Flutterby™! (short)

I'm not sure a still picture can capture the sense of "saunter" that's happening with these geese. They own the space, and they are aware.

Written in response to a friend sharing this Rachel Hurley post on Facebook:

"But the fact they're even bringing it up is perplexing. Why suggest something so impossible?" I think this is obvious: They're looking for regulatory capture.

Thursday night I was calling a square dance in Santa Rosa, one of the dancers and I were chatting and he mentioned an AI experience in which it "hallucinated"[1] things, and that if it didn't have an underlying knowledge or model, there was no way it could be useful for anything but entertainment.

When the non-technical people are figuring it out, the writing is on the wall.

At this point in order to bring value to pay off the money already shoveled down the rathole we need to be seeing tens of billions of dollars of revenue a month. Programmer productivity is notoriously hard to measure, but the workplaces foolish enough to pay for LLMs for programmers are starting to cap usage costs far far below anything that would bring that, because it seems like all they really do is *change* programming to a model that's less engaging, that reduces the levels of programmer understanding of the systems they're building.

Customer support? The only application is wasting customer's time until they give up and go away. If you give it the tools to actually do anything, you're in for a world of hurt[2], and some of the discussions of ways that these things can exploit side effects[3] mean they're impossible to secure.

I have a larger theory bubbling about what Capital actually responds to, because it's not competence (other people are dancing around the same thought[4]). But at some point that meets up with reality, and...

I really really hope that we can have something other than a bunch of tilt-up sprawl and environmental destruction to show for it, but I'm betting that, like previous bubbles, we the normal people will bear the brunt of the stupidity, and the shills will end up bailed out by government policy.

If we can get loud enough, maybe we can make sure that doesn't happen. It's probably going to have to involve large protests, because the systems of law are built to serve Capital, but we need to be loud enough that when this comes down those who've promulgated this grift on us pay for it out of their own hides.

[1] Quoted to emphasize that anthropomorphizing plausible sentence generators is wrong, but I did it anyway. Sigh.
[2] https://gizmodo.com/hackers-tr...g-out-access-to-major-instagram- accounts-2000766087
[3] https://infosec.exchange/@haroonmeer/116670973426246236
[4] https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/attack-on-competence

Casual question: Is there a discography to YouTube database anywhere? I dummied up some data using yt-dlp and Jacob Collier's playlists, but I'm playing around with browsing an artist, and it'd be cool to do this in a more generic sense.

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

If you're wondering why Anthropic et all are publicly making stupid claims ('our AI that writes itself!') and begging world governments to regulate them - while directing the regulation via lobbying - it's pretty simple: they're locking out competitors.

If you read through this draft of "The Great American AI Act" it's pretty clear that nobody but the current big players will be able to comply. It's "regulate me, daddy" = "make sure nobody else can compete".
https://trahan.house.gov/uploa...ican_ai_act_discussion_draft.pdf

Things that put the climate crisis in context: A Nextdoor post from someone complaining that they just spent $7.99/lb on beef...

A "pride flag" rainbow in which the blue line extends outside the rectangle. The caption reads:

There is no such thing as pride without a thin blue line.

The brave men, women, and non-binary heroes at Stonewall couldn't have thrown bricks at cops if there hadn't been any cops.

🌯 Chipotlai Max

The AI coding agent that steals Chipotle's support bot. Free inference paid for by burritos.

Interesting conversation at square dancing last night, someone had tried to use one of the chatbots, and his take-away was that as long as it didn't have any model for correctness it really wasn't useful for anything but entertainment.

Good to see non-tech people discovering this independently.

Woohoo! Knew that trading my privacy for a browser gamification experience would pay off some day!

The 19th: ‘Intersectionality’ scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw thinks it’s time for everyone to talk back. I think I'm going to have to read this memoire.

Interesting screencap of Codex using Docker to write to root-only files