I’m more concerned that the writer could listen to this, presumably multiple times on his tape, and still wrote the rest of the piece like these guys are acting in good faith. Regardless of the unanswerable question of whether they believe their own hype, they are clearly saying things for a purpose of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement rather than out of any concern for other people, and that is where the story should be. Even the guys most ostensibly interested in protecting humanity are still, when they think the mic is off and the journalist is out of the room, joking about how they’re manipulating the press into saying what they want.

• On pages 17 and 19, Whiting cites “T.C.A. § 29-12-119,” but we cannot find a section 29-12-119 in the Tennessee Code Annotated

lol. lmao.

On page 4, Whiting states “it is well settled that the First Amendment does not protect speech that knowingly asserts false statements of fact. United States v. Alverez, 567 U.S. 709, 721 (2012).” Alvarez states the opposite: “This opinion . . . rejects the notion that false speech should be in a general category that is presumptively unprotected.” Id. at 721–22 (plurality opinion).

Oh. Oh no.

• On page 1, Whiting states, “This Court has made clear that , [sic] ‘[T]he mere fact that a plaintiff did not prevail does not mean that the claim was frivolous.’ Adcock-Ladd v. Secretary of the Treasury, 227 F.3d 343, 350 (6th Cir. 2000).” Adcock-Ladd does not contain the quoted language, and it is not about frivolous cases.

This specific confabulation appears at least 5 times. I’m not sure if Whiting was copy/pasting from something ChatGPT spat out or if ChatGPT was at least consistently inventing the same bullshit.

Looking for a bit of context I found this local news piece and it certainly reads like the guy is a crank who kick-started this whole thing by trying to protest the crime of public safety during a global pandemic.

Although citing fake cases violates Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38, Rule 38 alone is not “up to the task” of sanctioning this conduct, Chambers, 501 U.S. at 50, because Rule 38 allows only for the imposition of costs and attorneys’ fees, Sanctions § 33. But we think other sanctions are also appropriate, so we employ our inherent authority

Not a lawyer, just a bit of a law nerd, by this is a big deal, especially the fact that courts have been repeatedly using their inherent authority sanction on people who fuck this up. Courts do not routinely invoke their inherent authority like this. Also this footnote is interesting:

Ghostwriting is when one person writes the document while another person takes credit for it without acknowledging the true author’s identity. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 741 (4th ed. 2000). Legal authorities generally discuss ghostwriting for a pro se litigant, see, e.g., Duran v. Carris, 238 F.3d 1268, 1272 (10th Cir. 2001), but we see no reason why rules regulating ghostwriting should apply in only the pro se context. The primary concern with ghostwriting is that the true author would escape liability for his conduct, see In re Mungo, 305 B.R. 762, 768 (Bankr. D.S.C. 2003); Ellis v. Maine, 448 F.2d 1325, 1328 (1st Cir. 1971), and that concern is just as acute when a lawyer ultimately signs the ghostwritten pleading.

It sounds like they’re looking for an angle to hold the LLM operators (OpenAI/Anthropic - or at least whatever company wraps the models in the necessary bits and bobs to make it a product they can sell to stupid asshole lawyers) as ultimately accountable for these filings, just as if they were a SovCit guru providing materials for one of their griftees to submit to the court without ever actually putting their name to the record where the might face consequences. I’d need to do some research to speculate on what that might mean, but it should give everyone operating in this space pause.

I’m still reading the appendix that goes into the specific hallucinations but it sounds like they’re pretty absurd based on the tone of this order.

Given the ubiquity of explosive drones specifically I feel like we need that calendar cartoon with March 2026 being torn off to reveal July 1864

I also appreciated this followup

I mean, some of their before/after images are much more impressive than the RE one, but the general look is less like a revolution in capacity and more like someone took some time to find the right Instagram filter.

Also after taking a look at Starfield’s steam page for comparison I’m pretty sure that all the “before” images were taken on lower settings for existing texture quality and lighting. Like, even in areas where the DLSS gives an improvement the original game doesn’t look as bad as presented here.

Also the discourse has been ongoing since at least Skyrim’s original release whether or not the increasing fidelity of game graphics was actually making games better, or just more expensive to make and play. And that was before transformer models entered the picture and started cooking the world. I’m glad nVidia got some new jerk-off material, but even if it works exactly as advertised that’s all it is at this point.

This was my thought the whole time: if the political will existed, we could probably already do everything that AI is supposed to “enable” here. Some of the work people would choose not to do would end up being actually important, and the market in its infinite power would need to find a way to get that work done, whether that’s paying more to invent new types of automation or compensating people enough that they choose to do it without the threat of starvation and homelessness (or finding new ways to exploit people to do it, but I believe there’s a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but that’s the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will there’s no reason to expect any change in productivity to change the current arrangement. At best the people working any jobs that get eliminated are discarded as obsolete, lose their ability to participate in the market, and are eventually handled by the criminal justice system or otherwise removed from consideration.

I mean she was undoubtedly too much of a lefty for the Thiel set to ever admit her influence, but I feel like that’s the exact type of vibe she’s trying and mostly failing to evoke.

I swear every time his stuff floats through here I end up standing as I read it and wildly gesticulating at my living room or ranting extemporaneously to my basement about something it made me think of or feel. After reading this piece I hope that comes off as more complimentary to his work than showing myself to be a freaking weirdo.

“Do you think there’s a reason why the DSA didn’t allow you to use Signal or other apps on your government phone?”

“No.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE “S” STANDS FOR YOU IGNORANT CHILD??

Just gonna file this on my mental list of reasons I didn’t go into law.

I have never heard of this before and rather than Google it I’m going to decide that if you put 5-10 parallel rail lines to spread the weight you can actually put a whole oil tanker on rollers to drive it across the desert to the other side of the continent.

10/10 no notes

It’s gotta be tied to the idea of anchoring, right? Like, the first credible bit of information you have is what sets the tone for everything that comes afterwards. At that point in a sufficiently complicated information ecosystem, confirmation bias kicks in and it’s hard to break out of.

Man, due to a weird alignment of the spheres I started reading those Honor Levy excerpts in the voice of Max Payne-style hardboiled narration and it fits weirdly well? Like a bargain version of the same sort of mid-budget semi-affectionate parody of existential angst that’s all tone and minimal substance.

Man, it’s frustrating to see him end up going down this route because the opening part of this is actually one of the better descriptions of AI psychosis I’ve seen, and i appreciate his emphasis on the way the delusion is built up in the sufferer’s mind rather than trying to game out what’s happening “inside” the chatbot. Even his point about how LLMs aren’t bad in exceptional ways for a new technology is pretty cogent. But his insistence on defending his own use of these things (and others who do so in “centaur-configured” ways) rather than thinking about how it interacts with all the relatively normal ways that this technology is wildly destructive is a very conspicuous blind spot.

Like, you can absolutely drive a nail with a phone book, and given the wider surface area it even has the advantage over a traditional hammer of being harder to smash your fingers. An individual craftsman may well decide that this is a useful tool and in some cases worth using over other options. But if the only source of these hammer-books was an industry that relied on massive uncompensated use of creative work passed through exploited third-world labor, ground rainforests to dust to create special “old-growth paper”, placed massive and unsustainable burdens on existing road infrastructure to collect these parts and deliver them, and somehow had been blown into a speculative bubble that represented something like a quarter of the entire US economy by promising that if they created a big enough book then one guy could hammer all the nails at once and they could lay off all the carpenters, I think it’s justifiable to look at the people using it as a normal tool and ask them “what the actual fuck are you doing?” The usage statistics they represent and the user stories they tell are used to justify not addressing any of the harms necessary to enable this tool to exist in its current form, and are largely driving the absurd valuations that keep pumping the bubble. Your individual role in those harms as a small-time user who finds it occasionally useful may be incalculably small, but it is still real.

Like, it feels like I agree with Doctorow on basically all the premises here. He seems to have a decent grasp on how the things actually work (even if he’s wrong about Ollama specifically being an LLM in its own right) and their associated limitations. He draws a decent line separating criticism from criti-hype. He is basically correct about how much of a bastard everyone involved in the industry at a high level is. But maybe because so many of these things aren’t really exceptional (save possibly in their sheer scale) he can’t seem to conceive of a world where things happen any differently, or of the role his actions and words play in reinforcing the status quo even as he writes pretty explicitly about how fucked up that status quo is.

Honestly it makes me think of the finale of his second Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle. After drilling into the business of the private prison operator that is making his friend’s life hell and separating the merely fucked up parts from the things that might actually have consequences if word got to what passes for cops in that tax bracket, he doesn’t go to the papers or start reaching out to the SEC. Instead he goes to the bastard at the head of it all and blackmails him into making his friend’s remaining incarceration less hellish and leaving him alone. And his friend, who started all this by begging for help unraveling this shit, rightly calls Marty a coward for it. There’s something ironic in seeing Doctorow here seemingly make the same judgement: abuse and apathy are sufficiently normal that we shouldn’t even bother to try and make the world better, just find ways to shelter ourselves and the people we care about from the consequences. And hell, I guess even there I’m not immune to it. There are reasons why I’m posting here and not waiting out front of a hotel with some engraved brass. Still, on the continuum of such things I’m disappointed that the guy who wrote that scene is stuck in the normalization blues.

I do wonder how much of the disconnect is in whgo gets considered part of the rich and powerful. Like, a lot of that 30% probably think specifically of liberal academics, celebrities, Democratic politicians, etc. and exclude or excuse people like Elon and Trump and whoever of his friends isn’t currently the scapegoat for why he isn’t ushering in the promised glorious reformation.

I mean I guess given how the current guy took a chainsaw to American soft power, industrial capacity, economic prospects, and so on I guess our wildly over funded military is probably the only comparative advantage we unambiguously hold onto.

It’s also a trend that I don’t see stopping without a major structural change. I don’t think there’s a point at which they’re going to say “we’ve cut enough corners and are going to stop risking stability and service degradation.” The principal structure driving the economy, especially in the tech sector, is organized around looking for new corners to cut and insulating the people who make those choices from accountability for their actual consequences.

It feels almost like Anthropic is trying to make this a marketing opportunity by reaffirming their mostly-illusory ethical stances. That was their original pitch against openAI, and this puts them rather than Saltman back at the center of the ai hype news cycle.

It’s theoretically possible to keep them separate, but I would assume in this case that it’s evidence that regardless of intentions CFAR and lightcone are sufficiently closely linked to be basically the same organization. I mean, if there’s not a separate legal entity then I would assume anything involving money is going to require the same person or persons to sign off on the transaction, regardless of what the board looks like.

Somehow I had never found that dragon army retrospective before and had the fascinating experience of wanting to explain to someone that “no, what you’re describing is actually a cult. Like, you’re describing being a cult leader.” Which is usually not the person to whom the cult dynamic needs to be identified and explained.