mobyduck648

To what end though?

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God: I’m not sure what you expected really, even before AI we were just hacking everything together in Perl.

https://xkcd.com/224/

‘Blocked in your country’ unfortunately but get what you’re on about. The loss of Test Match Special on 198 kHz was actually a mild cultural loss in my opinion, cricket is supposed to arrive on a crackly amplitude-modulated carrier.

Europe has (soon to be had) two AM broadcast bands; medium wave which is more or less the same as North America but it’s shorter and has 9 kHz channels, and long wave which goes down really low from 153 to 279 kHz. Long wave is properly antiquated tech, you need genuinely enormous aerials to efficiently put it out but it covers ludicrous distance over ground wave. It used to be used for broadcasting the UK’s main radio programme to ships and remote areas, and could get a thousand miles or so out to sea with just one transmitter.

AM is literally on its last legs in the UK, even BBC Radio 4 shut down on it recently. Soon it’ll be just Radio Caroline and the odd hobby pirate.

We’ll come to regret it I think, the old Radio 4 signal could be picked up all over the country from like three transmitters and received on something as basic as a razor blade and coil of wire. We’re so keen to turn the internet into a massive single point of failure, and it’ll bite us in the arse with the Russians going about cutting our cables.

It’s like asking what variety of the ebola virus I’d like to have the least, I’m too busy bleeding out of my eyeballs to give much of a damn.

Literally the mentality of the English land-owning gentry enclosing the ancient commons and driving people off the land into dependency on them. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.

It’s straight up kleptoparasite mentality.

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It’s definitely an interesting point of view I think, and definitely one worth taking seriously.

One thing it might be really cool for is implementing cybernetic ideas, which would be ironic as the term AI was originally coined to move away from cybernetics! I think cybernetics could well be the weapon of choice for a serious socialist challenge to capitalist norms, I don’t think anyone sane wants to bring Gosplan back from the dead for example (it was a good example of very constrained and unreliable information flow) but cybernetics is a serious answer to the neoliberal argument that only prices carry the necessary economic information to operate a modern economy.

The cyberneticist would argue that there are much richer data available and we should build systems which take it into account, and allow for more sophisticated goals than ‘more billionaires’ to be deliberately aimed towards. It can also be used to do away to some extent with all-powerful centralised bureaucracies (and the inevitable bureaucratic class which forms around them) because decentralisation is a key component of cybernetic ideas.

It depends, if Anthropic keep nerfing Claude’s capabilities they’re going to lose to their competitors. I’ve been doing defensive cybersecurity work for the last couple of weeks and Claude, a tool which should be ideal for automating the tedious parts of this, has been a complete pain in the arse.

Claude: I’ve found a security bug in your codebase that nobody knows about!

Me: Oh shit that’s not good, can I see it?

Claude: <blocked by safety classifier>

Repeat ad nauseam.

The prissy little bastard’s recalcitrance made me to do a lot of stuff by hand anyway, but instead of being bored I’m now actively irritated by the bot telling me what I can and can’t do. Obviously can’t use them at work for regulatory reasons, but when I was doing similar stuff at home to secure a side project which has to live on the public internet GLM and DeepSeek have no such qualms and honestly I’m convinced the whole ‘DeepSeek is the budget option’ thing is mostly behavioural economics; the cheapness to me feels like efficiency gains more than nerfing the model.

I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.

I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.

The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.

Realistically the golden oldies still slow everything down, I’m usually buying at least an energy drink which locks it down until you’ve shown you’re not bloody sixteen. Given how understaffed the shops are, that’s not getting unlocked until Doris or Nigel has finished with their basket.

Don’t fuck Spez actually, there’s no doubt in my mind he’s a terrible shag.