with knowledge of "logistics operations and product movement schedules," suggesting planning and coordination.

So do you have any thoughts about implicit personality variables Claude is hiding within each instantiation?

I like the FP though I wonder if you were going for funny in the "You say that like it would be a bad thing" genre. A whole lot of the code that was written yesterday and today was bad code enabling bad ideas, so no code tomorrow isn't bugging me too much.

However the joke I was looking for involves how much easier it is for humans to learn to think like machines than vice versa. I think that's a bad thing (per the old warning from Sydney Harris) but I also think that's the path of least resistance that too many, probably most, people will follow. There will be at least two other groups. Probably a large group of people who refuse to go along and who get discarded as "low-value" losers and a small group of people who are smart enough to go beyond thinking like machines. The "beyond" people will be competing at the level of using the tools without being used by them, and the few who win that competition might be planning to rule the world with a robot's iron fist (controlled by obedient (?) AIs).

Going more directly to the story, I did a fairly complicated system recently using Claude. Because of token limits, I used several instances, which led me to the belief that there are implicit personality variables that make Claude more or less useful. My time and effort was MUCH smaller than when I did the same system using PERL and every test I've been able to think of says the AI version is better than mine, which doesn't make me feel good even about my programming skills, even allowing for the peculiarities of PERL. (But I have been lucky enough to work with and for some top-tier programmers and I've learned that I'm not at that level...) However the most interesting thing was that the new version got me to reconsider the problem and now I see a much better way to handle the UI. (But I hate the depending on Claude so much that I am declining to do another version? And I'm too afraid of thinking like ChatGPT to use that one again?)