sc_griffith @ sc_griffith @awful.systems Posts 15Comments 387Joined 2 yr. ago
this is so embarrassing. "you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?"
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear "pro-Hamas"
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
buddy,
the answer is yes
ok I looked up the transcript and these were the most spicy bits, which in my memory had come to dominate the whole episode
EDIT: her shtick does not seem to have been confined to this interview
I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.
he certainly doesn't himself have such a mindset, and I am not convinced that he knows why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, nor am I convinced that it is necessarily a big deal. for example with five seconds of searching
All earth dams leak to some extent and this is known as seepage. This is the result of water moving slowly through the embankment and/or percolating slowly through the dam's foundation. This is normal and usually not a problem with most earthen dams if measures are taken to control movement of water through and under the dam.
https://damsafety.org/dam-owners/earth-dam-failures
one would suspect a concrete dam leaking is pretty bad. but I don't actually know without checking. there's relevant domain knowledge I don't have, and no amount of "engineering mindset" will substitute for me engaging with actual experts with actual knowledge
I listened to ezra klein's podcast sometimes before he moved to the NYT, thought it was occasionally interesting. . every time I've listened to an episode since he moved it's been some of the most credulous shit I've ever heard
like, there was one episode where he interviewed a woman whose shtick was spending the whole time talking in what I can loosely call subtext about how she fucked an octopus. she'd go on about how they were 'tasting each other' and their 'fluids were mingling' and such and he'd just be like wow what a fascinating encounter with an alien intelligence. this went on for an hour and at no point did he seem to have a clue what was going on
a really big boat is the ultimate compound. escape even the surly bonds of earth!
I think it's more like $188,000 in stock, $31,000 in cash, annual pay of $45,000, and you currently have a $60,000 loan. the new loan would be an additional $16,000
According to The Information, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is planning to borrow $16 billion to invest in AI, and may borrow another $8 billion next year. The following points are drawn from The Information’s reporting, and I give serious props to Juro Osawa and Cory Weinberg for their work.
SoftBank currently only has $31 billion in cash on its balance sheet as of December. Its net debt — which, despite what you think, doesn’t measure total debt but rather represents its cash minus any debt liabilities — stands at $29 billion.. They plan to use the loan in question to finance part of their investment in OpenAI and their acquisition of chip design firm Ampere.
According to SoftBank’s reported assets, their holdings are worth about $219 billion (33.66 trillion yen), including stock in companies like Alibaba and ARM.
am I reading this correctly: softbank has $50 billion in debt, equal to about 25% of their total assets? is that... normal? these are genuine questions, not sure whether I'm misunderstanding something/whether this is actually usual
I'm kind of puzzled that he would ditch the editorial staff. major publication opinion sections are pretty uniformly propaganda by and for comfy elites; I'd think he'd like that
also not clear on the connection between the AI story and the clearing out of the opinion section
it has to be. you can't do better than this. who is going to be like "they told me my child would be gifted but the kid is actually mid at best"
LLMs, text to photo, and text to video models are getting exponentially better year over year.
it is 2025 how are you still saying this shit
somehow it makes it worse to see people getting radicalized about this. makes the fact that we're in the nightmare scenario acutely real
gamergaters and their descendants are novel (to me). for them the games themselves are just vehicles for what they really care about, which is despising game developers and journalists. they're far right, but much more specifically than that they're an anti labor movement targeting the labor that makes and writes about one type of product. their primary goal is to make that labor feel frightened, unstable, etc
if you've ever seen chuds cheering mass firings (say by elon at twitter or the white house), gamergaters have the same spirit, except elevated to the top priority
EDIT: which now that I think about it makes it pretty perverse to invoke Luigi - the whole thing that makes the UHC assassination persistently popular is that the target was a person of enormous power and not labor
at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars is... much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive
this was so shocking that at first I thought it must be satire https://youtu.be/VwlBwyJVEfw
:)
EDIT: ok it was a joke
if it's any reassurance, i've understood all your points perfectly! you're basically making an argument for all UI to be more apple-like
I've been listening to faster and worse (see https://awful.systems/comment/6216748 ) and I like it so I wanted to give it ups.
(I think this and the memory palace are the only micro podcasts I've listened to. idk why it isn't a more common format)
more seriously I can't really criticize automation in complete generality. it's way too broad a concept. I like having abundant food and talking to gay people on my phone. but we all know the kind of automation merchant is referencing does very little besides concentrate power with the ultra wealthy