YourNetworkIsHaunted

My understanding is that most professional podcasters start off more or less like this, start getting a Patreon or some light sponsors going in order to fund actually decent equipment, and then look at the numbers one morning and realize that actually they could just do this for a living.

I mean, giving inflated titles and grandiose plans is part of the sales pitch. Y'know, for the cult.

Like, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding here. The problem isn't that the people who want to be cult leaders are able to attract a lot of people who are preinclined to be cult followers and those people suffer the associated psychic damages. It's that even the less culty parts of the rationalist subculture seem to produce a weirdly high number of wannabe cult leaders, even if they don't conceptualize themselves that way.

I'm sure glad that the people screwing over literally everyone else on the planet for their own benefit aren't going to screw over us, the investors. Surely there's no way they could screw over the people who have been giving them a functionally blank check for nearly a decade.

Insert surprised Pikachu face here

Rather than use an LLM to churn through however many zillion tokens and parameters and do an ungodly number of matrix multiplications, maybe consider thinking about the problem and writing the relevant "if()then;" blocks yourself!

You know, like a caveman (according to these same bosses a few months ago).

Seriously. Instead he announced he was going to be throwing somewhat less money into that specific dumpster fire and the investors decided that was worth 4%.

I will confess that my initial reaction was from a partial reading since I got derailed ranting about the silicon valley attitude towards neurodivergence and how much damage it's doing to us, and basically right after that bit it starts taking a much more (appropriately imo) cynical tone that was honestly refreshing.

Let this be a lesson to those of us who must learn, I guess.

In other news, Cade Metz' latest piece is actually pretty critical, especially by NYT standards, but you wouldn't know it from the headline.

"A.I. Agents: They’re Fun. They’re Useful. But Don’t Give Them the Credit Card."

Ask for it to be password protected.

I think I'm having a stroke. Or at least I hope I'm having a stroke and that this unparodiably dumb piece isn't any more real than it sounds.

Did someone tell him that Perun had cut the "here's why the US doesn't have enough boats to escort all the traffic through the strait and would need a coalition to have any chance of success" part from his latest video, or is that just a deeply ironic coincidence.

Isn't that new Chris Pratt movie I keep seeing the first 5 seconds of a trailer for basically this, but mixed with a Minority Report knockoff?

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.