TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
I extremely briefly looked into it earlier when I saw the headline drift by on lobsters or something, and found a venturebeat presser
so it seems we're at that stage of the LLM grift cycle
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he's selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future "AI", represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn't a parody, they're literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
Another fine AI lawmaker for our collection.
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Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html
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Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
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AI party (performance art, unclear how much of this was actually serious): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
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AI Mayor / AI Party: https://www.ai-mayor.com/, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党 (their(?) earlier iteration also had a lady robot because AI Mayor AIn't sexist yo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KomiEpEik-Q)
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be "analyzing" the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be "inflation"
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
It's remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He's worked on that, but it's clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn't very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I'm thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you can't convince me that you're really the world's best technical interviewer if you're also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you're suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who's financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they're concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
Lex hasn't optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee's and the (implicitly) listener's ego.