Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
BlueMonday1984
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electronics — but that expires 9 July. If it isn’t extended, then US data centres are screwed — no new buildouts, and huge maintenance problems for existing data centres. [Verdict]
Trump had the opportunity to do the funniest thing by setting them for the 4th of July.
At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.
That's waiting until rampant deregulation puts everything in place for another 2008 style crisis
New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)
The piece falls back into the standard "AI Is Inevitable™" at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.
New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:
I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on "are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you're not lying about not being conscious?"
For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It's the monkey orgasm button, and they're just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.
Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.
Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life
I'm thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.