I work with IT at a STEM company, but the typical education is chemistry. People are grounded in measurements and real world practicality, but sci fi is also rather popular.

Some people got hype last year, but most people was more in "new stuff, will this mess with my work flow?" mode. After getting and evaluating tools, some small uses were identified, mostly first draft of meeting minutes. Trying for themselves seems to have quelled the hype. Now there is mostly concern for how AI processes in surrounding companies will affect our products and sales.

So from that small measurement it feels like the hype is breaking. We have a sane and reality based management though, and that helps.

And he is brave enough to say that:

• There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.

• Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.

• Trans people are not people.

Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.

Yeah, the exclusion of the dismal science got a chuckle out of me.

Oh, that explains it. They put "Kill kids in Gaza" as "A" and "Win election" as "B".

I think it is a reference to Funko calling the Itch guy's mom. Which they apparently did.

Here it sounds like he is criticising the parliamentary system were the legislative elects the executive instead of direct election of the executive. Of course both in parliamentary and presidential (and combined) systems a number of voting systems are used. The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.

So to be very charitable, he means a parliamentary system where it's hard to depose the executive. I don't think any parliamentary system uses 60 % (presumably of votes or seats in parliament) to depose a cabinet leader, mostly because once you have 50% aligned the cabinet leader you presumably have an opposition leader with a potential majority. So 60% is stupid.

If you want a combined system where parliament appoints but can't depose, Suriname is the place to be. Though of course they appoint their president for a term, not indefinitely. Because that's stupid.

To sum up: stupid ideas, expressed unclearly. Maybe he should have gone to high school.

If you mean swapped for a worker in a low wage country cosplaying as AI for minimum wage for a billion dollar company, then you have a point. Though using Bostrom's positive reinforcement bullshit is the opposite of treating someone fairly.

But I see elsewhere that you didn't mean that.

LLMs just train on which words follow which, right?

So if the version of the text changes every other word, it should mess with them. And if you change every other word to "communism" it should learn that the word "communism" follows logically after most words.

Just spitballing here, but I would find making the robots they intend to replace workers with into communist agitators rather funny.

The number of rocks in my garden is information. Yet, despite counting them all, I have not found AGI. So I must need more information than that.

Clearly, counting all the rocks in Wales should do it. So much counting.

Larger expenses in a month than earnings in a year. AI going great. Capitalism going great.

They are trying to solve the problem of gigantic markups - because of legal monopolies through patents - on advanced chemical products where dosage and quality control is literally life or death. Their solution is to do it yourself in a garage.

Couldn't they at least tried parallel imports from quality controlled production in countries with less gigantic markups?

Or, if they could have stopped playing Robin Hood for a second and looked at the systemic problems instead, there was a proposal at WHO some ten years ago to reform pharmaceutical research and development with direct funding and then releasing the results, basically creating a direct to generica pipeline. The US shot it down, of course, which means public relations campaigns in the US would be great. But no, DIY in the garage.

(If anyone is interested in details the proposal was called "delinkage".)

In response to the last sentence, you have a HG Wells story with from before world war one with pilots tossing nukes from the biplanes. (The nukes has smaller explosions but keep on burning for decades.) There's also Karel Capek's the God Machine from the 1920s where an inventor creates a machine that transforms matter into energy, but I'm the process creating a by product of God (turns out God is in all matter, but not all energy), leading to all sorts of problems.

But neither Wells nor Capek took their own writing seriously enough to create a cult around it.