Can we please, please not do this?

Like, the days when I worked on AI research are long past. But this is still nauseatingly familiar to me.

https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1664331870564147200

It's practically a law of heuristic or evolving algorithms that the edges of the test harness are weaker than the problem you're trying to solve, so the AI seeks them out instead. And then smoothing out all the edge cases and glitches turns out to be harder than the problem!

ChatGPT still fails the Gilligan's Island test First of all, it loves literally singing Elon's praises.

More interestingly, though, it can't count syllables and can't get the rhyme scheme right.

Argh. The frustrating thing about the ChatGPT discourse is that it seems to be carried on in a weird hypothetical vacuum. This is a good example -- AI apologists asking "you can't just ban AI stories, what if they're great?"

Folks, they're not great. ChatGPT is, except by accident, not capable of writing a good story. *It is not a general AI, it is a text prediction engine.* It takes words and figures out which words are statistically likely to come next, based on its corpus and hand-tuning.

Sigh. Another article saying, "Times are tough in tech, and companies are tightening their belts. Tech workers have to give up perks like working from home."

*Turns on megaphone*: WORK FROM HOME IS CHEAPER FOR EVERYONE It's cheaper for workers, obviously, since they don't have to subsidize their employers with unpaid commute time, vehicle costs, and gas.

And meanwhile in Seattle, the big tech employers (AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, etc) spend literally *billions of dollars* on *parking*.

Reading a bunch of stuff about Meta and IG and how they keep optimizing to follow the clicks.

And it occurred to me -- can we necessarily assume user behavior even indicates user preferences?

https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1551961318545956864

In the abstract realm of Homo Economicus, this is usually taken as a given -- individuals make rational decisions based on their preferences and available information. Indeed, this is how you *find out* their preferences.

Turns out that cyberpunk wasn't nearly bleak enough

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… The article, of course, is cheerleading this. "This may sound dystopian to some, the plotline of a Black Mirror episode. But social tokens are part of a broader and fundamentally positive phenomenon: everyone is becoming an investor."

This for sure. Pain is not a virtue.

https://twitter.com/CaseyLBlair/status/1417259668812931072

There's this instinct of "if I sacrifice something valuable, which I can recognize because doing so is painful, then surely I will be rewarded in return!"

Which is very understandably human and often completely wrong.

Twitter: Hey, take this survey to help shape the future of Twitter!

Me: I guess I do have string opinions about that. *Clicks*

Survey: *doesn't work*

Seems about right? STRONG opinions. The fact that this tweet has a typo is also peak Twitter.

This game site is advertising World War I: Verdun as an *FPS*, which sounds like the worst game ever.

Feel the EXCITEMENT as you plod slowly forward through mud and barbed wire, then get blown up by artillery you can't see! "The gameplay in this true WW1 battlefield experience is as immersive and gritty as it can get..." by which I assume they mean you spend days cowering in bunkers under bombardment then go over the top only to be mowed down in seconds.

Ooookay. NFTs. If you know this already mute this thread.

Context: I follow a lot of artists because I love seeing cool art in my feed, but it means I get a lot of art world discourse too, and this is a big deal there at the moment. For the record: I am *not* a visual artist. But I *am* (by training) a software engineer.

So the chatter has been, basically, that some artists have been selling NFTs for lots of money but there's a lot of problems with them and should we do it or what?

Ok, Valheim peeps. Anyone have issues with consistent crashing in a shared world, which had been playing fine up until it started? I can playing about 5 min before the client crashes every time.

cc @BrianTMcClellan @BrianTMcClellan Things I have tried:

-restarting the game
-restarting my PC
-restarting the server (it's a rented remote host)
-logging in to a local host (seems to work, at least for 10-15 min?)

Reading THE LAND THAT NEVER WAS, aka "that time a con man used Orientalist fantasies to bilk English investors out of tens of millions and also get a bunch of people killed," and it's fascinating. If you don't know the story, we're talking about this guy, Gregor MacGregor, Scottish "adventurer". (Read: con artist.)

He fought in the Napoleonic Wars, not particularly notably, and parlayed that into a post as general under Bolivar in South America.

Finally watched TENET. Note to self -- do not write movie script where for plot reasons characters must constantly wear face-concealing masks.

(It's a real problem. The end action scene is just this anonymous mass of people shooting at each other, sometimes in reverse.) Honestly though I am both impressed with its cleverness and not surprised it didn't really land for most people. They do some neat stuff in a really understated way that leaves you kind of like ... meh?

Because I am a COOL AND EXCITING person I am reading a book about the development of modern managerial practices in the US between 1850 and 1920, and it is making me think @maxgladstone thoughts. I'm used to thinking of the trappings of bureaucracy -- reports, procedures, and so on, as sort of conformity for conformity's sake. Which they are sometimes! And the book contains somewhat alarming sentences like this.