The basic graphing technology used by AI is the same pioneered by Alta Vista and optimized by Google years later. We’ve added a layer of abstraction through user I/O, such that you get a formalized text response encapsulating results rather than a series of links containing related search terms. But the methodology used to harvest, hash, and sort results is still all rooted in graph theory.

The difference between then and now is that back then you’d search “Horse” in Alta Vista and getting a dozen links ranging from ranches and vet clinics to anime and porn. Now, you get a text blob that tries to synthesize all the information in those sources down to a few paragraphs of relevant text.

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

Then I’d ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we’ve got an AI that’s built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it’s just as likely they’re ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

That’s sort of the problem with AI. There’s no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that’s already inelegant and resource intensive).

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

The problem is less that we don’t know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don’t know either. They’re fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don’t even know if they’ve got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.

Bribes to local governments and police, mostly.

Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.

I have to wonder if this headline would be received the same way if it was “US State Department Accuses Chinese Internet Security Company of Conspiring With Chinese Government”, as all this seems to go back to a claim by Trump’s 2020 department that Qihoo leaked info to the Hong Kong police during the protests five years ago.

Still… Qihoo 360 appears to have been an active investor and developer in Silicon Valley since 2014. Chinese investment in the US isn’t new or even undesireable, as of a decade ago.

But consider how the US has also recently attempted to seize the US branch of TikTok and block domestic sale of Huawei phones. Add in the domestic freak out over Chinese AI companies outperforming their US peers. This could easily be American tech companies trying to freeze out their competition on national security grounds rather than Chinese tech companies posing a military threat to US domestic interests.

P(rice of stock)/E(arnings)

It’s not even about banning people, it’s about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you’re actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders

If they’d been stalwart about banning automation and keeping original, legit human content pure, they probably could have used it as a fountain of fresh data for AI, for polling, for engagement farming, and for promotion.

The site was still growing even despite the admin induced atrophy. But they just couldn’t resist killing the Golden Goose.

It’s got triple digit p/e. The stock is doing fine.

millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks

Planned Obselecence means a lot of modern consumer goods are deliberately designed to be difficult to repair.

More cheap plastic used for buckles and clasps. More glue used in place of screws or latches. More electronics soddered or otherwise made irreplaceable/inaccessible to an amateur. Shoes, in particular, leap to mind. Shoe repair used to be a standard dry cleaning service. It’s practically extinct today. Very few good ways to repair a modem sneaker.

My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.

There’s a time cost to repair and maintenance that’s often frustrating. I don’t blame folks for opting towards convenience. But I feel horrible every time I take out the trash, knowing how much plastic waste I accrue every month.

What about the transition.

It’ll likely be a bloodsoaked mess, given the history of these things.

Or, more broadly, when individuals are recognized as valued participants in the community rather than obsolete expenses to try and scratch off the books.

Realistically I can’t see either of those things happening.

Not under current business and political leadership, no. But with a strong union movement leading a next generation of working class people… maybe.

The bigger problem here is the loss of jobs and we are talking about a huge loss of employment that will affect economies really hard.

I would say that’s a tangential problem. Because, you know, in theory…

But the deeper problem is ultimately in expertise as a learned skill developed over time and through practice. If you’re de-skilling work, you’re dismantling the tools by which we train the next generation of artists and production crews. If we were just replacing humans with machines for some route manual labor (like Pixar replaced Disney’s old hand drawn animations with a newer CGI look), the result would be a new style and perhaps less tendentious from route reproductions.

But we’re gutting the whole process of development which means you’re losing the pool of skilled professionals who know how to create CGI (or even flip-book style 60s animation) from first principles. That means sacrificing whole fields of specialized expertise for… what? This?

Honestly most recent movies and tv shows look like scenarios were generated by AI or some barbie sweet happy life generator so there is nothing entertaining.

A lot of slop has wide appeal. And let’s not pretend soap operas and sitcoms and trope genre fiction don’t routinely have wide appeal. The theory that AI can seamlessly replicate pulp fiction / scripted reality TV seems to have held up for the most part, because so much of this content is a canned and formulaic to begin with.

What AIs lack, more than anything, is a face and personality that is distinct to the line of work. There is no real AI “House Style” that gets adhered to. I can pick up a dozen Brian Sanderson novels and get roughly the same experience. But if I ask a Chatbot to “write me a chapter of a Brian Sanderson novel”, what I’m really going to get is a generic jumble of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Marvel with a few Brian Sanderson tropes thrown in.

I think people feel more connected because they feel something when watching person talking on the screen whatever they want to talk about instead of person reading from script.

So much of the “spontaneous” content is still heavily scripted and acted on delivery. What makes professional acting impressive is the range - a single person embodying a wide range of personalities and mannerisms. I don’t watch Gary Oldman or Daniel Day-Lewis because I’m looking for unpolished delivery.

But the Auteur experience is what draws people in and makes certain works rise above their peer materials. AI has no real artistry. All it does is cut, copy, and paste from a grab bag of established popular materials, hoping it’ll trigger enough nostalgia to be recognized as good.

As styles and tastes shift, I have to wonder what AI is going to look like, given how rooted it is in the moment of instantiation. The long tail will drag, while younger and historically unburdened artists will be out experimenting.

This is Whataboutism and you are clearly a Wumao agent sent here to destroy democracy.