Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.

That’s a very good point.

That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.

Paying a premium for ridding yourself of institutional knowledge and existing experience, then paying again to fill the gap with ignorant novices, then paying yet again to train them to former levels of productivity while paying for the difference in the interrim: That’s government efficiency, baby!

I mean, why pay for one thing once, when paying for the thing you already had before you threw it out four times over is clearly four times as good - just like how a double standard is twice as good as a boring singular standard. As Big Balls from DOGE would no doubt say: “That’s math”.

He should report all those pasty motherfuckers to ICE.

What a swell idea, Vance! I’ve been trying to figure out how to persuade my compatriots why visiting the US aren’t worth the risks, and it really helps when the Vice President makes my case for me. Cheers, buddy!

If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.

And you’ll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.

Hey, look on the bright side: While it’s a problem, at least it won’t be your problem. Ah, sweet death. The only known solution to the problem of taxation.

And the predations of other financial institutions.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.

The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.

And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

Well, it’s not like the dead have expenses. The funeral might need financing though.

Or, and hear me out America, you could try cutting out all the for-profit middle-men and indulge in some good old fashioned collective bargaining. It works for everybody else.

Alternatively, you could keep doing what you’re doing. That’s an option too, I guess.

Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?

Yeah, but who’d take a Nazi at their word?

Those are some excellent points. The root cause seems to me to be the otherwise generally positive human capability for pack-bonding. There are people who can develop affection for their favorite toaster, let alone something that can trivially pass a Turing-test.

This… Is going to become a serious issue, isn’t it?

Look, I realize the frontal lobes of the average fifteen year old aren’t fully developed, I don’t want to be insensitive and I fully support the lawsuit - there must be accountability for what any entity, corporate or otherwise opts to publish, especially for direct user interaction - but if a person reenacts Romeo and Juliet with a goddamn AI chatbot and a gun, there’s something else seriously wrong.

Trump’s actually great at good governance. All one has to do is carefully listen to his suggestions and then do the exact opposite, and before you know it: Presto! Well-functioning highly-educated modern country with a balanced budget and booming economy.

Meanwhile, in Congress: “Emoluments Clause? Wazzat? Can I eat it? Conflict of Interest? Sounds tasty.”

“You can’t fire me! I quit!”

Sorry, I meant:

“I’ll persecute you for prosecuting me!”