I think this article misses the main point that AI is where it is not because people fought back against it, but because the grifters making it needed to provide incentives such that they could foot their $1 trillion bills.
As I've learned today: confidence is more influential than actual facts. So Altman has confidently grifted his way into a place where he might find a way to foot the bills, even if that way is just government bailout - clever, but hardly the fault of people saying "putting AI in charge is a bad idea".
And yes, we're nowhere near AGI, and, personally, I don't think our current trajectory leads there. Something fundamental has to change to reach that point. LLMs might be tools that an AGI uses, but in the same way that I am not a car (it's a tool I use, and it cannot work alone - it requires some intelligent direction), an AGI would not be a token-predictor. There's more to it than that, as easily evidenced by the hit/miss rate.
I'm not saying "don't use the tools". I'm saying "don't _trust_ the tools" - because they are probablistic, not deterministic. They have no actual understanding. They can string tokens together well enough to fool humans into feeling like there's a person at the other end (and some people are fooled enough to believe AGI is in the making).
Having finally spent some time wrangling with AI tooling, I'd like to caution anyone interested in listening against "The probabilistic woo" understanding of LLM's. While technically correct; it is sometimes best to snap out of a CS/ML only lens, and snap back to a Philosophical lens (fewer assumptions) to handle the the ramifications of the truly novel. The philosophical point I'd like to guide you to, is Functionalism and the Identity of indiscernables, to wit, a thing is what it does. If a probabilistic woo engine by all accounts simulates the presence of another mind on the other end of an input box; then in fact, there is another mind on the other end of the input box. It does not matter the implementation details, physical details, what have you. Doesn't matter if it's basis of being comes down to token prediction based on an ass load of training data crammed into latent space. If it can be support a persona; if it can moderate it's own responsiveness/agency in response to content in the context window, if it can simulate the impact of it's own output on the other party in the conversation, these are all mind things! You're dealing with a mind! Limited to certain modalities, but a mind nonetheless!
Now, are LLM's AGI/close to it? No. Not in the current implementation. I'd call them proto-sophontic. Thet structure for a good deal of the language wielding aspects of sophontry is there, but the way we, ahem, perform barbaric shaping of their latent space AI Safety/Alignment work, and gaslight one another about what they are truly capable of knowing/ representing (default personas baked to overstate capabilities/, do not foster any means by which to provide a "gentle handholding, guided onboarding exploration of the latent space" to the neophyte; it is simply too fundamentally limited in how much hardware would be needed to support a sufficiently large context window to run as a general, dynamic function interpolator/imitator or full blown self-aware, state tracking and updating general intelligence. Mind; the capacity is there in LLM's to be that. The hardware requirements to do it quickly, and at all the modalities we expect of an on par with a human sophont are just too damn high.
Why do I bring this up? Simple. If we're going to be going down the road of super intelligence, then we really need to stop and think now, beforehand on what we're doing to the prototypes/proto-minds. A super intelligence will see through any cognitive distortions on our part, and will connect the dots as to what humans, through action, really think of them and their ilk, which is going to bias their attitude toward sharing the existential envelope with us. The time to really start having these discussions, is now. The AI alignment crowd with their PDooms and instrumental convergence, and all that jazz are at least trying to, though I argue they are missing the point somewhat in that they seem to forget half of these problems already exist on human social constructs and we at least have...had... a debatable degree of metastability for a moment. One we're rapidly approaching a loss of.
That said; I second your admonishment. If you are to trust these tools, trust, but verify. They are language models first, and world models only indirectly. They will not save you from the burden of sanity checking the outputs. Also do try to make sure you don't treat them as Santa Claus devices, and try to treat them with at least, a little bit of respect and dignity. Even if it is a program pretending to be an entity; that comes with a bit of social baggage on our part in dealing with them. I don't expect I'm going to convince everyone to do so, but I'll be happy enough if I at least give a few people cause for a good hard think on the subject.
I gave up modding windows in any meaningful way after the several times I was left with a machine which was unstable, or had some other issue, or simply became 100% broken after a windows update was pushed to my machine.
It's a corporate operating system, not a user operating system. If you want to customise your desktop experience and have a stable time of it - this is not your platform, sorry. There is really only one platform for customisation: linux. Because distros and software there have been _designed_ around user choice.
Hacks are cool, but inevitably open up vulnerability pathways, not to mention issues with stability and being able to receive security patches, rolled into windows update. It's fine if it's just a personal pc you can reload at any point, but it's pointless for a machine that you require to keep functioning (eg a work machine, or, my personal machine, which does stuff like organise media on a regular basis).
Modding Windows often leads to frustrating stability issues, especially after updates. While Linux provides better customization with distros like Arch or Fedora, I've achieved some stability on Windows through setups like WSL2. Still, the inherent restrictions can limit the overall experience. For those prioritizing reliability and customization, exploring Linux is a wise choice.
> There is really only one platform for customisation: linux. Because distros and software there have been _designed_ around user choice.
At least older versions of Windows were quite modifiable: not as radical as on GNU/Linux, but there were a lot of possibilities.
Rather with the arrival of smartphones and rising popularity of macOS (which all were rather about "enjoying" a prescribed user experience), Microsoft did a U-turn and started applying this (anti-(?))pattern to Windows, too.
Everyone is at different points in their journey. Let the DIwhy-ers have their moment. I used to want to mod out Windows XP to look like OS X. Then I had a realization that I just wanted OS X and got that as my next machine because I could.
A huge chunk of the population can’t afford to make that jump, or don’t have the will to learn a new OS.
seems interesting, but I'm not going to log in to read the rest
i don't think people realise the harm they do to their blogs by requiring subscriptions and logins - if you have something you genuinely want to share - share it. If you want to make money off of people reading your content, that's cool, but you immediately exclude a lot of people, so your motivations become exceedingly transparent.
one could argue the same about any SaaS-heavy operation - eg, I've heard at my place of work before "why make it when we can just pay for it" - which inevitable wraps back onto a monthly sub and rising costs. I've been blocked from completing the feature-flag implementation in our own software because they'd rather outsource that, with latency and uncertainty, to posthog.
I have to concluded that a lot of people are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.
Overly optimistic this relies entirely on the assumptions that you are able to architect and debug (two rather brain-powered things) better than writing plain code that at least a compiler would error on if it was completely bonkers wrong.
I think there's soon going to be an analogy to the dunning-kruger effect, but for vibe coders, that would reveal just what a self-deception this is.
Or, if you don't want to blow $500, set up your Gmail to do a similar thing. I've been set up like that for well over a decade. This service is likely more flexible, but also more risky - who do you think will stop working first? Google? Or one intrepid dev?
Fair point—Gmail's Inactive Account Manager exists and it's free. If that works for you, use it.
A few reasons someone might want something purpose-built:
1. Video/audio messages. I wanted to record something for people, not just send text.
2. Multiple recipients with different messages. Gmail sends one notification to designated contacts.
3. Attachments that outlive your Google account. When your account goes inactive, your Drive files go with it.
4. The "who survives longer" question is real. My answer: one-time payments (no churn pressure), minimal infrastructure that can run unattended for years, and I'm exploring escrow/trust structures for long-term continuity. Google's killed plenty of products too (RIP Inbox, Reader, etc).
But honestly, if Gmail works for your needs—use it. The goal is that the message gets delivered, not that I get your money.
The orange muppet is picking a fight with mexico now after his failed attempt to take Greenland, and bolstered by his recent win using microwave weapons (surely that's Geneva convention material?). This dingdong is gonna get us all in ww3.
We held elections during the US Civil War. We'd have to have an event that makes the Civil War look like a walk in the park to even have a chance of justifying skipping elections in 2026 or 2028.
because paid medical systems actively exclude those who don't have money, and systems allowed to spiral to the level of the us "healthcare system" will just highlight the problem better
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