ineedasername

While in theory building rapport and loyalty sounds nice, what you actually end up doing is spending a lot of time on the people who ask the most of you, but their subscription dollars aren’t worth more, and they’re rarely satisfied. You end up feeling taken advantage of.

This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.

This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.

In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.

It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.

There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.

37 data centers and there are plans to build 17 more, including plans to convert hundreds of acres of _Civil War battlefields_ into data centers.

Those poor battlefields. How rarely it is that anyone thinks of their needs.

Is it that all or nothing? Are you sure you're not overthinking it into two extreme choices of total life disruption and just putting it all online or something?

How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.

I used the phrasing the article author was objecting to for cars. It anthropomorphized to the same extent as what the author is complaining about. So, I suppose you could collapse the thing either way- bullets are often anthropomorphized just as much as cars, or your direction which I'd agree with- there isn't much anthropomorphizing to begin with in either of them.

If everyone continues to agree it's worth what it says then not very much. Of course the whole thing can collapse for a number of reasons, not much different from other mediums of exchange that don't have an intrinsic utility, the utility is a sufficient number of people willing to cooperate. Which is pretty much everything except bartering goods.

The premise is false. Headlines or descriptions of events like *"Three innocent bystanders were hit when a spray of bullets burst through the door, killing 1 and injuring the other 2".

So... Bullet anthropomorphizing is also a thing.

fake stops being an applicable term as soon as people start agreeing to accept it, which the article says happened. Then it's as legitimate as anything like Bitcoin.

AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.

In this respect it depends on how AI is used. In this case, I didn't envision it doing this in the "deep research" sense or otherwise making its own conclusions from data, I meant more in the vein of a well scaffolded agent loop iterating through, for example, census tract-level data, cross referencing that with other data sources to find the relevant, granular-but-requires-intelligent-judgment details to piece together countless small datasets to assemble a large pictured. Grunt work that is repetitive but just variable enough you can't do something like download/scrape and assemble at scale because each block or tract or zip code needs one small bit of human judgement.

None of that is my work though, just where I think things might usefully go. For my part I'm trying to jump industries into AI more directly, it aligns well with my background, but that fact combined with zero industry connections (save Claude Code's recommendation & endorsement, that I had to tell it not to email on my behalf to Anthropic) hasn't broken down that wall yet, and in the meantime I try to build useful things that might help in that direction. So I'm aware of AI's blind spots on some things, and its significant capabilities still need significant shepherding.

Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code.

My hope is that agentic analysis that does this tedious methodical chipping away, comparative cross referencing of seemingly disparate datasets, will help shift society the tiniest bit away from law & policy making via hot takes that make even the well intentioned fall on their face with poor reasoning and the more cynical wield ambiguity a cudgel of control by any emotion they can incite, usually not the good ones.

Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s.... The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.

This is the step that otherwise smart people fail at.

"We were afraid of danger X so we did Y to prevent it and turns out it was a waste because not only did X not get worse, it got better! To heck with Y!"

And don't consider, maybe, things got better for that reason?

This is "only sick people take medicine" logic.

If you're tempted down this line of thinking you need to consider: If nothing had changed or they got worse, would that have been the expected results? What then would be the expected outcome?

Comparative analysis at a minimum, not just to other societies with different norms but attempting at least to find pockets that didn't change as much or as quickly, what happened there and in other sub populations where factors varied.

Otherwise you're just someone complaining how things used to be different, better in any way that fits a narrative that makes you feel comfortable or righteous or whatever.

There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.

A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.

Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.

I'm not sure of your reasoning on "anything can be...".

Yes, I suppose, but without elaborating further that doesn't explain why you're taking it to be circular, because I could have given some other description of what trends & goes viral on TikTok and you still could have said "Anything can be can be turned into that."

If we take it in the more formal logic direction you're going though it's all very simple and straightforward, here's the p & q -> r of things:

Algorithms of this sort work a particular way in directing next-video selection towards options with some characteristics similar to what the user has engaged with before. I'll stipulate there are lots of ways that can be done, time horizons and methods of weighting different factors but that's the broad strokes. Take this as premise P.

There are certain things that trend more frequently than others and they share some common traits, it really doesn't even matter what those specific things are, we can take this as an axiom without it being controversial.

Therefore, if anti-democrat content is disproportionate to pro democrat or anti or pro GOP, it isn't automatically thumb-on-scale, it can simply be that anti-democratic content has more similarities to what typically trends than those others.

This isn't circular. It's trending content is similar, anti-democratic content trends more often, therefore anti-democratic content can simply have been more similar to other trending things.

You're correct of course about Occam, but then your bring up that aspect of things was merely expanding on what I explicitly stated in my original comment when I said it didn't mean TikTok didn't tip the scales, only that such a thing isn't the only possibility. In short, it was clearly not stated as an "IIF/if-and-only-if" argument.

Going on to your For "arguably the opposite" final statement:

I think that too needs more little explanation. As-is, it sounds as though you're saying essentially "the fact that simpler explanations can be wrong is potential evidence for deliberate interference". That's a line of thinking when, offered without expansion, steps somewhere just adjacent of conspiracy thinking of the "the evidence is in the lack of evidence", and I doubt that's your intent, but I'm not sure either where that's heading otherwise.

Algorithms like these typically have some foundation in the same type of vector embedding used elsewhere in AI, eg semantic and other qualities that map to overlapping or nearby latent space will drive suggested content. So, what typically trends on TikTok, goes viral, etc? Entertainment, emotional hooks.

In short, anti democratic content was, on average, more entertaining or emotion provoking.

That doesn't have to hold a deeper meaning on the value of any particular political viewpoint, or require tiktok's thumb on the scales of the algorithm to explain things. I'm not even saying TikTok didn't/doesn't do such things, but that type of interference isn't required to explain this trend.

I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?

In this person's communication culture, they are saying

Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.

With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.

Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

This is unfair to those of us who’ve been writing walls of text to simple questions all our lives. I demand AI be the ones who start writing shorter things. Then I can go back to people ignoring my accidental wall building— accident because lots of times you’re a page in still going on things you see as relevant and— well, you see how things can get away from a person. But I want people to ignore me for what I write, not for thinking i don’t have anything worth ignoring in the first place.

Good for him, his public work these last ~1-2 years has been influential for me, as I'm sure it has for others.

I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!

I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.

So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.

Some small public artifacts finally going up: https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma

Eh. Worth a shot!

Typo when it was created.

I forget what Stross has to say about it

I've seen him comment on it a few times over the years, though I wouldn't take my vague memories on them as canonical: He's mainly pissed off that many avid fans of some of his books and Accelerando in particular show a few patterns of thinking: 1) They miss his intent to show future for humanity that was much more of a "Warning! Do Not Enter!" than as any sort of advocacy/enthusiasm for it 2) Really pissed off that a subset of the that are ultra ultra wealthy either miss the signpost or dont care and seem to take it & other hard-takeoff singularity stories as potential maps & guidebooks on the path 3) He's annoyed (maybe not the right word) that a significant portion of people that cheer on the idea of a singularity do so in part for the hope of something like immortality, biological or uploads, specifically in a way that reinvents quite a bit of the trappings and mythos and other cultural baggage embodied in a lot of western Christianity, most notably a lot of the TESCREAL hodge podge of groups.

Again, all of this is my own dodgy recollections and paraphrases.

Language is leaky, it gets just about everywhere. Some LLM goes and spills a bunch of emdashes and subordinate clauses all over a billion folks’ browsers and a bunch of them— especially those that may come into contact with a lot of language for a living— writers, for example— and they soak up a bit of it themselves and smear it all around.

Put another way, search out the great vowel shift. That happened over more time but then again the contact with different speakers wasn’t as constant as every day on the internet. It’s just what happens, how things spread. No different and maybe to a further degree than typical memes.

rewards health outcomes rather than required activities… earn the full amount only when patients meet measurable health goals, like lower blood pressure or reduced pain

They’ll just start cherry picking their patients, finding ways to squeeze out the people just that little bit lower on the prognosis curve. Or at least that will be the risk in a setup like that.

"The legitimate maintainer has won €2.3 million in the EuroMillions and is researching goat farming in Portugal..."

"Root Cause: A dog named Kubernets ate a Yubikey

Ah, yes, irresponsible to get taken in by one of the well-known classic exploits. The 'ol "distract someone with a lottery windfall & make a dongle irresistibly tasty to another person's pet". When will people learn.

The author lightly touches on other ways humans have viewed cognition, “computationalism” as one, but somewhat brushes these aside as though LLMs are somehow a unique expression of this tendency. That seems unlikely to me but we’re pretty early days into the tech to start assuming and concluding every initial hot take on “AI is Doing $Thing”.

Especially when this particular thing is just one in a very long line of metaphors humans make to our own minds’ operations every time a new major technology comes to play a pervasive role in society. Computers, steam engines, even aqueducts were not immune to comparisons of thought flowing like water, funneled by deliberate intent, etc. And for some, a certain amount of hand wringing worry or even moral panic about “what it’s doing to us”, eg taking away critical thinking because “OMG calculators!”

What's the trap? You're either deciding that the concept "god-of" is baked into the concept of being the inventor of something, or you decide that it isn't baked-in. Doing this is just book keeping in the ledgers of the lexicon, but doesn't get you anywhere new, though it does then impose the need for some new words so that you can meaningfully and coherently have conversations about the concept of something that has has the metaphysical properties commonly ascribed to things you'd previously been referring to with the 'god' entry from the lexicon, but is now orphaned from the lexigraph layer.

It’s not gambling, these are legitimate financial instruments designed to allow proper risk management through appropriately market-set pricing on the value of that risk mitigation, and it’s doing this in a way that democratizes risk management in a way previously inaccessible to the public.

j/k totally gambling

employees are not enthusiastic about becoming ups

Employee enthusiasm isn’t really much of a factor. For better or worse, in the event of significant change of the brick & mortar day to day operations then employee continuity & institutional knowledge is even less of an actual strategic asset than the minimal treatment it already gets in consideration.

Depends on how market cap is defined for the purpose of the contract. Typical definition is just against floating shares in the market * share price. Debt doesn’t factor in at all except in so far as it will influence investor confidence -> share price.

That said: conceptually it’s not an awful fit for GameStop. In so far as video games discs and cartridges were the main disposable belonging i had as a kid and the main target for new purchases, Funcoland was (later to become GameStop), if you squint your eyes, a brick & mortar eBay scoped to only video games. If you’d been an SV startup at the time pitching the eBay concept you could have said “it’s like funcoland, but online and for anything and also lets people sell peer to peer “

Location: NJ / NYC (hybrid or remote preferred)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

What I’ve been working on lately:

LLM introspection tooling and observability, mainly around token-level behavior during inference; Also experimented with inference-time interventions (no retraining) e.g. improved DeBERTa on HANS via targeted layer/head adjustments.

I just put up a small demo of part of the tooling (HF Space):

https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma

It exposes:

-per-head projections into token space (logit lens-style)

-token rank changes across layers for target-tokens ("rank displacement")

-top-k next-token branches with internal state views

-mute a head at a given L x H coordinate

-inject tokens or rewind context

There's a minimal example in the UI showing how token candidates stabilize (or don’t) across layers

Background: ~15 years in data science/ analytics (higher ed), mostly translating technical work into decisions & policy for leadership. More recently focused on LLM internals + tooling (Python/Rust, local model stacks, etc.) and agentic analytical tools for operational use. Background in philosophy / applied linguistics & NLP; previously designed and taught a course on propaganda (how language shapes reactions to media etc.).

Looking for: roles around LLM tooling, evals, interpretability, or applied AI where understanding model behavior is useful.

Tech: Python, Rust, SQL, embeddings, local LLM infra

Contact: jim.jdiv@gmail.com