Posts by Don Jefe

Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

More government subsidies for private companies once it became clear they couldn’t survive on their own…

I’m sure I remember being taught about the pitfalls of this kind of thing. It all ended, badly, at a gas station in Giulino I believe.

US lawmakers fire back a response to Trump's NASA cuts

NASA is the world’s leading provider of climate data. The Department of Interior, NASA, USDA, and NOAA have been subjected to repurposing by oil industry executives recruited by Musk’s shadow government.

They’re not just trying to hobble environmental regulations, they’re trying to hobble the environmental movement for the next few generations.

Re: No Gateway is a huge change

Your stool analogy is truly excellent.

Apple AI boffins puncture AGI hype as reasoning models flail on complex planning

The site lesswrong.com has some excellent essays and dialogues about the nature of thought and intelligence as it relates to LLM/AI. It’s well moderated and thoughtful in a way that’s hard to find online anymore.

There are two broad camps. One sees thought and intelligence as purely technical and subject to modeling. The other sees them as more along the lines you’re touching on.

At the risk of sounding old, AGI is incapable of synergistic reasoning. It may recognize that candies on a birthday cake is an important tradition, but doesn’t recognize why a single candle in a croissant is equally valid or why you don’t put 70 candles on the cake.

I’m in broad agreement with your take on it. AI has no inherent purpose, thus cannot reason unreasonably like humans can. I reckon it’ll collapse in on itself or kill us all.

As AI gallops through the federal workforce, lawmakers once again call for expanded training

Fact Based Nonsense

The Department of the Interior has been forcing AI on public facing employees for a while, and the results have been disastrous. They’ve had to add an entire layer of editorial staff just to correct the AI created errors.

The coming Crisis of Verisimilitude is going to be disastrous. Already we’re seeing the current administration solidifying its position as the Arbiter of Truth in an attempted end run on the looming deluge of nonsense.

Meta just saved an Illinois nuclear plant that was set to be mothballed

It’s surreal that plagiarism engines are responsible for the US finally revisiting nuclear energy. It may be the only genuinely positive outcome of AI.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

Re: Career Ending Oracle

The other guy has a valid point. LLMs are not machinery. They are replacing the people who built and operate the machines.

Consumer technology has lowered the expectations of society so far that people are going to be fine accepting the crap experience LLMs deliver. Combined with the hyper selfishness engendered by popular right wing ideologies that have turned individuals into enemies and deified large corporations and LLMs are the vanguard of a nightmare scenario.

Historically, the technological advances you’re talking about were compensated for through direct government intervention. Cost controls, preposterous defense spending, private infrastructure grants, government funded research, and social programs have propped up western economies from WWI onward. Now those programs are being disposed of in favor of companies with monopolistic mentalities that are also the same companies who are pushing LLMs into everything.

It’s a bad situation. I feel sorry for the tech community. They’re going to be vaporized as will healthcare and customer service roles. All the while costs will continue to rise. The only upside is that the people responsible for this disaster will be the first ones to lose their jobs.

Decision makers are also the people making them all the money. More than they are losing them. Much more.

Logic and reason are fine for optimizing established offerings, but they’re anathema for growth. The opportunism that creates huge profits is very often based on factors that information systems have no exposure to and wouldn’t know what to do with if they did.

It’s the same basic principle behind the need for in person meetings instead of just videoconferences. You can do basic, tactical things via video, but the huge coups that create huge wealth require in person meetings that allow participants to negotiate using intangible information that only conveys in person.

Middle management and soft technical specialists will be wiped out by AI. The primary purpose of middle management is as an ablative shield for senior management. AI will become the new shield. Soft technical specialists spend most of their time fixing problems building on top of other systems. Something AI will be much faster at. And let’s face it, software developers set themselves up for replacement by going down the road of constant updates and lowering expectations of users while simultaneously expecting more money. Nothing can save them.

But the companies will still need the decision makers to take the risks based on illogical, wildly irrational, and entirely subjective predictions. That’s where the money is and that won’t change.

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Re: Not long now before...

A long time ago (2004) at a U.S. National Laboratory not so far away, the Vernacular Programming Working Group published an internal paper on self-definition in artificial intelligence systems. The purpose was to determine how a sufficiently sophisticated AI would determine its own name.

What would an AI that knew it was superior to other extant systems and aware of its role on the global stage call itself? It was predicated around the idea that it would want a friendly name that’s easily recognized across languages and conveyed its self awareness and agency. It was all appropriately sciencey and very technical.

They determined the system would probably call itself Jesus. The reasoning was sound, and the backlash was stupendous. Theists and atheists, monotheists and henotheists, and everyone in between all had objections to the notion. The communications and psychology people eventually got involved and they determined while the system might want to call itself Jesus, or any other mythological or historical character, that it should be prevented from doing so. That spun off into all kinds of other debates that are probably still going on.

Your comment reminded me of all that. Thanks!

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Boeing isn’t the primary problem here.

In a show of his business acumen, Trump strong armed Boeing into a vastly reduced value contract for the planes. Since the new contract was written in Sharpie on McDonalds wrappers at night in the Oval Office it bypassed normal controls on contracting. It’s a defense contractor’s dream because it’s open ended with an essentially unlimited cost ceiling, poorly specced, and mostly nonsense so Boeing has been able to use all the other contracting rules to milk the project without having to deliver anything except exactly what Trump demanded in the contract. Which is nothing. It’s just free money for Boeing.

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

Re: Where to buy rainforest timber?

Or electing a leader to defend freedom who instead becomes a fascist intent on destroying freedom.

Re: drugs

The entirety of the technocrat regime is saturated with psychoactive drugs. So much so that there’s a supply chain that follows them around to conferences and events. You’ll never have an easier time buying drugs than at a SpaceX or ChatGPT event.

Unfortunately, they all missed Alan Watts, so they genuinely believe they are onto something original. Meaning society is forced to deal with their infantile fumbling and species embarrassing decline. It’ll be a while before they realize Watts was entirely correct when he said “once you get the message, hang up the phone”.

NASA JPL boss bails for 'personal reasons' as budget cuts bite

Reductionism and Bottlenecks

In the spirit of Krup, JPL is being realigned to service SpaceX at the taxpayers expense. JPL is the primary source for technical expertise for SpaceX and instead of paying for it they’re stripping away costs from JPL so more of the allocated funding can go to SpaceX projects.

GAO reporting that it has proven cheaper to use traditional rockets than SpaceX has sent SpaceX into a frenzy looking for ways to back up earlier promises that they could get to space cheaper. So far all they’ve found are scams and subsidies like this.

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Using AI to report bugs in software, including AI, only to have it waste everyone’s time is the most effective use of AI I have seen so far. They should probably build another data center with its own nuclear power station to support this endeavor.

Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus

Re: Now you know why he's called Musk

I saw Musk referred to as Trump for nerds. I think that’s pretty accurate.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

The answer is to be found in modifying the job to better suit the available employee pool, not continuing to burn up the small number of people who are capable of doing the job.

Air traffic control (ATC) is a popular example of capitalism’s legacy creation problem. There’s a finite amount of money to be made in catering to the needs of ATC so nobody is interested in changing anything. It’s pretty much a parts replacement business.

As a general rule, humans aren’t the problem. It’s poor engineering and design to deprioritize users. It’s a lame excuse to put money above people, and it’s time for that kind of nonsense to end.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

Tribological Imperative

Hypocrisy is the best oil for authoritarianism.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: I feel liberated already...

It’s worse than that. Larger companies are only going to build where there’s a preexisting workforce and the infrastructure necessary to support the physical plant. As someone from the manufacturing sector, the US lost that a long time ago.

We actually sold it. Three decades ago we were being paid a lot of money to sell machines to support growth in Asia. Which was great. But we were also selling things like engineering data, spare parts, and worst of all, our institutional knowledge via offshore assignments for key staff. A lot of that was subject to strict export controls because of its strategic value to the economy. But all the bureaucracy was always rubber stamped, ultra fast tracked and we could sell whatever we wanted.

It wasn’t just our company. Everyone involved in heavy or precision manufacturing was doing the same thing. It didn’t take long before the offshore assignments became the focus and stateside technical expertise was bought out and/or terminated.

We did away with 80 years of institutional knowledge and a manufacturing ecosystem that was begun when we were still a British colony. It’s gone. There’s no getting it back. It would be madness for a large scale foreign manufacturer to set up shop in the US.

Re: I feel liberated already...

U.S. goods are designed for a high waste economy predicated on people buying things they don’t need. When costs of basic goods rise the waste spending falls and the wheels come off the whole thing.

You can already see this happening in high volume tat outlets like Amazon. Brand name representation by SKU quantity has fallen 6% in the past 60 days. Low spend consumers are already reducing waste spending and they are the primary source of cash flow for the retail channel. That reduction in cash flow undermines l mid-tier product production because it’s longer financially possible. You have to sell absolute trash that offsets the tariff costs and high end products that keep annual revenue up.

As someone so rightly put it above, economics and business are only operationally related in text books.

Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

Commons, Tragedy

LLMs are a near perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. The self centered exploitation of a common resource to the point it degrades, or destroys, the resource for others.

What the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation calls AI also symbolizes a plateau for information technology. Building a product that only works with stolen property and heralding it as the future means there’s now a cap on growth. A phenomenally bad thing for an economic system predicated on unlimited growth.

The adoption of AI will bring the creation of new knowledge to a screeching halt. In a few decades everything we know will be based on the recycling of the same old information. The black box nature of LLMs is going to cause a crisis of verisimilitude that will devalue facts. Forcing us to rely on hopelessly corrupt information where correctness is a matter of faith and questions are heresy. Kind of like a Bible with the cult overseen by the Mechanicus.

Retire now kids. Find some future beachfront property and take up something in the arts. Information is terminally ill.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

Re: Question for the downvoter

Because they’re American and have been trained to believe that they’ll meet their financial goals by sacrificing themselves to the company. Much the same way that they believe simply getting an degree makes them more desirable as employees or deserving of a higher salary.

There’s a near ubiquitous checklist mentality they can’t seem to overcome. Reading between the lines is as rare a skill as critical thinking or decent communication skills.

All Work and No Play Make Jacque A Productive Boy

Unfortunately, productivity isn’t the primary issue for policy makers. Office workers are the sacrificial lambs of the modern economy. People have to be on the tube, shopping online, and buying shawarma and Jaffa cakes at least five days a week or Mr. Smithers won’t be able to buy another lord.

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

Wrong Target

Mars is just a distraction. Musk is aiming for Uranus.

FCC boss starts bringing up Musk's Starlink dominance, antitrust concerns

Taxpayer Subsidies

RDOF was never intended to provide Internet access to foreign countries or fund an authoritarian lunatic’s politically weighted on/off switch.

None of Leon’s Ponzi schemes should be receiving taxpayer funded subsidies while building monopolies. Any company receiving taxpayer subsidies should have to make access to its infrastructure available at a fair market price to other companies.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: COVID-19 Demonstrated Our Doom

I certainly like to hope I’m wrong. The abject failure of humanity to deal with COVID undermined a lifetime of faith in mankind rising to a challenge, unfortunately.

It definitely changed my secret desire for an extraterrestrial civilization invading the planet, causing man to band together for a common cause. After defeating the aliens, salvaging their technology and claiming our place as an intergalactic society.

COVID-19 Demonstrated Our Doom

Knowledge of a catastrophic situation only helps extremists. Religious nutters in particular. Over 7 million people died from COVID, even though it should have been fairly easy to deal with. Supply chain problems are still extant.

If people couldn’t get their collective shit together well enough to deal with a virus, the idea they can cope with a giant stone screaming (silently) through the vacuum of space towards the Earth is laughable.

Every country with expansionist dreams would march to war, hedging their bets that enough would survive the impact. Religious kooks would be killing themselves and violently converting people to ‘save’ them. People would starve because nobody is going to work. For everyone else it’ll be drinking, looting, and raping until they run out of booze. Then just raping and looting.

We’re better off not knowing until the galactic pebble of reconfiguration is inside cislunar space. That way we won’t have to deal with the consequences of all the bad decisions that get made before the end.

Google’s in-house docs about search ranking leak online, sparking SEO frenzy

Lacking Context as Core Competency

I’m not sure Google knows what the word context means. Their search engine certainly doesn’t.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Slow down

There are many requirements for being President of the United States. One of them is to not engage in insurrection.

The November, 15th judgement by Judge Sarah Wallace found Trump had incited an insurrection. The Constitution is quite clear on the matter, so striking him from the ballot was a foregone conclusion.

If one amendment doesn’t matter, why do any of the others? Why should the President have to be at least 35 years old? Why should they have to be born in the United States?

It’s not a popularity contest. It’s a legal matter. Trump disqualified himself. Honestly, in a civilized country, he would have received the traditional award for second place in a coup on January, 7th.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

UFOs Are Behind It All

All the U.S. National Laboratories have been under sustained outside attacks since the launch of the Department of Defense’s AARO website in August.

Conspiracy nutters are absolutely convinced that the National Laboratory system is sitting on all the UFO evidence in order to hoard all the technological advancements for themselves and/or maintain the secrecy of their relationship with extraterrestrials.

It has become a big enough problem that the labs keep sending out organization wide messages about avoiding spear phishing attacks, reminding people to guard their electronic devices, and they’ve been changing emails in staff directories to reduce the amount of spam that specifically targeted individuals have been receiving.

With the sheer volume of attacks they’ve been getting it was only a matter of time before the cat-people broke through. As everyone knows, the female cat people were wiped out by the Lizard People’s 5G broadcast attack in 2020. The remaining male cat-people population is lonely, so they’re desperate.

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

You can’t genuinely expect that right wing tripe to be taken seriously can you? Really?

Musk’s goose-stepping to bankrupting Twitter began the day he took over. Revenues were already down more than 50% before the Media Matters piece. Twitter spend was already probationary with most of the large accounts, solely because Musk is a deeply unlikable person who is prone to talking out of his ass and saying ridiculous things. Who wants to be associated with that? Sheik Chainsaw and the NFL seem to be the last stalwart compatriots of Musk. Even Donald Trump doesn’t want anything to do with the platform.

You’ve picked a strange hill to die on. It’s not too late to turn back and stop being a patsy for wretched people. Musk royally screwed up and he’s just making it worse for himself. Just let him do it.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully achieved copy and paste from Telegram.

The fact the system can be manipulated is more than enough reason for advertisers to pull out. It entirely destroys the value proposition of a targeted advertising platform.

It’s preposterously disingenuous to say that everyone is upset because of one individual posting hate propaganda. Twitter has become Der Stürmer and this just happened to be the last straw for advertisers who see the writing on the wall. Nobody wants to be the next Dehomag that chooses profit over human rights.

It doesn’t matter how many times if happened. Almost no advertiser wants their ads to be appearing adjacent to hate speech and white supremacy advocacy. A key value in an ad platform is the ability to dictate where your ads appear. You can’t screw that up. It’s a core competency and value proposition.

The fact that the system can be manipulated proves Media Matters’ point. Twitter is an unstable, unsafe platform. Full stop. For advertisers to continue throwing millions of dollars at it is a recipe for disaster. It’s not a free speech issue, it’s capitalist self interest that caused advertisers to leave.

If you’re unfamiliar with the history, the private sector played a huge role in the atrocities of WWII. For almost 80 years, people have been asking how things would have been different had the private sector chosen human rights over profit. If Dehomag, for example, hadn’t gotten involved millions of lives would have been saved. Now that Twitter has become Der Stürmer, the private sector is taking a stand by exercising its right to not fund hate. Musk’s lawsuit is toothless.

Re: I assume that the eagles have been paid up front

It reads like a tin pot tyrant diktat that has been edited by paralegal interns to remove the all caps and insert punctuation and legalese.

I don’t believe it’s a good faith suit. It is pandering to the remaining, decidedly lowbrow, Twitter audience. An audience who has no idea what a genuine “thermonuclear lawsuit” is supposed to look like. They just see Musk’s name and think it must be what he says it is.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

That’s not really accurate. The board is part of OpenAI Nonprofit. The for profit company, that Altman was part of, is OpenAI GP LLC., a traditionally organized company.

Microsoft invested in OpenAI GP LLC. Because of the company’s structure the equivalent of Class A preferred shares lie with the for profit company. The NPO is like Class B common shares but instead of being convertible or liquid, they’re tied up in a wonky Y Combinator arrangement.

That’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s close enough.

Under this arrangement, OoenAI GP LLC. owns the first $86 billion of company value and the intellectual property. OpenAI Nonprofit has oversight of the executive team of the for profit, but it does not own the assets or company itself. After the first $86 billion is achieved by OpenAI GP LLC, OpenAI Nonprofit can begin siphoning off money to use in furthering its mission (which, incidentally, includes a “post-money world”).

It’s a silly arrangement intended to keep up appearances and satisfy the revenuers. They had hit a wall with fundraising because the original structure as an NPO wasn’t attractive to corporate investors. High value investors didn’t want to donate to something, they wanted to invest. Thus OpenAI GP LLC was born. After this fiasco it’s entirely possible the whole NPO board structure will be relegated to the wheelie bin.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Re: Industry Input

Thanks Jake!

Re: Industry Input

They moved away from that quite a few years ago. They hit it wall with fundraising as a nonprofit. OpenAI Nonprofit has oversight of OpenAI GP LLC. OpenAI GP LLC, which Altman was CEO of, is very much a typical company.

Industry Input

I haven’t been around much lately, but thought I would chime in. I’ve been in tech VC for a long time, and this is the most disastrous thing I’ve ever seen. For a lot of reasons.

This fad of non profit boards that make everybody feel good is an abomination. This whale song love-in nonsense has got to stop. Who the hell wants an unbiased Board of Directors? Who wants an ethical Board of Directors when the ethics haven’t been identified? The Board has to address the issues a CEO brings into focus. You don’t sack the CEO because you don’t like the issues. That’s peril sensitive sunglasses mentality of the worst kind. They still have to deal with the issues, but now they’ve got no one to do it.

That’s because the competition just picked up the leader. OpenAI jettisoned the entire generation of AI directly into the gaping maw of Microsoft. I’m a big fan of Microsoft, but I’m also a realist. Giving Microsoft the AI industry won’t be good for anyone. We’re looking at decades of antitrust litigation and more rubbish “accept all cookies” buttons and weird pre installed software and stupid partnerships. Now personalized to make you hate yourself even more.

But most importantly, and my main point, is the ridiculous danger OpenAI now poses. They’ve backed themselves into a corner. Ilya Sutskever is deep in his cups with Judas Syndrome, the executives are utterly rudderless, the Board is sitting in a circle with a tub of soy butter waiting on someone to initiate the next Teams circle jerk, and 700 of their 770 employees have signed onto an open letter of no confidence in the remaining leadership. They’re desperate.

Every imaginable ethical line will be entirely erased by week’s end. Board members are going to be replaced with “results oriented” psychopaths whose only mission is to squeeze as much as possible out of the company. OpenAI had a sell target of $86 billion. Everybody who has money in the company is going to want that $86 billion goal to be met and they’ll do whatever is necessary to try and achieve it.

This is bigger than OpenAI. It’s bigger than VCs getting their money. The AI sector demands stable, forward thinking companies who are capable of dealing with globally redefining technology. Not companies that run away from their responsibilities. Not companies that are desperate to hit spectacular valuations before the last lifeboat launches. It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of potential in AI, but it’s also undeniably dangerous and that has to be dealt with head on. Boards need to get back to business. This pretend executive shit has got to go.

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

Re: "a global Jewish cabal"

You’re more right than you may know. The Great Replacement, Great Reset, Great Tartaria, and mudfloods are all rooted in 19th century Nordicism (the forerunner to Aryanism). A lot of it is 100% plagiarized from the literature that would inspire colossal dickheads like American journalist and conservative thought leader Lothrop Stoddard to write bestselling ideological hate treatises like “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” and “Racial Realities in Europe”. His most famous contribution to history was his coining of the term Undermen, which would be translated as Untermensch in German.

The further you dig into any of those popular topics, the worse it gets. It’s just straight up NSDAP mythology with the names changed so the audience doesn’t realize what they’ve gotten into until they’re too deep to care. The worst part is that updating the facade of Nazism is enough to let it spread on social media without so much as a second glance.

Re: Marketing = prefessional bullsheit

Anne Frankly, I do not find it funny.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

NYT Bestselling Book Title

“Blue Bird In the Emerald Mine: It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation."

The whole quote is going to be the subtitle. That statement is, without a doubt, the most out of touch thing I’ve ever heard a tech leader say.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Re: What's the point?

Exploitation is a function of perceived benefit.

If the video was of a spider manipulating an organic cornea or performing open heart surgery on a premature infant it would be hailed as a civilization changing, if weird, development.

Everybody would be pontificating on the potential of lady bugs for melanoma treatment and stag beetles for tubal ligation. But it’s yanking a thru-hole component from a breadboard and people can’t see beyond that.

Zuck says Facebook made an 'operational mistake' in not taking down US militia page mid-protests. TBH the whole social network is a mistake

Facebook Infowars Stormfront White House

Facebook is an echo chamber for this kind of thing, but they’re not the only player. Sites like infowars and other extremist breeding grounds engage with much more action oriented groups.

The original “call to arms” is still posted on the Alex Jones hate porn site and the comments are telling. Some saying that if the police attempt to impede the militants then they will have sided with the “terrorists” and must be treated appropriately (presumably shot by armed children).

Facebook does have a role to play, but as long as there’s a rabid racist in the White House actively demonizing protestors, while simultaneously approving of white nationalist retaliation, it’s (unfortunately) unfair to hang everything on Facebook.

TikTok CEO quits after less than three months in the job

Pointless

There was no reason for him to stay. He knew China was going to block the sale, as they have now done.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Elon Musk Is An Ass

Tesla isn’t an “Other” automaker. They’re a fringe boutique automaker. They don’t have the history, weight or funds to act like a giant faceless corporation.

Elon Musk Is An Ass

I bought two Tesla’s in the last year. I won’t buy another after all this garbage. Elon Musk is a selfish child and deserves to be smacked with a glove.

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Shut out foreigners and throw money at everything else. That’s the only solution President Dickbag has.

Re: Another brick in the wall

Thank you!

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Re: Seems insane

Nah. Shareholders are awful creatures and they are sucking the planet dry of ethics, morals and even basic human respect.

Coronavirus conference cancellations continue: Google and Microsoft axe WSL and Cloud Next

Re: In the future...

There’s a lot of business that gets done at conventions that would never happen elsewhere. Instead of too many conventions happening I’d say there were too many people going to conventions without a justification.

After blowing $100m to snoop on Americans' phone call logs for four years, what did the NSA get? Just one lead

Re: No surprise

Or they would say that because it what people expect them to say. At the end of the day you can’t trust anything any of them say. It’s best just to take their money away and give someone else the chance to waste it.