We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
Not a useful analogy because nihilism is a human pursuit, not an OS one. The aggregate history of humanity does have meaning; it embodies information, cultural transmission, a lineage of ideas, which are all artifacts of human interactions that often shape the trajectory of civilization and the choices we make as individuals.
At least Plato did the work in attempting to describe the qualities (of the soul) and structure necessary to erect a just society; the problem is that we have not cultivated the frame of mind to produce people with "philosopher king" traits. As we advance further in our technological development, we will need to think carefully about how we form societies that cultivate responsible stewards of technology. After all, not everyone is equal in their capacity to manage certain technologies responsibly. Plato made a serious attempt at addressing this problem. If we have failed in realizing his vision, it is because we forgot how to attend to our soul.
We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
They will have machines do that for them, curating collections of dissident files that are categorized by various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE); it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it, your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e., the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening. What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale.
I mean, they mostly are just picking folks up off the streets cause the folks are brown or have an accent.
I am not sure that even if they could minority report their way into killing off all the future Fred Hamptons, they have either the man power to do it or the mental ability to define an ontology for their little scrye to even tell them who they -should- target.
It is easy to confuse these folks with the mostly competent neoliberal technocrats they replaced, but that's the whole point of this thread, no? Patel and Bongino were more interested in how to win twitter points after Kirk was killed than, like, going and playing g-man, after all.
Also, one of the nice things about living in a panopticon is that it gives the folks running it the idea that they actually know what's going on. I'll take the long bet on the over-confidence and under-competence of these WWF wrestlers.
Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.
AI is unquestionably useful, but we don't have enough product categories.
We're in the "electric horse carriage" phase and the big research companies are pleading with businesses to adopt AI. The problem is you can't do that.
AI companies are asking you to AI, but they aren't telling you how or what it can do. That shouldn't be how things are sold. The use case should be overwhelmingly obvious.
It'll take a decade for AI native companies, workflows, UIs, and true synergies between UI and use case to spring up. And they won't be from generic research labs, but will instead marry the AI to the problem domain.
Open source AI that you can fine tune to the control surface is what will matter. Not one-size-fits-all APIs and chat interfaces.
ChatGPT and Sora are showing off what they think the future of image and video are. Meanwhile actual users like the insanely popular VFX YouTube channel are using crude tools like ComfyUI to adopt the models to their problems. And companies like Adobe are actual building the control plane. Their recent conference was on fire with UI+AI that makes sense for designers. Not some chat interface.
We're in the "AI" dialup era. The broadband/smartphone era is still ahead of us.
These companies and VCs thought they were going to mint new Googles and Amazons, but it's more than likely they were the WebVans whose carcasses pave the way.
Same for Apple would be my take right now. No point in spending billions trying to build and train an LLM. Better to buy AI services from e.g. OpenAI for a bit, then extract the valuable bits after the crash. The current crop of AI companies can waste money of figuring out what works and what doesn't.
They are the proponents of The Great Reset. Here’s an excerpt from a book I read:
‘As Hitler declared in 1934, “The German revolution will be concluded only when the entire German Volk has been totally created anew, reorganized and reconstructed” (cited in Koonz, 2003, p. 87). The “Great Reset,” announced by World Economic Forum (WEF) director Klaus Schwab, son of Nazi industrialist Eugen Schwab, attempts the same thing on a global scale, promising to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country [ . . . ] must participate, and every industry [ . . . ] must be transformed” (Schwab, 2020).’
The book is:
Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State
There’s a good book that discusses dark patterns in Gambling games, making it easier to appreciate how they extrapolate to other contexts as well. The title of the book is:
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Exogenous ketones (such as BHB salts) are known to help with glymphatic drainage in the brain during sleep. I've used them extensively and have noticed improved sleep with nearly a doubling of the time spent in REM stage.
Sure. When I have a night of poor sleep or anticipate one, I usually take 6 grams of BHB salts in the morning on an empty stomach. You can work your way up to a maximum of 12 grams, but I would advise caution since it can cause diarrhea. I would start by buying the cheapest product (nutricost) you can find online; if it costs more than $80 for ~300g, then you're probably getting ripped off. I noticed that I have very lucid dreams and experience strong hypnagogic jerks when I take this supplement.
Here is some literature that I've perused to support my experimentation with BHB salts:
