Posts by Arboreal Astronaut

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

who knew The Register was such an easy mark for private-equity PR?

No, Red Lobster didn't go bankrupt because of "endless shrimp", Red Lobster went bankrupt because of private equity running its typical predatory schenanigans: acquire a potentially healthy/solvent established company (typically in a leveraged buyout), sell off as many liquid assets as possible and load the company down as much as possible with debt (in the case of large restaurant and/or retail chains like Red Lobster that have significant real estate assets in their brick-and-mortar storefronts, this typically involves transferring real estate ownership to vampiric shell companies which can then leech the target company dry with rent payments), then use some combination of more shell companies and bankruptcy-law loopholes to make sure other people are left holding the bag when the company inevitably goes under.

Basically, an ever-increasing slice of the U.S. financial sector is organized around a thinly veiled version of the naked con game that Tony pulled off against the sporting goods store owner in season 2 of The Sopranos, especially when the target is vaguely well-known enough that a headline-worthy alibi can be provided for the benefit of gullible media dupes like The Register.

California DMV tells Tesla to ease off on those Autopilot claims

Re: Role of copilot

> not a single actual instance of that happening has been documented by the DMV

Anybody who tries to do anything with U.S. traffic safety data knows that the entire thing is a gigantic dumpster fire, and the systemic failure to maintain good data on these kinds of issues isn't fixable without addressing the underlying cultural problem: the entire auto-based transportation system in the United States is premised on wink-nudge failure to take any kind of steps to hold drivers accountable for dangerous behavior on the road, from the casual lax attitudes toward traffic violations like speeding or drunk driving, right up to inventing a whole lesser category of crime called "vehicular homicide" so at-fault drivers can avoid the manslaughter charges they'd have to face if they killed someone through negligent operation of any other kind of heavy equipment.

Lax attitudes toward data gathering/reporting on Tesla driver safety doesn't make it an exception, it's just that the slight novelty of the tech involved makes it slightly harder for people to mindlessly apply the same ideological scripts they've been conditioned to use decades to allow automakers to avoid accountability for their role in a transportation system that reliably kills tens of thousands of people per year.

Tesla's position here vis-a-vis legacy automakers is a bit like Michael Corleone telling the Nevada senator "we're both part of the same hypocrisy": it's not that Corleone thinks they're both criminals and murderers who should be locked up, he just thinks it's unfair that he isn't being granted the same free pass for his murderous criminality that the more "established" criminal gets by default.

Re: Now available: Tesla Quantum Drive Interstellar Plus Plus

Introducing our new driver-assist system: "Car That Drives Itself Without Any Human Supervision Whatsoever, No Seriously, It's Totally Fine For You To Go To Sleep Behind The Wheel On The Highway"*

* system requires full driver alertness at all times

Amazon blocked 1,800 suspected North Korean scammers seeking jobs

Re: +1 in the phone number is a red flag? Really?

Switching your computer's date/time to 24-hour or DD-MM-YYYY? North Korean agent!

Kilometers on your phone's directions app? We got us a commie here!

Displaying your weather forecasts in Celsius? Nice try, Kim!

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Sure, it's just a question of whether the government in question has the political and economic muscle to force companies to obey it. When (for example) a court in Ecuador rules that Chevron owes the Ecuadorian people billions to compensate for damages caused by pollution, Chevron decides to fight back, because it decides it can and it's worth it. If Microsoft and other companies/institutions in the same situation decided they had the collective leverage to force the U.S. government to back down, nothing stops them from trying, especially if they can credibly argue that the Khan sanctions could end up becoming the tipping point that costs U.S. tech companies billions of dollars' worth of international business.

We don't really know what would happen in Microsoft defied U.S. sanctions on Khan, because there's never been a mass-scale institutional effort to defy these kinds of sanctions before.

Up until now, everybody seems to have taken it for granted that it'd be totally fine for the U.S. executive branch to have 100% unchecked power to essentially revoke a person's membership in global society on a whim, because surely the U.S. can be trusted to only use such power to go after people who "really" deserve it, right?

All these institutions need to ask themselves where they'd draw the line of open defiance, or next thing you know they'll be helping enforce U.S. sanctions on some random guy at Trump's golf club who took too long to finish the hole ahead of him or whatever.

It's neither malice nor incompetence, it's weasely evasive PR lawyer-speak.

"Sure, we did in fact knowingly and deliberately cut off digital services to the ICC's chief prosecutor after the Trump administration ordered us to do it... but we didn't cut off digital services to the *entire* ICC as an *institution*, which is something the Trump administration never ordered us to do, even though we probably would've done that in a heartbeat if they *had* given us that order."

Nexperia drama intensifies as Dutch chipmaker denies ousted CEO's claims of Chinese split

Re: Mke up your mind -- Politics or Business

It's especially absurd since Nixon and Kissinger cozying up to China was an integral part of the strategy by which the West won its original Cold War with the USSR, actively working to drive a wedge as deep as possible into what could've been a coherent Eurasian socialist economic bloc.

By contrast, these days the West is explicitly shoving countries with deeply contradictory ideological frameworks (conservative nationalist Russia, nominally state-socialist China, Islamic theocratic Iran) into a box with each other because something something "autocracy", part self-fulfilling prophecy and part death wish: "hey you guys, I know you don't necessarily like each other, but please please please gang up on me and kick my ass!"

"Let me ask you something: if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

Like the vast majority of Western tech companies, Nexperia has long been little more than a glorified R&D/sales/marketing department for goods manufactured in China and/or Taiwan.

Outsourced relationships like these have been the actual material base of the Western "manufacturing economy" for decades now, and if the trajectory of the shift has been getting any gentler in recent years, it's only because the West has less and less manufacturing even remaining to be outsourced.

For a firm like Nexperia to be outright sold to a Chinese-based conglomerate is basically just being more honest about who in this situation is economically dependent on whom.

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

It's a bit like the Boolean probability problem of an assisted driving algorithm that phantom-brakes on a rural road at night because it suddenly interprets the moon on the horizon ahead as a yellow traffic light.

Do you stick with trying to teach the system to discriminate ever more finely between the plausible-seeming probabilities of "that yellow circle is the moon" (i.e. "Benioff's real position is pro-Trump") versus "that yellow circle is a traffic light" (i.e. "Benioff's real position is anti-Trump")?

Or, instead, do you try to teach it to recognize the extremely obvious underlying reality that moons don't suddenly transform themselves into traffic lights (i.e. that Benioff has no "real position" other than being an unprincipled hack who'll say whatever it's in his business interest to say)?

Chamber of Commerce sues over Trump's $100K H-1B paywall

The way the H-1B program is typically presented in these sorts of debates hinges on an oddly symbiotic consensus of hypocritical doublespeak between the program's corporate supporters and its anti-immigrant opponents.

Employers arguing in favor of H-1B disingenuously wrap themselves in the garb of tolerance and multiculturalism to obscure the extent to which their support is grounded in the ability to use the conditions and restrictions of the visa program itself to clamp down on foreign workers' freedom to say no to an abusive or exploitative employer.

On the flip side, xenophobes disingenuously wrap themselves in the garb of pro-worker populism to obscure the extent to which their a priori goal of clamping down on foreigners ultimately ends up hurting domestic workers, by making foreign workers easier for employers to mistreat (which ironically only makes companies want to hire them even more).

Restructuring the H-1B program in a genuinely pro-immigrant way, so that an individual visa holder would be free to quit an abusive job and search for another without the threat of imminent deportation, would degrade companies' ability to use the program's restrictiveness as leverage over their workforce, while also offending the sensibilities of those for whom hatred of foreigners is a goal in and of itself, not necessarily a means to any other end.

Carmakers fear chip crunch as Dutch sanctions hit Nexperia

Re: You say that like it's a bad thing

Sure, touchscreens in modern cars are a scourge that need to be replaced with analog-style buttons and dials ASAP, but the most important chips in a modern ICE vehicle are on the proverbial back end (under the proverbial but also literal hood) to monitor and control the functioning of the engine, in ways that are integral to a lot of modern advances in vehicle performance, efficiency, emissions control, and so forth.

For that matter, my guess would be that the electronic components in the driver-facing interface are the easiest ones to replace with alternative suppliers, since they're fairly similar to non-automotive consumer-grade electronics, and working around potential differences between different suppliers would be relatively easy and low-stakes... by contrast, the control modules and sensors under the hood are highly specialized for specific mechanical tasks, and need to work consistently and reliably within precise operating parameters where the slightest variation might legitimately make the car non-functional.

Dutch government out here taking hostages like Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles

"Hold it! Next man makes a move, the economy gets it!"

Datacenter water use? California governor says don't ask, don't tell

Re: California water politics is already a corrupt oligarchic kleptocracy

> The only way in which California is unique here, is that it is a rich and heavily populated state, so you can claim water rights in a free market would be absurdly high.

The Mediterranean climate is actually a major part of what makes the major growing areas of California exceptional: mild winters with little to no frost result in an unusually long growing season, but taking full advantage requires massive amounts of water to be pumped in from elsewhere, and the state's endless willingness to do this (aided and abetted by the carefully-cultivated lack of open public discourse around exactly where and how the state's water actually gets consumed) means that the potential for water shortages is limited only by farmowners' capacity to plant more and more water-intensive crops in fields that wouldn't otherwise be able to support them.

The problem isn't that there's something inherently wrong with the idea of large-scale regional irrigation systems to support increased food production -- the problem is that the politics of water distribution in California are shrouded in an exceptionally flagrant culture of corruption and secrecy, choking off any meaningful public capacity for rational decision-making about what levels of water consumption would actually make sense.

Re: California water politics is already a corrupt oligarchic kleptocracy

Sure, 1 farmer employing 1000 workers is going achieve lower costs than 100 farmers employing 10 workers each... but how exactly is this contingent on the farmworkers' immigration status? Would the economic advantages conferred on large enterprises by economies of scale somehow cease to apply in a world where all farmworkers had valid up-to-date work visas?

By contrast, it seems pretty clear how the ability to rig California's water rights system in their favor would confer a qualitative advantage on large-scale agricultural land barons as compared to smaller-scale farmers, above and beyond the baseline reality that economies of scale exist.

California water politics is already a corrupt oligarchic kleptocracy

Water usage in California is dominated by a small number of large agricultural landowners in an opaque, privatized water-rights allocation system reminiscent of Yeltsin-era post-Soviet privatization auctions, using the water to irrigate vast tracts of arid desert land on which they grow water-intensive cash crops like almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, Mandarin oranges, and (especially) alfalfa for livestock feed.

Data centers are a perfect fit for this dysfunctional system -- hell, the owners of Wonderful Pistachio Company (whose southern California fields singlehandedly consume more water than the entire city of Los Angeles combined) are probably interspersing data centers amidst the pistachios as we speak.

Meanwhile, California's public discourse around water is largely premised on trying to pin the blame for shortages on residents of large coastal cities for taking long showers or watering their front lawns or whatever.

Easy to see why Newsom vetoed this bill, since imposing transparency on any part of this system would be an anathema.

Dutch government puts Nexperia on a short leash over chip security fears

Re: Protectionism for me, free trade for thee

> The discussion was about "nationalizing" companies, not genocide.

Fair enough, so maybe the best historical example to bring to the fore here would be the Opium Wars. The Chinese government's effort to crack down on the flow of opium from British and American drug kingpins seems pretty clearly reasonable, both as a geopolitical question of national security, and as a domestic question of safeguarding the best interests of its people. (Certainly no less reasonable than Western governments' vague fears about Chinese control over global semiconductor manufacturing.) In response, the British government chose to interpret the Chinese government's actions as an unacceptable violation of the absolute sanctity of free trade and private property, and ultimately as an act of war.

If the Chinese government chose to react as histrionically to the Dutch government's actions today as the British government did to the Chinese government's actions back then, Chinese ICBMs would've already reduced Amsterdam to a glowing pile of rubble.

Re: Protectionism for me, free trade for thee

Within living memory, China has been subjected to one of the most brutally destructive, mass-murderous wars of conquest in all of human history, at the hands of one of those very same Western-allied "neighbors" toward whom we're all supposed to feel sympathetic. There's only one reason why the Japanese Empire's 1931-45 campaign in China isn't remembered as the single greatest act of evil in modern history: because Japan's ally Germany stole its thunder right around the same time with a slightly-more-murderous (but not by all that much) war of conquest in eastern Europe.

Or maybe we should talk about the Opium Wars, the British Empire's oh-so-noble crusade to safeguard the free trade rights of narco-smuggling kingpins against China's nefarious plot to combat a foreign-inflicted drug epidemic? Or how about the West's "punitive expeditions" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were naked exercises in mass-scale armed robbery, to such a brazen and unashamed extent that Queen Victoria herself owned a Pekingese dog stolen from one of the Chinese imperial palaces that had literally been given the name "Looty"?

I wouldn't dispute that the Chinese government is capable of doing bad things, but let's please have some perspective here. Historically speaking, the West and its allies have done far, *far* worse to China than China has ever done in the other direction, nor does any of the current fear-mongering about what China *might* theoretically do come particularly close to what the West and its allies actually *did* do.

Protectionism for me, free trade for thee

If a government in the Global South behaved this way toward a major European-owned multinational conglomerate -- involuntarily restructuring one of its local subsidiaries in the name of "national security" -- European governments would be screaming bloody murder, and the offending Global Southern government would probably be hit with some combination of international trade sanctions and/or a CIA-orchestrated coup.

The Dutch position here is a near-perfect mirror image of the arguments that the Global South has been making about European economic neocolonialism for nearly a century. Good to know that Europeans are capable of understanding and embracing these sorts of arguments after all, as soon as they're the ones on the receiving end...

Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco

Re: SF's homelessness problem is a housing problem

Mentally ill drug addicts exist pretty much anywhere on Earth, the main difference is that in San Francisco it's exceptionally hard for them to afford a place to live.

If you start pumping lethal levels of carbon monoxide into a room full of people, the first people to suffocate to death will probably be the ones with preexisting asthma. What would you describe as the root cause of death by suffocation: the asthma, or the carbon monoxide?

SF's homelessness problem is a housing problem

San Francisco has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and most of the city's land area is zoned exclusively for single-family homes at a typical maximum height of 2 stories.

Tourists in San Francisco generally spend their time in the northeastern half of the city, whose development largely predates WWII -- by contrast, nearly the entire southwestern half of the city was built out in the immediate post-WWII era as a vast uninterrupted tract of near-identical, builder-grade, low-density houses, whose suburban-style qualities were reportedly part of the original inspiration for the Malvina Reynolds song "Little Boxes".

If San Francisco and the surrounding cities were built in the style of a first-rank European metro area, with districts consisting largely of 4-6 story mixed-use buildings and densely-packed narrow townhomes/flats, the city's homelessness crisis would look vastly different.

Fake North Korean IT workers sneaking into healthcare, finance, and AI

The way this whole issue is framed seems utterly bizarre

Call me crazy, but how does it make sense to describe what's going on here as a "scam" involving "fake workers"? A company hires a worker to do a job, the job gets done, the company pays the worker, everybody goes their separate ways, then maybe the worker's North Korean identity gets discovered after the fact. Is the company somehow being deceived into thinking work was performed when it actually wasn't? Is North Korea a magical land where polished IT work output springs from the ground fully-formed, without the involvement of flesh-and-blood human IT workers?

One of the laugh lines in the South Park spinoff movie "Team America" (which ironically has Kim Jong-Il and North Korea as the arch bad guys) is a dopey celebrity liberal trying to describe a nefarious plot by "corporations", yet struggling to articulate what the nefarious plot is actually supposed to be, aside from the inherent nefariousness of anything done by "corporations". Paraphrasing that line:

"Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the North Koreans finance the remote IT workers, and then the remote IT workers go out... and the North Koreans sit there in their... in their North Korea buildings, and... and, and see, they're all North Korea-y... and they make money."

Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China

"Our bumbling idiot, their nefarious dictator"

Not for nothing, but this "lol Trump is dumb" story would be framed in histrionic "oh no, Big Brother is coming!" terms if it was the Chinese government proposing to implement this sort of tracking tech on chips that might end up in the United States.

Both framings are simultaneously 100% correct: it's dystopian and totalitarian, and it's also extremely dumb.

That said, when/if the Chinese government proposes similar measures, hopefully it'll be remembered that the U.S. government did it first.

Kremlin goons caught abusing ISPs to spy on Moscow-based diplomats, Microsoft says

The point is that it's disingenuous to complain/criticize the actions of a foreign "enemy" government while failing to note that your own/allied governments do the same thing, let alone to a far greater and more pervasive extent, as is straightforwardly the case with the US government and digital surveillance.

The "our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes" cartoon isn't just a meme about hypocrisy in general, it's specifically calling out ideological hypocrisies related to nationalism and xenophobia, in situations exactly like this one.

Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems

paraphrasing Orwell

If you want a picture of the future of programming, imagine an airheaded mid 90s-era wannabe Silicon Valley entrepreneur telling an actual programmer...

"I just had a great idea for a new [program / website / video game]! Hey, you're, like, some kind of computer-y person! Can you, like, make it for me?"

...forever.

White House bans 'woke' AI, but LLMs don't know the truth

Model collapse?

Don't call it "model collapse" -- call it a righteous anti-woke crackdown against diversity in LLM training datasets!

Laptop farmer behind $17M North Korean IT worker scam locked up for 8.5 years

Re: Fraud?

U.S. sanctions are part of U.S. law, so presumably all sorts of conspiracy/fraud/etc types of charges can attach themselves to situations where you're conspiring to break U.S. sanctions, tricking someone into unknowingly breaking U.S. sanctions or helping you break them, and so on.

Admittedly, U.S. sanctions are deeply *stupid* laws, the primary vector for what Wired recently described as "the enshittification of American power".

But there's no law requiring that laws must be rational or sensible, so there you have it.

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

IBM and eternal politics

> As The Register wrote over a decade ago, IBM was "first incorporated back in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company."

IBM's early history goes back to the 1890s with Herman Hollerith's original punch-card tabulators, the primary early use case for which was to crunch demographic data for the US Census Bureau, largely at the behest of rabid eugenicists whose fixation was to maintain the purity of the United States' Anglo-Saxon racial stock against hordes of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. (Not unrelatedly, IBM punch-card tabulators were also instrumental in the administration of Germany's camp network during the 1930s and 40s.)

So yes, it's politics and far-right racist kookery, all the way down.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

Doesn't this seem a bit like "undercover cops can't lie to you about whether or not they're a cop" logic? How exactly is a state supposed to be able to have any kind of functioning espionage system at all (let alone a super-effective 1984-style authoritarian secret police network) if its own operatives are strictly forbidden from criticizing the regime or its leaders, even when doing so is strictly necessary to establish their cover?

The only logical explanation for why this sort of interview question would weed out applicants from North Korea is if the people being weeded out were are IT workers who happen to be from North Korea and are acting without the approval of the North Korean state, in which case they might very well have reason to be afraid of going on record criticizing their own regime to an untrusted third party -- which would also mean that the North Korean applicants being weeded out are precisely the ones who are *least* likely to pose any kind of actual security/espionage threat.

Even people who can't fathom the idea of poking holes in Western ideological tropes about North Korea, should at least still be able to perceive the constructive criticism of silly and ineffective counterintelligence tactics that only succeed in providing Western institutions with a false sense of security.

Re: north korea knows you are a coward

The news story where I first heard about this situation described a company hiring a remote developer who claimed to be from Singapore, they did the job, got paid for it, and the company only learned that the developer was actually from North Korea when the FBI approached them long after the work was complete -- the guy being interviewed even made a point of mentioning that the code written by the North Korean developer was still in use in the company's system, even now!

Whether or not it's part of some kind of forced labor program, or an espionage operation using legitimate IT work for cover, I have no idea, but it seems bizarre and nonsensical to describe these people as "fake workers" when by all appearances they're real people doing real work, even if they're lying to those hiring them about their country of residence. (Which, given the nature of Western sanctions, would seem like a perfectly understandable thing to do if one was an aspiring remote IT worker who happened to live in North Korea.) Is North Korea actually the realm of Mordor, and these people aren't really people, they're actually orcs or something?

Even more so than obvious big-picture lies and omissions about things like the history of the Korean War, those are the kinds of little descriptive details that tend to trigger my internal propaganda-BS detector when reading news stories about countries my own government desperately wants me to hate, as if people writing these stories can't just leave well enough alone and describe the situation in plain neutral language without adding that extra little editorialized stretch just for the sake of waving the flag in their readers' faces.

Re: north korea knows you are a coward

> the other option of getting a legitimate job and not committing a crime is denied to them because the schemes where they get these jobs are orchestrated by the North Korean government

The *actual* reason why getting a legitimate remote job with a Western IT firm is forbidden to North Koreans is because of US sanctions that forbid the transfer of assets to anybody in North Korea for any reason, including something as innocent as paying the salary of a remote IT worker. These sanctions make no distinction between the regime itself and ordinary civilians; the basic logic of broad-based economic sanctions against a country like North Korea, Iran, or Cuba is to weaken the regime's economic/industrial base and spread popular discontent, which inherently means targeting ordinary civilians right alongside actual agents of the regime.

Do people really not understand that this is how sanctions work?

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

Questions like these wouldn't do a thing to weed out an actual operative of the North Korean state participating in an intelligence/espionage operation to infiltrate Western IT infrastructure -- if answering these questions the way their interviewers want to hear is a necessary part of the job, they'll just do it.

On the other hand, if there's anybody these questions *would* potentially weed out, it's an ordinary IT worker totally unaffiliated with the North Korean state, but who merely happens to be from North Korea and is simply trying to find a way to make a living, just like an IT worker from any other country on Earth.

Westerners who fail to draw any conceptual distinction between these two categories of people, lumping them equally into the category of "North Koreans", are doing de facto unpaid volunteer propaganda work (extremely effective propaganda at that!) for the North Korean state.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

how LLMs work

I'd assume that a large part of the problem is a failure to understand how an LLM like Grok processes a prompt like "The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect" -- there's no genuine semantic understanding of those words, only an associational/statistical link between the kinds of text that are likely to contain those words, and the kinds of words or phrases such a text might also be likely to contain.

On the one hand, if you actually tried to come up with a consistent semantic definition of the concept of "political incorrectness", it'd be hard for it not to encompass things like being a communist during the McCarthy era, or opposing Israel's war in Gaza, or being an elementary school teacher with a same-sex spouse and offhandedly alluding to your spouse's existence. On the other hand, entirely independent from what political correctness or incorrectness might actually mean, it turns out that the kinds of people who are likely to describe themselves as "making claims that are politically incorrect" are also disproportionately likely to be online Nazis.

An LLM's "understanding" consists 0% of the former and 100% of the latter, so no surprise adding those words to Grok's prompt helped to turn it into a Nazi.

French cops cuff Russian pro basketball player on ransomware charges

moral high ground? what moral high ground?

Almost too on-the-nose, given how shocked -- shocked! -- everybody in the West acted when it came to Russia's high-profile arrest and detention of a basketball player from the United States.

Say what you will about Russia's over-draconian drug laws (which, to be fair, are hardly any more worse than those of, say, Texas) or the nakedly transparent political motivations behind the Russian government's handling of the case, but at least there was never any factual dispute that Brittney Griner was actually guilty of the criminal offense for which she was convicted.

(To be clear, it'd be far from surprising to see a criminal gang employing an international traveling athlete's coaching or managerial staff for use in this kind of border-crossing criminal activity, but your median professional athlete has a brain about as close to that of a child as it's generally possible for a neurotypical adult to have.)

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

In old-fashioned pre-neural-network cognitive science, there's a classic line of thought called the "poverty of the stimulus" argument: observing that people have an uncanny-seeming ability to extract huge amounts of multi-layered semantic meaning from relatively small and simple linguistic utterances, the argument is that this should only be possible if our interpretive abilities are rooted in an innate "universal grammar" or "language of thought" encoded in our genome and hardwired into the basic architecture of our brains, entirely independent from any specific twists and turns that might be taken by the individual's learning and cognitive development. In this account, the work of cognitive science was to "decode" this universal-grammar "algorithm" from its original language of ATGCs, with the corresponding work of AI research being to "translate" it into the digital language of a human-built computer.

The counterpoint, which one might call the "wealth of the stimulus" argument, is that people exchanging words with each other are never *only* parsing linguistic input, but a broad range of non-linguistic context-based cues, grounded in shared experience, which help to parse meanings that might otherwise be vague or unclear if the input actually did consist *entirely* of language. (A famous account of an exchange between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Sraffa: Wittgenstein insisted that all communication must, in principle, have a precise semantic content that can, in principle, be articulated linguistically as a finite series of atomistic logical propositions, to which Sraffa responded with a contemptuous/dismissive Italian hand gesture, brushing his hand across his chin, and retorted, "what's the semantic content of *that*?")

Observing these sorts of results in LLM models is an excellent object lesson in what linguistic cognition might look like if the stimulus genuinely *was* impoverished in the ways that old-fashioned cognitive scientists imagined it to be, if the development of a cognitive agent genuinely *did* have nothing to go on but the surface-level semantic inputs of language, with none of the rich layers of materially-grounded developmental experience possessed by an actual human being.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Hard to imagine a worse long-term marketing disaster for Tesla than "MAGA Elon"

If you squint hard enough, you can almost see the argument for how Musk's pro-Trump pivot could theoretically make sense for Tesla from a business standpoint: Chinese EV makers like BYD already have better and cheaper offerings than Tesla and the imbalance is only getting worse over time, so it's in Tesla's interest to help gin up anti-Chinese xenophobic hysteria, to build support for a massive wall of protectionist trade barriers to keep the Chinese auto industry from eating Tesla's market share for lunch (and the vast majority of Musk's net worth along with it).

Of course the obvious logical flaw in this strategy is that "Tesla customers" and "Trump supporters" are about as close to mutually exclusive as it gets for a company that big, and if you'd gone up to a bunch of random people on the street a few years ago and asked them to think of a hypothetical example of something stupid a major company could do that would irreversibly alienate the vast majority its customer base in one fell swoop, Tesla pivoting its brand image toward MAGA might've easily been one of the top suggestions, right up there with, I dunno, Fox News launching a children's network dedicated exclusively to "drag queen story hours".

People have empathy with AI… as long as they think it's human

Is this result supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" or something?

Humans have the capacity to extend empathy to lots of nonhuman and nonliving things: pet rocks, sentimental heirlooms, even that old computer that you respect for soldiering on for so long and mournfully bid farewell when it finally kicks the bucket. Empathy often seems to work on the same basis as the criminal law adage that it's better to let ten guilty defendants go free than convict a single innocent defendant.

This overcapacity for empathy is no small part of why such a large portion of human social interactions (especially between strangers) are so formulaic that they can be passably imitated by an enhanced autocomplete algorithm, because having to flex your empathy muscles at 100% all the time is exhausting, and it's easier if you can take frequent breaks and let a culturally-dictated script handle your responses for you.

People might knowingly extend empathy to nonhuman objects for fun or practice, the same way someone who does manual labor might also go to the gym to work out, but they deeply resent when they feel they've been "tricked" into extending their empathy to a nonhuman object designed to impersonate a human, the same way someone would resent being told to haul their furniture up the stairs to their new apartment, only to then be told that the apartment was actually on the ground level the entire time.