Mac Rumors: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts - Ed
Zitron
And I think that told Apple to pump the brakes. It's barely spent anything on
capex. It's barely done anything with AI. Despite headline after headline claiming it's
"falling behind," nobody can really explain what it is it's falling behind on or why it
matters. People hate Apple Intelligence, and I think Apple knows that, and so they're going
to jingle the keys for the markets by putting "AI" on stuff without ever really putting
their back into it.
Via
New-Cleckit
Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social
This is just to say
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You know what's interesting. None of the Chinese models have hacked Hugging Face yet.
It's almost like maybe they're competent enough to keep their models contained?
The irony of a "no politics" sign in a bike shop.
Anyway, if anyone's got a favorite bike shop that still stocks parts for us analog bike riders, I'm open to suggestions.
Whatever happened to Google search? I'm trying to find if Emily Wilson has written anything on "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou", and the "AI" summary is sending me down links that, of course, don't say what the summary claims.
But even the Google excerpts are just bogus now.
I went looking for a non-paywalled, non-Bezos-owned version of Washington Post: Deadly U.S. boat strikes have failed to curb
cocaine supply, Pentagon and DEA officials say that everybody's linking to, and, yeah,
the indie people were on the story a week ago: Breaking Defense: The US military campaign to
stop drug trafficking has failed. It’s time to move on.
According
to US Customs and Border Protection, more cocaine was seized by US authorities in the
eight months since the boat strikes started compared to the eight months preceding them.
Cocaine prices have remained stable across this time frame as well,
which suggests there aren’t any supply shocks. The market is well stocked. In short, if
the US objective is to reduce trafficking, then Washington’s own statistics show that
Operation Southern Spear is doing absolutely nothing.
I mean, given that the current administration and its well-heeled supporters are probably
the majority of the cocaine demand in the US, it's silly on its face to assume that they'd
pursue a policy that actually impacts supply (unless it lets their cronies raise prices),
but it's also unsurprising that shooting up a bunch of fishermen for sport impacts supply
either.
Way back in 2016, at the Maple Leafs Regroup square dance convention on
Toronto, a bunch of us newer callers let ourselves into a room after the normal dancing
started, and called to each other until we couldn't stand up any more. The 2017 Palm
Springs organizers got wind of this, asked me if I'd take responsibility for a room, and
the tradition was born.
I haven't been back to many IAGSDC Conventions since COVID, we went to San Francisco, but
missed Montreal this year. Apparently, though, the activity is ongoing, and one of the
callers who's carrying on this tradition and is writing something up emailed me for a
quote, and I'm not sure I gave her anything pithy or quotable, but I'm copying what I
wrote here:
I think people give me credit for Zombie Caller School in the same way that neighborhood
parents might wonder about the thought process that led the sewing machine to be tied to
the clothesline and dangled from the barn roof, and know that I must have been involved
somehow. Aside from being the usual bad influence, I think the only "push" I gave it is
that I said "yes" when people asked if I'd be willing to take responsibility for the room
to reprise what we, collectively and without a clear leader, did guerrilla style in
Toronto.
And if I'm going to have any influence going forward, 'cause at this point me referring to
myself as a newer caller or student is like the thirty-something hanging out with high
school kids, it's that...
Along with going down to the Sunnyvale caller workshops, Charlene and I have been
participating in singing circles recently. They're generally led by someone, often there's
a "big" name, but the song leaders make a lot of space for people who have a song idea
they want to share with the group, It's tough, because you don't want to turn it into an
open mic for everyone who has a trauma issue, but it's also about fostering new leaders,
and reinforcing that this isn't a constructed experience, it's a strongly participatory
one. We're co-creating these spaces.
This is something that bugs me about square dancing, that it is so hierarchical. One of
the things I love about the Sunnyvale caller workshops is that there's a lot of "I think I
see what you're trying to do, let me show you what I think would work", and there's much
more of a sense of working with peers, rather than the caller being somehow on a different
tier than the dancers.
I don't know what it looks like to the activity at large. There are some people who will
only ever dance and that's fine, but we *need* more callers, and I really want to foster
the idea that we're all bringing something more to guiding and shaping this, and co-
creating it, not just dancing.
So if the original Zombie Callers was us saying "I missed caller school this year, how are
y'all progressing?" to each other (and learning things, I remember Diana's "aha" that
night about Chicken Pluckers after *how* many caller schools?), what I hope it's becoming
is a place to foster that square dancing as a collaborative activity, rather than an
experience that the "Callers" deliver to the "Dancers".
There's this idea that I've seen floating around in various essays since at least the
'90s, it probably goes back further, that synchronized dance is the art form of fascism.
That the masses of troops marching in synchrony in Red Square or Pyongyang are a symptom
of a hierarchy that's pretty disturbing. And I've often wondered about the post WWII rise
of square dancing, and the ways in which MWSD is very much tied to recorded music and
amplified voice, and tried to deconstruct how it fits into that.
Obviously, I love square dancing. But, as a domme friend once suggested, calling does
sometimes feel like topping in a group scene. Maybe there's room for it to be something
more as a conversation between equals, a coordination of anarchy.
Anyway, if I can get back into the habit of going to convention, that's the direction I'd
like to see it evolve. Zombie Callers feels like dipping a toe in.
It's not just lawyers: A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court
Transcript, Judge Says.
In a memorandum decision concerning a case about a man who sold drugs to
another man who overdosed and died, filed on July 23, Judge Paul Felix wrote in a footnote
of the decision that a transcript contained errors that looked a lot like generative AI.
The footnote was spotted by attorney Rob Freund on X.
Via.
AI and
Productivity
But the optimists have not given up. Some suggest the so-called Jevons paradox that
argues that increased efficiency (from AI) will lead to increased demand as unit costs of
spending on AI falls. That will generate the profitability that AI companies are
seeking and the stock market is hoping for. But only 2% of S&P 500 companies
mentioned AI productivity during Q1 2026 earnings calls. And among those that did, the
focus was overwhelmingly on cost savings rather than revenue growth. This raises serious
questions about how the hundreds of billions in investment can be expected to turn into
profits, let alone revenue.
Via.
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human
extinction. The song is David Bowie's Five Years: lyrics.
Via.
Stephen Follows: What just happened to The Numbers should worry us all. The Numbers is a film industry tracking site, this
is the story of how scraping brought it to its knees.
Man Sues OpenAI, Saying ChatGPT Almost Killed Him With Horrendously
Dangerous Medical Advice — "Spiritually? What you just did was a form of worship.
You tested the body in faith, not fear."
Brought by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor and real estate professional,
the lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI of negligence and of engaging in the “unauthorized
practice of medicine,” is the first known case to argue that a general use chatbot should
be liable for bad medical advice. News of the lawsuit was first
reported by The New York Times.
ChatGPT wrote her “resignation.” She says she never meant to quit.
Run The World cofounder Xuan Jiang testified that she asked ChatGPT to reject
a roughly $380,000 buyout, but the AI‑generated email said she was stepping down, which
the company now cites in its summary‑judgment motion.
Via.
Hacker News comment by
thaumaturgy on the reasons they hate LLMs. Via.
AI vs
Human: Lessons from AI detection. Via.
I probably already linked another take on this, but... Five tech
giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron.
Via.
Tesla
swapped a solar owner’s lease contract for the Book of Enoch.
A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla
account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of
Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.
Via.
The Rose City Riveters are a fan club for the Portland Thorns women's soccer team.
The are not happy about being featured in an ad that used images of them to promote
"Treasure AI" (no link, 'cause it's an AI company, they're not gonna be around long): Human Connections Matter - An open letter
to the Thorns Front Office.
Via.
Inspired by someone who got a worse answer, I tried this, and, yeah, find me a human that would answer this "yes, it clearly is" question with "no".
Anyway, Sam Altman thinks we've hit the singularity.
Just ran across the word "mechanthropomorphism" in Peter F Hamilton's "Pandora's Star", and I like it and the concept a lot.
