It always throws me off when people recommend Come and See as an anti war movie. When I watch it, my only thought is "Oh my God I am so so so so so so so so so so happy we went to war against these guys"
Book of the New Sun
Corporations have been automating farming for a while
Main takeaway from this is
1) I (obviously) still prefer human writers
2) Ursula Le Guin is obviously an amazing writer but had some truly goofy goober ethical takes. Nature and society are both series of rolling catastrophes
this has been haunting me all day
the difference between "exploitative capitalism" and "fully automated luxury communism" is who gets the benefit of improved technology
literally nothing else, the technology itself fundamentally cannot be and is not either capitalism or communism
A little complicated, I can write something up soon
The average person's theory of reference leaves MUCH to be desired
The present king of France in shambles
Was really hoping over time I'd find better arguments against it and felt more and more uneasy when I realized how bad they were
I'm kinda being constantly tortured online bc I both think
1. It's extremely unlikely current AI models are conscious.
2. Almost every argument I scroll by for my side is insane and is just steamrolling decades of philosophy of mind work.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/09fa5c20-2c8f-4f41-9d91-c78476eaac20 Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services facilities this week in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain highlight the vulnerability of cloud facilities — prominent symbols of US tech power in the region and hard to defend against air attack. Fars News Agency, an outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Thursday that Iran targeted Amazon and Microsoft facilities in recent drone strikes. Experts say Amazon’s facilities were likely targeted by Iran. Microsoft said it had not experienced any outages in the region. The strikes mark what is believed to be the world’s first military attack against the US “hyperscalers” that dominate the global cloud computing market. That could create a chilling effect on the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s plans to spend billions of dollars on local AI infrastructure in the coming years, a crucial plank of the oil-rich states’ efforts to diversify their economies. “The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank.
Iran acknowledges they are targeting AWS and Azure data centres. "The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Data centers no use much water" = Tech oligarchs
"Machines that can think could be dangerous" = CCP
We're in a very healthy political environment where everything is accused of being either a secret plot by far-right billionaire tech oligarchs or by the CCP. I'm lucky enough to regularly get accused of both.
I guess I'm separately pretty skeptical of criticizing motives. Psychologizing people kills the object level conversation
As a rule, I only ever say "I'm just some guy" to emphasize that people should take me less seriously. If you see me deploying that to say people shouldn't criticize me, take me less seriously.
I am against smol beanism in all contexts. If you're writing publicly, lots of criticism is always legit as long as it's not crossing into doxxing or harassment.
people who don't have access to paid models and/or don't use LLMs regularly still have no idea how capable they are
Bro
I predict that my vision for New England will not be approved if it's put to a vote in a town meeting
I basically think it's potentially worse than useless to indiscriminately "activate" everyday people on environmental issues, because it's too easy to think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and hard to think about trade-offs and collective action problems.
🥲
He knows remarkably little about climate for someone who's claimed to care about it for so long
Ya I assume Joshi thinks EA is just a way to hype the AI labs etc.
I'm wildly unsure about AI safety and alignment, truly no clue if any lab is doing good or catastrophic evil there.
But Claude as a consumer product right this moment is my guy. I'm still riding high on opus psychosis.
I feel seen
I posted it here and the only engagement it got was from the primary funder of my movement bsky.app/profile/andy...
I feel seen
And the long section toward the end
Had actually responded to this specific article in the intro here open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...
