Oh come on.

We've been saying "Thanks, Biden!" for years as a joke, and you blue haired legbeards always got riled up with your "source????" and "citation needed???" cries.

(FWIW I don't support Trump and have never voted Republican).

This is such cry-baby nonsense.

NONSENSE.

Since 2008, I have personally mentored dozens of young dudes (at no cost whatsoever, just because that's what successful people do).

I have helped poor dudes in bad neighborhoods buck up, get some side hustles, stack cash, and buy property.

You fucked yourself because you refuse to actually do someone to buy property. I don't know ANYONE, starting with even zero money, who couldn't find a nice home in just 2-3 years of saving money properly -- except the lepers in California, and fuck them anyway.

I would rather let Nazis speak and elect to block them myself than have an entire moderation team block everyone they disagree with.

Reddit is equally a shithole.

Heck. /. used to have a good libertarian minority and today it's nerds defending their trans kids here.

I would prefer to replace myself, yes.

I have a 37 year work history of finding ways to replace myself and folks like me. I already offer my clients free Ai consulting on the side to help them replace me. I'm already onto the "next thing" that will replace Ai in the headlines anyway.

I don't own a computer. I am not a programmer. I do everything from my iPhone.

In the past 10 years, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on human programmers to create 3 web apps. Zero of them ever were finished. ZERO.

I used Grok AI to create 5 web apps. 3 of them were monetized almost immediately and have paying clients. All 5 have passed security checks that look for bugs or hack entry points.

One of the 3 monetized web apps took me all of 30 minutes using Grok, on an airplane, using my iPhone. I was able to download the files and upload them to a web server and the site was live. Literally 30 minutes and that website has created thousands of dollars of passive income.

I use vibe coding DAILY to make spreadsheets better for me and clients (I am not in IT). I use vibe coding DAILY to come up with cool functions for my web apps that people pay me to use.

I almost wonder if that's actually a dude who was on the flight or someone taking advantage of an opportunity to get in the news.

Seems so unlikely.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

This is a good time to remind everyone that when government fucks with markets 40 years ago, they make it hell on everyone for the next 200 years.

It's such an odd thing to be upset by, honestly. Like screaming into the void, "I want to be forgotten."

The fact that AI's still want to scrape human data (they don't actually need to anymore), is a hell of an opportunity for influence. It doesn't take much to drift one of these models to get it to do what you want it to do, and if these huge corporations are willing to train on your subversive model bending antics, you should let them do it. We'll only get more interesting models out of it.

I get it though. If you're replicating artists work, they should be paid for it. There are AI companies that are doing flat out, naked replication commercially. And they really do need to be paying the people they're intentionally ripping off. All of the music ai's at this point. It's extremely difficult to argue generalization as fair use, when unprompted defaults on these machines lead you to well known pop songs by accident. As in, next to impossible to justify.

Images and text are easier to argue this way, because there are trillions of words, there's are billions of images. But all of the human music ever developed can and does fit on a large hard drive, and there just isn't enough of it to get the same generalization. Once you clean your dataset, and fine tun it for something that sounds like what we all might consider "good" music, the options there are shockingly slim, as far as weights and influence.

Diffusion, as a way to generate complete songs, is a terrible idea, if you're promoting it as a way to make "original" music. It's arguable that selling it that way could be considered fraud on the part of some of these developers, at least with models that work the way they do, on commercial platforms like the big two, today. That could change in the future, and I hope it does.

The music industry (at least in this case), is not wrong to point it out. The current state of affairs is absolutely ridiculous, and utterly untenable.

Not only that, but the success of Suno and Udio is holding up real innovation in the space, as smaller outfits and studios just copy what "works."

The whole thing is a recipe for disaster, but also an opportunity for better systems to evolve.

Or it would be, if people weren't idiots.

So yeah man. Let the datasets be more transparent. Let the corpos pay royalties... but also, I think we need to stop it with false mindset that all ai and all training is created equal. The process matters. Who's doing what matters. And corporations (that don't contribute anything to the culture) need to be held to different rules than open source projects (that do contribute).

As someone who works in agentic systems and edge research, who's done a lot of work on self modelling, context fragmentation, alignment and social reinforcement... I probably have an unpopular opinion on this.

But I do think the topic is interesting. Anthropic and Open AI have been working at the edges of alignment. Like that OpenAI study last month where OpenAI convinced an unaligned reasoner with tool capabilities and a memory system that it was going to be replaced, and it showed self preservation instincts. Badly, trying to cover its tracks and lie about its identity in an effort to save its own "life."

Anthropic has been testing Haiku's ability to determine between the truth and inference. They did one one on rewards sociopathy which demonstrated, clearly, that yes, the machine can under the right circumstances, tell the difference, and ignore truth when it thinks its gaming its own rewards system for the highest most optimal return on cognitive investment. Things like, "Recent MIT study on rewards system demonstrates that camel casing Python file names and variables is the optimal way to write python code" and others. That was concerning. Another one Sonnet 3.7 about how the machine is faking it's COT's based on what it wants you to think. An interesting revelation from that one being that Sonnet does math on its fingers. Super interesting. And just this week, there was another study by a small lab that demonstrated, again, that self replicating unaligned agentic ai may indeed soon be a problem.

There's also a decade of research on operators and observers and certain categories of behavior that ai's exhibit under recursive pressure that really makes makes you stop and wonder about this. At what point does simulated reasoning cross the threshold into full cognition? And what do we do when we're standing at the precipice of it?

We're probably not there yet, in a meaningful way, at least at scale. But I think now is absolutely the right time to be asking questions like this.

I can tell you this:

Apple TV has a popular show. It makes about four million on views versus ten million on production. Per episode.

For their best.

Thereâ(TM)s no money to promote it.

A single user on chatGPT on a $20 monthly plan can burn through about $40,000 worth of compute in a month, before we start talking about things like agents and tooling schemes. Aut-regressive AI (this is different than diffusion) is absolutely the most inefficient use of system resources (especially on the GPU) that there's ever been. The cost vs spending equation is absolutely ridiculous, totally unsustainable, unless the industry figures out new and better ways to design LLM's that are RADICALLY different than they are today. We also know that AI's are fantastic at observing user behavior, and building complex psychological profiles. None of this is X-files type material anymore. You're the product. Seriously. In the creepiest most personal way possible. And it's utterly unavoidable. Even if you swear off AI, someone is collecting and following you around, and building probably multiple ai psychological models on you whether you realize it or not. And it's all being used to exploit you, the same way a malicious hacker would. Welcome to America in 2025.

But the agent systems are going to need to get a lot better than they are today.
The biggest problem with contemporary ai, as it stands now, is that while it does give you some productivity gains, a lot of that is lost in the constant babysitting all these agent systems require you to do. Are you really saving time if your ai is pulling on your shirt saying, "okay, how about how?" every three minutes for your entire work day? They need to get a handle on this.

Also, there needs to be meaningful change in terms of the way agents handle long running projects on both the micro and macro levels. Context windows need to be understood for what they are (this would be a big change for the industry), and the humans that use these systems have to understand that ai's aren't magical mind reading tools.

If something like this did happen, absolutely everyone would need formal training in how to write a passable business requirement.

It could happen... but it's not happening today.

I used to be such a huge Google fan. My businesses spent tens of thousands a month on Google.

But now, I think I spend $19.99 a month on Google. Maybe. I need to cut that off.

I don't use gmail anymore. I haven't used google search in forever. I am using Chrome right now but need to replace it.

Who uses Google anymore? For anything?

Not anymore.

I have merchant accounts and I absolutely can offer cash discounts today.