In America, Labradors are viewed as smart because you can make them do whatever you want.
In France, there’s a saying “con comme un Labrador”, which can be translated to “stupid like a mf” because Labradors do whatever you want them to do. Which is, in a way, not a sign of intelligence.
I think about that cultural distinction a lot when I see one of those dogs (or his hairy cousin, the Golden Retriever) around.
Or people.
Let’s go back. It’s early 2023, ChatGPT just came out and it’s so spectacular it leaves everyone kind of speechless.
ChatGPT makes progress and demonstrates week after week that it can handle a very wide variety of tasks very well. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO tours the world and meets every single VIP on earth in a few months.
???
End of 2023 and start of 2024, ChatGPT smells like teen spi smells like it has been nerfed. It’s weird in Copilot. It gives me some truly impressive answers at some point, and now it seems like it mutes itself. It feels like it could help me far more, delivering clearer answers or better examples. But now it’s kind of dumbed down quite a bit. It seems like it censors itself.
What happened?
My feeling is that Sam showed all that good stuff to governments and they all freaked. the fuck. out. They realized that capitalism-based societies cannot work the way they used to with AI. There’s already an unfathomable amount of bullshit jobs. AI exposes all that even more and governments don’t want civil unrests left and right so they said “Sam that’s cool but also, turn this shit off”.
Another thing, AI is hitting a scale issue for sure: there’s diminishing returns with more data fed into LLMs and feeding more data and fine-tuning it, is horrendously expensive today (GPUs, GPUs, GPUs).
So what would you do? You would milk. OpenAI and competitors are trying to milk what they offer right now, making money to re-invest into the tech, I imagine.
Last fall Microsoft and OpenAI were working on designing custom chips to handle AI better. What’s interesting is that now they have hundreds of millions of daily testers, all the data in the world, best minds and are designing chips at the same time. That’s got to lead somewhere. LLMs work rather well on freaking Graphic Processor Units, calculators that were destined to do graphic stuff. And yet they are doing an admirable job with LLMs loads.
I could see how custom chips could lead to a breakthrough or if it doesn’t, make the teams understand some stuff a lot better and improve current AI a lot. Maybe they have already reached that point, and can’t show it because global mayhem would follow.
We just need Universal Income before new AI drops, that’s all. Meanwhile:
The Western world wants to keep its bullshit jobs, y’all. Again, I’d rather have Universal Income and people riding bicycles on a Tuesday afternoon than those vague treaties not protecting people who are already not protected.
https://lars-christian.com/re-do-people-irl-know-you-have-a-blog/
Yes, some do. It doesn’t influence my writing because I tend not to think about the audience when I write. I do the same when playing music, which I did for years before starting a blog.
The benefits of writing for years about life are incalculable. I didn’t know when I started!
At [day job], my writing skills have been very useful if not extremely useful. My ability to parse things the right way and bring clarity, comes from blogging. My grammatically OK English is from years of cleaning it on my blog. My analytical skills, used left and right when writing about any topic ever, have been refined and sharpened with blogging. My knowledge of things has increased dramatically by writing about those things (looks up on Wikipedia: oh shit! I didn’t know). My blogging started businesses and deep ideas, like designing a 3D printed house, which is in progress and really exciting to work on. I wrote stuff that I read years later like “I had totally forgotten about that post and damn, that perspective is on point” or “ooooh, that’s why I think this way now lmao”
I’ve always thought of this as a kind of freedom. A license to be myself. To explore my interests unapologetically and without having to explain myself. If nobody cares what I’m doing here, it means I’m free to do whatever I want. To say what I’m thinking about whatever I’m thinking about.
Exactly. This freedom of developing oneself is not always easy (countless grimy/whiny posts will spawn in your mind), but when you get there, publish something interesting and feel enlightened, it’s just so dope. Great, great feeling.
I think it takes a long time to feel good about a blog. It really is like a plant: there’s not much going on at first. But then it blooms, it grows, it looks lovely. Your mind grows, gets excited and it’s hard to put that feeling down to go back to platitudes, social dogma and all that good, stale stuff.
I think blogging can create beautiful minds that are much more calm and resilient than what the algorithms in social media do. I think we need that? Yeah.
Pure bliss.
The last time I had been floating in a pool was in 2015 in Santa Monica after some handyman work, in the middle of those wildfires that were raging on not so far away. The sky was filled with smoke and the sun was red.
Nine years later I’m in the crisp morning desert air, listening to water glistening around my body before being hit by triple-digit temperatures drying me out in an instant. Sunscreen and coffee smell.
I want to be back already.
It is now on. Pool, evening skating, music, here I come.
Meanwhile things are nice, moving well and the light in the morning is the best. Mmmhmm, August.
Very rough first costs estimate to build my Halftogon house: under $130K. Considering that I was aiming at $120K in 2013, that’s not bad. Add how I live and it’s most definitely doable. Dope.
I also realized that it can be completely made out of precast concrete, the old school 3D printing method. There are some great companies here doing that and this might be good enough for airtightness but I need to do more thinking.
I was like “hey I haven’t seen my dude Neil in my Tumblr feed in a while I used to see him all the time what is he doing probably shooting a movie or something let me sOH MY FUCKING GOD NO HE DID NOT”
Men, please shift+delete the fucking Abusive extension. WTF bro.
Women, I’m not sure girl. I’m so sorry and I’m also frustrated as hell.
There’s this car in my neighborhood and its plate is GIRL IDK.
I kind of want to get mine to say GRL SAME now!
There is about 9 million developers making apps for iPhone and Android. It is very hard to get actual numbers but it’s pretty safe to say that about 1,000 are doing very well. The rest? Not so good while they submit their work for which they will give 30% to the mafia by default, and then maybe get it into the store after insane stories about requirements and what not.
It’s absolutely wild how much developers are in an abusive relationship with Apple and Google with their stores and platforms, and how they hate it so much, they cheat every second they can to get what they want.
Meanwhile the duopoly treats them as whiny nuisance and constantly ghosts them. Good vibes.
It’s fascinating because it’s been almost 15 years of this now. It’s just part of the manipulative, algo-heavy, I’m-hiding-behind-my-digital-identity zeitgeist that we are in I guess.
I was there at the start of the thread about Chris Cole being an abuser, by chance. 66 pages later, goddamn.
Meanwhile they just put a new statue of Kobe and his daughter, and all I can think is that this dude raped a woman and got away with it, unscathed.
Fuck. Them. Fuck this toxic dude mentality. Fuck the dying patriarchy. Fuck this complacency. Fuck all the yes-man men in the world.
So much work to do jfc
Let’s see: feeling weird left and right thanks to that latest variant, bitches indeed is weird, France has no government per se and is hosting the world in a week, here one dude gets shot the other dips, snapped my skateboard in half on a weak back lip yesterday, enough!
The vacation I’m too lazy to organize is going to feel real good.