The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles

Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled “companion piece.”

Hard to know if “Contovicsy” is an AI in-joke or a Grauniad in-joke. Or neither.

Paying 20-somethings to have orgies on the beach in Bali is a form of charity, if their laptops are nearby.

Starting a wall of text with a non sequitur is a bold strategy. I cannot follow his 9/11 logic at all.

One of these things is not like the others. (my bulleting)

We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies. These risks range from

• the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to
• manipulation and misinformation, to
• the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen.

10/10, no notes

At the risk of kind of picking around the edges here … something caught my eye in #5:

Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.

This claim is ridiculous. The homicide rate in the US was something like 30 or 40 per 100,000 people in colonial times, reducing every century, and it’s around 5 right now, since the increase from the 1960s - 1990s has gone back down.

Maybe, in the past 100 years, we have passed so many bajillion new statutes that it has increased crime tenfold, but that’s not what the reactionaries are saying at all.

My first response would be “that’s a rather shite superpower then, innit?”

I was thinking the same, especially if it only works on busses.

Haven’t we all written a blog post with an “Acknowledgments” section at the end?

Those photos at them working all over the world in exotic locations, including the FTX condos in the Bahamas… … and still referring to themselves as “charity workers.”