just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why

(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)

The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf

as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!

~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it’s the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!

(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don’t know if it could’ve gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)

meanwhile so many people (both those who’ve come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don’t even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won’t hold out (it’s a truism that at some threshold people will start asking “wait why am I paying for this?”) and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but… fuck. there’s been so much damage from years of this shit

I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can’t hold), but I also grimace about what’s coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)

this is one of those things that’s, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that’s fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!

to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it’s playing on the definition of the conceptual “smart” computer, as it relates to human experience. there’s been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole “omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)” arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it’s one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express “grappling with $x to make sense of it”

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)

personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it’s a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it’s a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: “is it my knowledge of this domain that’s spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?” is the question that comes up, and it’s surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering

on the whole I think it’s often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it’s also worth keeping an eye on how much it’s a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something™ is up

hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?

this post extremely quickly goes many places I didn’t come close to expecting

impressive.

clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs

aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho

linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you

AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption

an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!

that’s why you should keep your at-risk data on quantum ai blockchain!!~

“and if we’re making a ton of money tomorrow, just imagine 3 months from now!”

I asked the other day whether they’ve actually spoken with these people that they keep posting such takes about, and thus far my presumption is “they haven’t”. posts like the above reinforce that view

oi no spoilers ;p

I’ve learned so much langdesign and stuff over the years simply by hanging around plt nerds, didn’t even need to spend for a single dragon book!

(although I probably have a samizdat copy of it somewhere)

which naturally leads us to: having to fix a portage overlay ~= “compiler engineer”

wonder what simonw’s total spend (direct and indirect) in this shit has been to date. maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?

I was curious so I dug up the post and then checked property prices for the neighbourhood

$2.6~4.8m

being thiel’s idea guy seems to pay pretty well

customer: “why is my FSD not working? I’ve got my hands off the wheel but I’m stuck in a parking spot”

tesla support: “nono, you misheard, it’s Fool Self Driving!”

(source (archive))

gigabyte selling shovels (and not even just random shovels, specialty shovels that need a fixed type of mobo to use)

not gonna spend much effort on it now but if someone runs into an actual worthwhile review showing training performance numbers I’d be keen to see (my expectations are that it still does not do very much, and that runtime quality still underperforms relative to VC-subsidised platforms)

irl winced at this

yep, I was seeing some folks reckon it might be 20~30x what they’d make in later royalties. I’m not knocking the suit or the value to authors - mostly just wishing it were more so it might cause an even sharper effect

given the run rates all these fuckers have, I half expect they feel glad it’s “as low as it is”. couple of the authors I’ve seen speak about it reckon pay out better to them (once off) than they tend to get from book royalties (I saw chisnall and some others post around it earlier). precedent from this is probably a good thing, even if I wish it went harder (esp given how likely “a fine you can afford is just a tax” is to develop as a normal situation)

re burn rates: openai confirmed in the last day or so that it expects a $118b burn through 2028. fucking obscene

snore