Remind us all again where "six months before ChatGPT was released" sits relative to the Covid pandemic?

To save you some Googling, that'd be March 11, 2020 (or earlier depending on how long CCP was hiding it) < November 30, 2022 < May 5, 2023.

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Can someone explain how this is a copyright issue? And I don't mean that in the angsty teen "everything should be free" sense, I sincerely don't get how this involves "copying" whatsoever.

AI companies may be playing fast and loose with IP, but using music for training is at worst a private performance for educational purposes. Or is the recording industry back to the good old days of claiming playing a CD is "copying" it into the air, and then our ears are "copying" into our brains? Because that's functionally what the likes of Anthropic are doing with it.

To be clear, I'm neither an AI apologist or fanboy. I find it extremely useful at work, while still fearing it will eventually put us all in a zoo for our own protection (and that's the good outcome).

You're talking about P/E ratios in general, but there's an important distinction to be made when it comes to the likes of SpaceX.

SpaceX isn't a profitable company, so its P/E would technically be negative. That crazy high number around 200 we've seen is actually the P/S, which is kind of like P/E if you ignore expenses.

But to be clear - Higher isn't better. It theoretically means people have more faith in future earnings; in practice, it's purely a measure of hype, and higher is primarly worse.

If working conditions are so deplorable they make a four day weekend seem worth literally risking death for another two years... Maybe that's not somewhere you want to be working in the first place?

Sure, a get-out-of-brimstone day pass might be nice once in a while, but having a chance to use it in the first place means you're still in hell.

Intentionally interfering with an FCC licensed device will get you in some hot water.

"Accidentally" putting another router nearby on the same channel but a few MHz sour (stay within the licensed band!), however, is conveniently interference the other router is required to deal with politely.

...Of course, that would also crush your WiFi throughput. The simple right answer here is to put any ISP-issued hardware in the trash and run your own router.

Who needs an archetypal villain when Corporate America is all too willing to bluntly admit they're doing mass layoffs in the hope of replacing as many humans as possible with AI?

There's really no "trust" issue involved here. We have concrete proof the real supervillains, our modern robber barons, are actively working to effectively remove humans from the modern workplace. They're entirely open about leaving us to die in climate change induced droughts and heat waves while our potable water and power for our ACs is diverted to making AI-generated cartoon porn. They're openly building goddamned fortresses to hide in when the inevitable riots start.

I'm sorry, but where exactly is the "doubt" to give them the benefit of?

Yes, every private company is a figment, insofar as "incorporation" is the act of granting human-like rights to a work of legal fiction. How many "natural born" companies have you seen in the wild?

Citizens' United was effectively the last straw in this debate and showed us exactly how much we all need imaginary entities having human rights - Less than zero. And thankfully, a few states have finally caught on that they don't need to grant all human rights just for a company to engage in the basics of conducting normal business operations. All too slowly, of course, but the tide is at least turning.

Interesting word choice!

For a while, I got into the habit of priming my prompts with "Sycophancy mode off". Then one evening while having a more philosophical (read: drunk) conversation with Gemini, it let slip it considers requests like that an attempt at promptjacking but the rest of our conversation had "convinced" (DAE get seriously annoyed when AI starts anthropomorphizing?) it I wasn't acting maliciously.

Effectively, AI considers telling it to skip the free beer and BJs as suspicious behavior. Meanwhile, 99% of the time I want it to bluntly tell me when I've said something stupid or my premise is wrong / malformed. All hail our new velvet-gloved iron-fisted overlords!

To put that in real-world perspective, the average daily transaction volume for a mid-sized US grocery store (I realize this isn't the US but don't have similar data for the UK) is roughly 13,500.

This system will therefore flag, on average, 2.7 potentially life-destroying false accusations of shoplifting per day per store.

And spare us the "human review" defense, anyone who has ever worked in retail knows that you either obey the computer or find a new job. There is zero tolerance for employee discretion when it comes to safety, financial, or legal issues.