While a good description of how AI Doom has progressed during 2024, I think the connection to regulation (at least the EU regulation, I am not familiar with what was proposed in California) is of the mark.

The EU regulation isn’t aimed at AI Doom, it’s aimed at banning and regulating real world practices. Think personal data, not AI going conscious.

Nah, this is real profits. Real profits turned over to Microsoft:

Microsoft’s current agreement with OpenAI entitles it and other investors to take a slice of profits until they collect $100 billion.

Heads, Microsoft makes tens of billions in profit on their investment. Tails and Microsoft keeps Open AI in a tight embrace until they have sucked everything they want from them.

Would be smart, except they are sucking poison. Let’s see how Microsoft’s monopoly position can get them out of this jam!

“This is the perfect opportunity to describe retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).” We assume the family had already threatened violence if he mentioned bitcoin.

It is also lovely that the quote follows directly after Google’s glue in pizza. Just pivot to something else.

But since I don’t trust the linked AI fondler’s description, what is RAG? Sounds like an LLM stapled to a search engine.

And his actual name, Alexander de Pleffel-Johnson, also scans “generic English aristocrat.”

Hence the stage personality.

Biblically accurate gymnastics.

“We can’t get people to eat less meat and more vegetables, therefore we must invest billions so that we can get to the logical endpoint: million dollars steaks!”

“Or at least, that is what we told them. Now, feast on the most expensive meat yet as we now can literally eat up the planets resources!”

Evil laughter as the billionaires twirl their mustaches and salivates.

Great article.

I have long suspected that it was a dead end, because at most you get a slurry that you then have to process. We already have that, the slurry is just made of vegetables. Growing animal cells in a way is way more complex then mashing peas or beans and make processed food from that.

Or you know, be unafraid to try tofu.

But they make up for it in volume!

I think it is a reference to Funko calling the Itch guy’s mom. Which they apparently did.

I started thinking about when Emma Goldman’s partner Alexander Berkman tried to kill a 19th century robber baron who had sent in Pinkerton to murder workers into ending a strike.

One can make an argument about the economic conditions creating the condition’s for what the anarchists back then called “the propaganda of the deed”. But that isn’t where I am going. Instead let’s look at the aftermath.

From an assassination perspective, the quality of the assassination was lacking. Also, Wikipedia (my bold):

Frick was back at work within a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman’s actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[5] Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.[19]

In other words, today’s robber barons gets less sympathy than the O.G. kind. That’s a bit interesting.

A one with zeros is the roundest number?

In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.

So they named the product sucking the data after the Facehugger? At least they know that they are in the abomination business. Will they be releasing an AI named Bursting Chest?

It says it isn’t clickbait in the headline!

Do people really get on the internet and expect other people to lie?!

Regarding OFAC, making payment to any ransomware illegal, I have long pondered if participating in cryptocurrencies that is or has been used for ransomware payments shouldn’t be considered under money laundering laws. That might make most cryptocurrencies illegal, or rather shine the light on the main useages already being illegal.

Battlechess both could choose legal moves and also had cool animations. Battlechess wins again!

When I run into “Climate change is a conspiracy” I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go “Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?” and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.

At work, I’ve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that’s why it’s called work.

The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save… (drumroll)… Approximately nothing!

But if we hadn’t done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.

Having problems fitting enough GPT-3’s under that trenchcoat?

I have a suspicion, but let me first check with the AI in my phone:

“Cybercheck committed the m-u-r…”, AI suggests “murder”! That is it, case cracked!

As my AI figured out, Cybercheck themselves committed the murders and then probably created their service to cover it up!