TechTakes

Really appreciate that link to Unserious Academic! This piece underlines something very important about the forces (by forces I mean weirdos) we struggle against.

Also, this bit:

This technology was pre-ordained by the universe

Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.

I read this line basically in this voice

the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran three dark rituals the election is over

Then there is John Michael Greer...

Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

A regular contributor at UnHerd...

I did not know that, and I hate that it doesn't surprise me. I tended to dismiss his peak oil doomerism as wishing for some imagined "harmony with nature". This doesn't help with that bias.

It was an interesting read, thanks for posting it.

Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

The unspecificity is damning. "Facts about their membership" might range from "what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of" to "am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate".

and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

That's an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai's actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I'll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.

Awful.systems defaults to dark mode.