Hackworth

I can hear her voice.

I might’ve run this one in reverse.

Caveat on the drug thing: There is a list of who has a medical cannabis Rx. And I suppose any prescription… do opiods count?

-Dr. Steve Brule

So what I meant by “doubt they’ll be able to play the good guy for long” is exactly that no corpo is your friend. But I also believe perfect is the enemy of good, or at least better. I want to encourage companies to be better, knowing full well that they will not be perfect. Since Anthropic doesn’t make image/video/audio generators, they may just not see CSAM as a directly related concern for the company. A PAC doesn’t have to address every harm to be a source of good.

As for self-harm, that’s an alignment concern, the main thing they do research on. And based on what they’ve published, they know that perfect alignment is not in our foreseeable future. They’ve made a lot of recent improvements that make it demonstrably harder to push a bot to dark traits. But they know damn well they can’t prevent it without some structural breakthroughs. And who knows if those will ever come?

I read that 404 media piece when it got posted here, and this is also probably that guy’s fault. And frankly, Dario’s energy creeps me out. I’m not putting Anthropic on a pedestal here, they’re just… the least bad… for now?

They’re advocating for transparency and for states to be able to have their own AI laws. I see that as positive. And as part of that transparency, Anthropic publishes its system prompts, which go through with every message. They devote a significant portion to mental health, suicide prevention, not enabling mania, etc. So I wouldn’t say they see it as “acceptable.”

FWIW, Anthropic did just fund a pro-regulation super PAC to oppose OpenAI’s/Plantir’s pro-Trump/anti-regulation PAC, and:

The Pentagon is at odds with artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic over safeguards that would prevent the government from deploying its technology to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance. Reuters

But I kinda doubt they’ll be able to play the good guy for long.

I eventually ran out of energy for the requisite hyper-aware perception management.

Anthropologist William Stanner said that the Dreaming was best understood by non-Aboriginal people as “a complex of meanings”.

Something almost Platonic.

I imagined that being reported on by Hunter S. Thompson, for some reason.

Also, paying for a with-ads subscription like Hulu-with-ads. I honestly don’t get it.

Generative fill saves me a bunch of time in Photoshop.

I’m concerned that they’ve already undermined trust in the elections so much that neither side will accept a losing outcome as legitimate. The larger attack on democracy has already succeeded. I hope I’m wrong.

Similar to what happens to druids when the environment gets corrupted, I imagine. Gotta start learning the language of the microplastics and PFAS. Possible Druid to Tinkerer pipeline.

Same. I stopped buying most things. I haven’t ordered anything online since 2019. I wouldn’t say I do it to “fuck over the powerful,” though. I can’t imagine they care too much. Interacting with companies just became more and more toxic, until I couldn’t be arsed to do it - beyond the bare minimum. There are a few exceptions, but I can already see the enshittification starting with those too.

Edited to only include the correction.

They’ve been torching research and database access left and left. I assume they’ve already started burning books.

Uh huh

~25 years ago, in film school, we learned to cut physical film around the same time we learned to cut digitally with an NLE. The debates after class centered around whether digital would ever catch up with film, and what that would mean if/when it did. I interned, then worked for the only local tv station. It took 10 people behind the scenes to run a live newscast. A decade after I graduated, live newscasts in markets 4x the size were being run by 3 people and a ton of automation. Reporters used to have photogs with them; now they often have to set up and record themselves. And it was very strange to watch YouTube turn my career into something the general public kinda does.

That switch, though, did mean that a lot more small-mid companies started hiring videographers to regularly produce and upload videos. These are often solitary jobs, where the videographer is a department of 1 (maybe 2). So we ended up with a job landscape where there are far fewer ensemble and journalist positions, and more isolated, corporate positions. And now that “everyone can make videos with their phone,” the value propositions have changed. I’m not a fan, but I’ve made it work. I don’t know how much of this will be directly applicable to what’s coming with AI, but I figure it might be of some use to someone.

E: Oh, and that tv station I worked for in college no longer exists. The closest big city took over reporting (poorly) about it. This is becoming more common, as the companies that own stations have gotten larger. So that’s one less avenue for new film grads to break into the market.