Have to hand it to her for having consistently bad takes. Makes it really easy to hate her

100% agree that education focuses way too much on test scores. I went through alot of college realizing that “I dont have to actually learn this stuff, I just have to know what questions will be asked on the test and have good answers for those”. When you approach it that way as a student, you dont actually go through the process of really learning the material and cultivating your mind. After spending alot of time out of college and reading alot more, I realize that true education is having the space to acquire knowledge and wrestle around with it until you really understand it, and socializing with others about the material. You kind of do this when studying for tests, which is why I guess tests have been around for so long. In my time though there was the internet, which was just kind of like an extended library that was easier to search, and I realize that it saved me the hassle of needing to socialize with people about the material, which I think is pretty important when learning. LLM’s are probably going to result in worse outcomes, though maybe test scores will remain the same.

I had a friend in college who I thought was very intelligent, because he would basically take every assignment or exam and distill it down to what needed to be done to fit in with the grading system. I realize now just how harmful that approach is to truly educating yourself, yet it seemed right at the time because that is how the education system is designed (and it relates to capitalism because people want to use education to get a job and to get a good job you need good grades etc.)

It’s also pretty telling whenever I ask someone if they ever studied for a test and forgot all the material on the subject right after. That is contradictory to the whole purpose of education.

Yea the vision is very unclear to me, at least what they’ve announced publicly. I’ve seen people say the goal is achieving AGI but I’m not sure what that even means.

From internal docs leak it seems that the company is totally capitalist brained and it doesn’t have a clear definition of AGI either.

According to leaked documents obtained by The Information, the two companies came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.

https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-clear-definition-of-agi-2000543339

Again this is also unclear. How is it going to generate profits?

If it’s supposed to replace Google search, one avenue I can see is trying to incorporate ads into the LLM answers, which just degrades their product, but I suppose if they hit a mass market then they can create a sort of walled Garden that keeps people on it.

Another way is that it will totally replace workers. I don’t think this is possible and is AI idealism.

The other way is you make this a product that increases productivity. In that case you can replace workers because it makes the average worker more productive and then a company can do more with less.

But I’m just speculating, I think any of these can be totally wrong.

I wish that OpenAI and their ilk would die already so I could begin to make sense of the world

Ignoring the incoming climate catastrophe, I think the only way for AI to die is for something else new and shiny to come in that VC’s then stop throwing their money into AI buzzword bullshit startup and into that new industry. I think all these VC’s think the same way and want the next “internet”. It’s also why I think so much money was thrown into crypto as even though it was bs, it had a next big thing kinda vibe.

I’m hoping it doesn’t even get to that point and we can have some kinda revolution in the west because, fuck, we’re all dying so that these assholes can maintain their profits.

Is that because they associate Assad with Putin?

I’m also wondering what evidence there is for this rebellion force being “pro-Assad” besides being against the current government.

I agree with you, but I also believe people can change. A change in conscious towards unionizing won’t happen overnight. It happens as the workplace and job market conditions change, and that is what we are seeing right now in Silicon Valley. Tech workers have been used to rising salaries and benefits for so long, and we know that can’t last forever. I think now we are going to see the decline. As the article mentions, AI is the hope for the owner class to de-skill tech workers and thus make them a more exploitable worker that won’t be given a salary that is enough to live a materially comfortable life.

Perhaps one unionization can inspire another?

He definitely feels more like what people were saying Ron Desantis would be like. I think his main weakness (politically speaking) is he’s not very charismatic, but it didnt matter since he ran on the Trump ticket which doesnt require him to be charismatic.

Not surprising, Vance was made Trump’s VP pick specifically to represent silicon valley interests.

Vance mocked the notion that such campaigns could derail elections. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

Vance is more dangerous than Trump. He has clear goals and knows what language to use to hide them.

EU needs to grow a backbone and stop thinking they can go back to the good ol’ days of being America’s lapdog against Russia

Yea that’s what I’m thinking. We shouldn’t forget that he hasn’t done anything to close military bases overseas (yet?), so he’s not completely pulling out of these vassals.

But keeping these countries inline with threats only and no economic incentives will probably make them reconsider their relationship to the US especially if they can’t placate their population while the US puts pressure on them with tariffs, annexation etc.

Idk I feel Trump doesn’t understand that America already pretty much owns Canada. Given all the things he says, I don’t think he understands how American imperialism works in general. Otherwise I can’t comprehend why cutting USAID, defunding CIA, tariffing Taiwan etc. helps his class other than some short term gains that will be long term disasters (for the US)

Luddism part 2.

I think the question is if AI, as a tool, can make such a quantitative change in productivity that there is a qualitative change in the relations of production. Otherwise it’s just going to be the same as all other increases in productivity this century which sharpen the contradictions of capitalism.

I mean from my experience with chatgpt, it has def been trained on Marxist theory texts. And it gets some of it right and some of it wrong in the same way it gets anything right or wrong.

LLM’s are black boxes. You can’t modify their algorithm and influence them at the layer of abstraction to be pro or anti anything (at least from my understanding). The only way you could do that is by cherry picking its training data, and even then it’s still a black box so it could potentially have a bias towards the opposite of what you intend.

I’ve started contemplating if a butlerian jihad is more likely than a proletarian revolution at this point with how little class conscious there is in America.

It is interesting to see that even tech-bros can see some of the contradictions in AI. I do feel it’s easier to organize them against AI rather than against billionaires who own it (since in the tech bro mind they are already on the cusp of being one of the billionaires).

Also if I could indulge in some sci-fi speculation for a bit: what if the “AI takeover” follows one of the stories in I, Robot (the book) where there’s a official who is an AI but it’s not clear to the public that he is, creating this environment of ambiguity. Then we have more “AI’s” masquerading as real people (take the recent event with the AI Instagram profiles) until everyone we are surrounded by is an AI before we even know it.

It would be cool to see more tech worker solidarity, but I feel tech workers in particular have the most animosity towards each other, at least in big tech. Of course this is the result of how these companies are structured, but it’s hard to get that across to them.