HN user
also on substack as franz frenesi
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard.
“Excess” implies irrationality, but I wonder how could something irrational be a threat to ‘American dominance in computers’?
why use many word when few word do trick?
Recent publications have not yet passed the test of time.
Imagine being sanctioned for trying to read books.
This assumes that culture and academia work hand in hand, which is just in line with many right-wing conspiracies and plain wrong.
This is interesting. They really can’t keep you locked forever.
My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.
If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I don’t even think there ever were.
The last time the world had an intelligentsia of this magnitude, the Tsarist State fell.
It sounds like people are being paid to push Erlang for agentic stuff. Cool story, but if I end up feeling like I need to “return to the 20th century” for abstractions, I’ll just use Lisp.
So much money that only running your mega ad operation would allow you to cover the costs.
This is the first thing that comes to mind. However I wonder if not only the “general” vocabulary can be anonymized but also the underlying concepts and references, because they point to a particular place too.
The worst: ads.
This is a plain admission that the administration has lost on the merits of their arguments.
Damn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture.
In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.
This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
In my personal experience, an ironic statement that hits too close to home will - regardless of the irony - get downvoted. Partly because irony serves to be lost and it is lost too much. Partly because it still uncovers something uncomfortable. A lot of people really do want fascism. So you loose on both sides. Brutal.
I just wanted to add: there’s no single piece of machinery that can void the human experience. A large collection of machinery can only delay the inevitable. Please have fun with your project.
There’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.
And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
Very nice piece of text. For me it’s the fact that the book is always there and no amount of pages can be too much for me to gather something from rereading a part of the book that leads to where I left off. In a way I think we’re also past the point of bookmarking anything in our lives. Culture after all is just the reinforcement of the same idea.
It is impossible to enforce a world free of heuristics, but this is certainly very cool.
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the circular QR code.
It looks to me as a consumer that the worst option for my consumption is asserted as the inevitable decision of purchase only by coercion.
I hate these free floating quotes and sayings, but maybe the “malice vs. incompetence attribution” idea applies here.
That’s a very sober take in my opinion. Intelligence isn’t about neutrally inferring from externally sourced symbols such as the ones who already come from Culture in general. It’s about confronting them with the remaining determinations of your existence and producing a superior consciousness. No novel machine can disrupt this process. If anything the sheer added volume of symbols that can be produced from automated semantic mingling (also referred as to as garbage) will accelerate the process of producing the consciousness that can abstract noise away. Of course this won’t materialize evenly across the board, but is surely circumscribed in the overall tendency of intellectualization of the subjects of culture.
When the moral panic of induced schizophrenia from the use of ChatGPT is presented what’s at stake isn’t the innocent concern over the overall mental health of individuals. It’s about how the fear of radicalization from previously unobtainable ideas being circulated within society. The partial validity of every idea vis-a-vis the radicalizing nature of the current stage of development of our society is explosively disruptive.
I’m not saying that there’s a clear outcome here. The other way around can also apply, but surely this contraption (LLMs in general) will not fade until the society itself is deeply transformed. If that’s good or bad depends on where you stand in the stratified society.
The revolution will be notably public, but not live-streamed. It will come as a swift and decisive reaction to a shock-and-awe deployment that will de-stabilize the state apparatus of a big nation outside of the “west”. The movement will be initially localized but it will spread until a perimeter of containment is setup around developed nations. Much more will come after.
Laws and morality have always been bendable. It’s just that doing the bending requires a certain competence that was somehow lost.
This has worked for me. Just try to enjoy a self bombardment of the foreign language and hope you will catch on eventually.
This is irony. The study is stupid, society has reached a stupid stage of development. Kiki and bouba explain nothing and serve nothing. Culture is in shambles.
Believe it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of civilization.
Maybe Electron isn’t that bad. Maybe there are some great Electron apps. But there’s a big chunk that went unsaid: Most Electron apps suck. Does correlation here imply causation? Maybe not, but holy fuck isn’t it frustrating to be a user of Electron apps.