At first misread as cloaca. Barely even gave me pause in this thread.

Oh I didn’t think I implied that at all. Certainly didn’t mean to. I was just commenting that making cultural artifacts that can be revised into delta-based distributions instead of flat is useful for many reasons. But it’s no benefit to the corps and most users don’t care so of course it won’t happen.

It would be nice if that stuff worked more like git where yeah maybe the release version gets changed but you can always work back through the history to see earlier versions.

Not git specifically but just deltas from one version to the next instead of replacing the whole thing with a flattened text.

Cool. Sorry if that all seemed like a lecture. A friend and I have been working for years on a dungeon master chatbot that can run games on discord for people/groups without a GM.

It works about exactly as well as you think: pretty decent, inconsistent, and with a frequent need to tweak prompts to permit bad guys to be bad guys, have swords fights, etc.

I really want to run an uncensored model or at least one better trained on adventure stories and not at all concerned by a party of bloodthirsty heroes facing down bad guys who gleefully commit actual crimes. However to my consternation, OAI has the best response quality and understanding of game world lore.

So I’m hopeful the state of the art continues to expand so that we have more options. It’s pretty damn fun and we run small Chatbots that simulate real and fictional people (Harlan Ellison has some things to say about Paramount that would make a sailor blush).

It’s just a good bit of fun and something that keeps us all entertained. A total waste of money and silicon, but a lot of human pastimes are the same. And none is that even touches actual niche tools that actually are kinda decent (code completion isn’t replacing coders, but it’s a significant boost in some cases.)

It seems to me the only real grift is them convincing folks that replacing actual workers with AI is just around the corner (and how fucking awful would that be, anyway?) I think money invested in OAI might be reasonable but money invested in any company developing products based on LLMs is the real loser.

But I respect your opinion, and appreciate the response.

I get where you are coming from. From what I see there are a lot of folks genuinely excited about AI and genuinely think it is the future.

I also agree with you that it’s not for mass market. It’s a tool. I can be used by anyone. It can be helpful in a limited capacity for damn near anyone. But like a tablesaw, not everyone needs one and if you try to use it without understanding the tool, it’s liable to do more harm than good.

I’m actually really excited for LLMs because I was into them and using them way before ChatGPT, and now that everyone is excited there is all of this interest and investment and the costs for doing what I enjoy are socialized over a large number of people. It’s like if the whole world decided everyone needs a replica lightsaber. Instead of paying $600 for one, I could pick one up for $120 due to economy of scale.

I still think it’s a terrible business model. Everyone is trying to integrate it into mass market products, but it is uncontrollable. Your automated CSR bot might just tell your biggest client to go fuck himself. The chance is low, but it is never zero. That’s not a product.

When 25 phones out of a production run of hundreds of thousands catch fire, they recall the whole fucking lot. Anyone adopting LLMs on a large scale is begging to be sued into oblivion.

I would not invest in OAI. I might invest in a smaller, leaner competitor. I wouldn’t invest in an AI-based company. You’re right that it’s a sucker’s game, I’m just not sure it’s grift. Looks to me like rich idiots who don’t really understand it (well, and maybe grifters who don’t want them to).

That all being said, it’s a fun, cool technology. It has its niche uses. And who knows, we might just accidentally invent something really cool out of it. It has replaced Google for me ~80% of the time. Because Google is also full of shit, but it takes a lot longer to sift through. I’m not staking my life or livelihood on anything ChatGPT says, but if you know how to use it, and if you are skeptical about the results, it’s pretty amazing. IMO

I could write a fucking book here and I had to delete about a chapter just to get to the point here so this would be readable.

The current Russian and US gov’ts are forces for evil in the world. If they say jump, I’m looking for a shovel.

You’re not wrong that corporations are also a real problem—they are the surveillance arm of world governments. That doesn’t really intersect with what I was trying to say.

Until recently, I had the luxury of knowing my government doesn’t give a shit if I have queer kids. But now they do, at the same time that there is a push against encrypted communication. And I’m really paying attention to the signals (hah!) they are sending, because I’m mentally preparing for shit to turn really dark, really fast, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down.

Figure they’ve penetrated telegram or someone and are trying to drive people to use compromised messaging? Idk but when Russia and Musk both target Signal that makes me think I should be using it. (But maybe that’s the play lol.)

Blocking it from my computer would probably help, too. I think the internet is the problem. Specifically social media.

Probably going to be inflated through Trump’s sovereign wealth fund if he gets it. Another way to steal our money.

Grok has alternative facts.

I kinda do this. I’ve found that I drift away from everyone. I don’t respond in real time. I don’t want to interrupt anyone for idle conversation.

Not sure I’d really recommend, but I can’t seem to help drifting away from people. Only people in my life are my wife, kids, and people my wife keeps in my life, which includes my own folks.

It’s lonely when I stop to think about it. Which mostly I don’t, but when I do… it sucks. And I think I’m accidentally raising my kids to be the same way.

No one wants mentors. The way to move up in IT is to switch jobs every 24 months. So when you’re paying mentors huge salaries to train juniors who are velocity drags into velocity boosters, you do it knowing they are going to leave and take all that investment with them for a higher paycheck.

I don’t say this is right, but that’s the reality from the paycheck side of things and I think there needs to be radical change for both sides. Like a trade union or something. Union takes responsibility for certifying skills and suitability, companies can be more confident of hires, juniors have mentors to learn from, mentors ensure juniors have aptitude and intellectual curiosity necessary to do the job well, and I guess pay is more skill/experience based so developers don’t have to hop jobs to get paid what they are worth.

Fixed typos due to my iPhone hating me.

ChatGPT is extremely useful if you already know what you’re doing. It’s garbage if you’re relying on it to write code for you. There are nearly always bugs and edge cases and hallucinations and version mismatches.

It’s also probably useful for looking like you kinda know what you’re doing as a junior in a new project. I’ve seen some shit in code reviews that was clearly AI slop. Usually from exactly the developers you expect.

Whatever their plan is, you just described the one business model they clearly aren’t following by rejecting $100B.

I’ve used AI as a pseudo-therapist. It was kinda surreal. It had some helpful things to say, but there was a whole lot of cheerleading. Like, I appreciate the boost, and telling me how great I am. Then it kept trying to push me into an action plan like it’s selling a Tony Robbin’s book. And it never really challenged me on my representations or perspective except when I was down on myself.

I get it, when someone comes to you with troubles, try to make them feel better about themselves. But I really have to do a lot of searching to figure out what parts are worth paying attention to and what parts are just hyping me up.

I definitely would not trust it, but I think it says some useful stuff by accident now and again.

Maybe it would’ve done better if I’d given it really detailed instructions on how to be a therapist, but if I could do that I could probably give those same instructions to my wife or someone and be better off.

I kinda feel like other than this being specific to India and the differing marriage culture from the west, this could have been written about Match.com 20 years ago. If there is anything about what has recently come to define AI, I overlooked it.

That said, I’d probably be even more negative about AI’s ability to match people up. Although in a culture of arranged marriages, I don’t know that it would necessarily be worse.

I don’t know about government overall, but the military and HHS have has some of the most stringent security stances I’ve encountered. To the point where just working for them was a massive chore. (How effective they were I guess I don’t know, but working for them sucked.)

That said, I’ll take what you said on faith, because I think you’re spot on with everything else.

They have always been techno-punks: anti-establishment and more style than substance. That being said, if nothing else, they were able to shine a light on shitty people and that’s more than most folks do.

I wish they were getting into organizations and dumping gigs of documents detailing illegal and anti-consumer/citizen activities, but money and law enforcement really goes after anything with an actually impact that might affect wealth. No one actually gives a shit about a website being down. (Excepting like… Amazon or Google and good fucking luck with that.)

So it’s like a flaming bag of shit left on a porch. They take care of it and shout “you damn punks!” But if you burn the barn down, every cop in the county will be interrogating everyone they can find until you are caught.

I didn’t like Twitter as a social platform, but I did use it a lot for news on current events, such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident?

Handy for communication during some kind of emergency that floods the phone network, but that’s pretty niche. Anyway, I interact a little on Bluesky but mostly it’s just a time killer like TikTok or whatever. Twitter was super easy to quit between the Musk take over and moving away from DC.

both OpenAI and Microsoft are probing whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) without permission to train its own models on the output of OpenAI’s systems, an approach referred to as distillation.

That would definitely show up in the quality of responses. Surely they have better and cheaper training sources…