His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.

Dear god, my ribs are hurting after 2 paragraphs already.

Paywall just slammed shut. archive link

Hi @tante@awful.systems 👋

Nice writeup. Been reading some of your stuff for a few years. Seems like the gravitational attraction of awful.systems got us both.

sees McDonald branded product → neuron activation

Yeah sure, but this was supposed to my one positive post of the day. This doesn’t strengthen franchise owners, but benefits local businesses who have to work with shitty locked-down equipment.

The countersuit went so far as to ask the court to force Altman to “change its deceptive and misleading name to ClosedAI or a different more appropriate name.”

top kek

The guy (pun not intended) seems honestly as decent as you might hope for in a serial entrepreneur. Maybe a bit naive for expecting better from the players involved, but to me he comes off as endearingly earnest.

Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.

Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)

2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling

• Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously

• Development of “Schrödinger’s Ledger” prototype, allowing superposition of financial states

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc

This reminded me of a gag from Pyramids (discworld novel) where quantum accounting is invented to manage a reality-warping pyramid building business. So I was trying to get a quote…

…only to discover that Quantum Accounting is an actual grifting term in recent use. Please marvel at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc

I just woke up and some nerd is staring into my soul, asking why I was rude to the spicy autocomplete. What is this? Go home world, you’re drunk.

By the way, thank you Terry Pratchett for teaching me the use of Meaningful Capitalisation.

I feel like this has to be built on a lack of appreciation for words as a facilitator of human connection. By finding means of expression and being understood we manage to link our brains together on a conceptual level. By building these skills communally we expand the possible bandwidth of connection and even the range and fidelity of our own thoughts.

This has to be motivated by a view of words as Authoritative Things that sit on shelves and bestseller lists and are authored by Smart And Successful People.

Doesn’t even mention the one use case I have a moderate amount of respect for, automatically generating image descriptions for blind people.

And even those should always be labeled, since AI is categorically inferior to intentional communication.

They seem focused on the use case “I don’t have the ability to communicate with intention, but I want to pretend I do.”

Not sure that any time someone posts cringe on HN counts as a tech take. Maybe we can bring AI into this?

What about, enslaving prisoners is not controversial if an AI is giving the orders, since it’s not a person oppressing another person. I’ll take my 500M VC now please.

https://archive.is/VjTly

Is “No gods, no masters, no admins” a slogan that people were seriously using? Frankly, I was just taking the piss with that bit.

This isn’t a copyright thing. This is a tech regulation thing, that creates the possibility for data protection agencies to stick their noses in AI company’s business.

It’s a thing unfortunately. Here’s an event by the minister of justice this month: https://crm.fdpbt.de/termin/4-blockchain-roundtable-code-law-wie-sich-unser-recht-smart-contracts-und-legal-tech

As a german, kind of a relief that the mouthpiece of Bitcoin in parliament is some used-to-be-AfD nobody. (AfD = far right, pretty politically isolated). This shit could have come from the FDP (pro-business liberals) just as well, and they control the ministry of finance!

I expect some crypto sympathizers in the FDP, but if weirdos like this are the loudest advocates they will probably want to avoid the association.