I've periodically gotten myself some kind of LLM access during this whole hype cycle, and invariably go through a two stage process-
1) 'wow, it's neat a computer can do that now'
2) 'huh. that's not actually a thing I need- I'm cancelling this because everything else about this space makes me feel bad and gross'
The number of circumstances where I need slightly customized boilerplate is just not that large- and I have an 'email job'! I need to tell people things that are in my head, which the LLM cannot help with, I want to think things through by writing about them, which the LLM actual hinders, I want to sound like me, and if I'm creating something that's going to go out again and again the LLM is not good enough- any of the 'intelligence' benchmarks the model supposedly sail through these days are somehow overlooking that it only takes two or three prompts for the model to engage in some 'Clifford the Big Red Dog is not a dog because dogs are not big, except for Clifford' logical breakdown. Meanwhile, over on one side Ray Kurzweil is still wandering around muttering that we don't need to worry about anything ever again because AI will make food for us.
The one place I get any utility out of LLMs is as a search adjunct, but even then it's a close thing- Google's AI overviews actively annoy me, but Kagi has a 'summarize this page' button next to their search results that I use every once and a while to check for relevance, and, eh, occasionally handy. Notably it's slightly customized boilerplate being generated to help me think, not to communicate my thoughts. I'm building a document parsing thing as part of a work project that will probably have some kind of neural net deep in its innards, but making it do what we need is an actual, normal engineering problem- maybe it would have been flatly impossible before, but it still takes work.
“One political issue young American men are genuinely passionate about is their absolute right to lose a ton of money on an app in a really stupid way.” I laughed out loud in this Amtrak train, this observation is too real!!
The AI ads are incredibly annoying. They are vacuous because there are very few good use cases for this at a consumer level, so much so it makes really no sense to launch to consumers but they’ve aligned their product development pipelines behind AI and apparently we all have to suffer for it. It’s tempting to reuse a Thiel-ism: they promised us artificial intelligence and all we got was short substandard letters.
My conspiracy theory explanation for crypto sustaining is it got big enough and is facially legitimate enough (now that the crazy coins period has passed) that the haves recognized it as a tool for further wealth diversion and capital manipulation. It makes their giant piles of thinking money more flexible. Outside that use case, which really only benefits you if you are a hedge fund, crypto is a waste of resources. Full stop. It is like a traffic circle in the middle of a one way road. This also makes the haves happy because it is a wasteful activity to no good end that makes things overall worse for most people. So, they can make money, do more things with their accumulated wealth, and also screw with consumers in an indirect, difficult to tie back manner (buying up all the power and water and chips and whatnot, increasing demand for fossil fuel use, all to make fake money for criminals). If the haves had any imagination they'd have taken it over years ago.
That Meta ad is particularly bizarre. The pitch seems mostly to be that it will... automate using a search engine??
Fortunately the BBC Olympic coverage doesn't have ads, but I've been at the cinema a lot lately and hoo boy! The two stand-outs were a hilarious Crypto Dot Com ad presenting crypto as the plucky underdog ("They counted you out... mocked your ambition..."), and a more baffling Samsung ad for some kind of AI home. Apparently in my AI house of the future, "the washer knows what it's washing, the fridge knows what's in it, the oven knows what you're cooking, and the TV shows you the moments that matter". I'd say none of that seems particularly useful even if it works as advertised, but it's honestly unclear from the ad what it even means.
It honestly feels like Big Tech is just trying to do smart speakers again - but without any plausible new reason why their expensive toy is actually a home essential.
As election margins shrink, every niche constituency seemingly matters more and more, no? And while folks might not care about crypto or bitcoin, for a long time the crypto lobbyist have been pitching that these folks exist and are real / obsessive and...at least that last part is true (it's unclear to me just how many single issue crypto voters there are in reality tho).
Personally, these mythical crypto only voters seem like mythical pot legalization voters...folks always talk as if the first Party to endorse decriminalizing pot will win by 10 pts but at a state level it hasn't really happened that way...people split tickets with regards to ballot initiatives / elections.
Either way, seems like a pretty straight forward campaign promise to essentially buy votes...if the Executive Branch buys a billions in crypto...it will drive the price up and thus value up for folks owning bitcoin. Also, there is no legislation required to do that AFAIK.
It's unclear to me how real this purported "outreach" to crypto folks is, tho...seems more like freelance wishful thinking meant to disarm a ploy by Trump to literally buy votes...but we will see.
It is so stunningly depressing that Walz’s stances that help people are considered a liability while they are seriously considering a VP that wanted to join the IDF. We live in insane times.
... Warren literally fundraised off of "raising an anti-crypto army" (her words, not mine!).
I suspect anyone that could or should be classified as anti-crypto, you would deem as directionally correct and merely reasonable. That doesn't mean there aren't people opposed to it!
"It's hard to think of a more depressing sentence than 'Young men in their 20's and 30's from all walks of life and regions of the country are incredibly passionate about their right to buy, sell, create and hold digital assets,'": So true. That's pretty much what I thought about that sentence.
I doubt they really are from all walks of life, though. I suspect they're mostly white and bougie, because even if they can't really afford to lose the money they're losing, they need enough that they don't feel in immediate danger of becoming homeless or starving - most of them probably have at least some instinct for self-preservation.
I've periodically gotten myself some kind of LLM access during this whole hype cycle, and invariably go through a two stage process-
1) 'wow, it's neat a computer can do that now'
2) 'huh. that's not actually a thing I need- I'm cancelling this because everything else about this space makes me feel bad and gross'
The number of circumstances where I need slightly customized boilerplate is just not that large- and I have an 'email job'! I need to tell people things that are in my head, which the LLM cannot help with, I want to think things through by writing about them, which the LLM actual hinders, I want to sound like me, and if I'm creating something that's going to go out again and again the LLM is not good enough- any of the 'intelligence' benchmarks the model supposedly sail through these days are somehow overlooking that it only takes two or three prompts for the model to engage in some 'Clifford the Big Red Dog is not a dog because dogs are not big, except for Clifford' logical breakdown. Meanwhile, over on one side Ray Kurzweil is still wandering around muttering that we don't need to worry about anything ever again because AI will make food for us.
The one place I get any utility out of LLMs is as a search adjunct, but even then it's a close thing- Google's AI overviews actively annoy me, but Kagi has a 'summarize this page' button next to their search results that I use every once and a while to check for relevance, and, eh, occasionally handy. Notably it's slightly customized boilerplate being generated to help me think, not to communicate my thoughts. I'm building a document parsing thing as part of a work project that will probably have some kind of neural net deep in its innards, but making it do what we need is an actual, normal engineering problem- maybe it would have been flatly impossible before, but it still takes work.
“One political issue young American men are genuinely passionate about is their absolute right to lose a ton of money on an app in a really stupid way.” I laughed out loud in this Amtrak train, this observation is too real!!
The AI ads are incredibly annoying. They are vacuous because there are very few good use cases for this at a consumer level, so much so it makes really no sense to launch to consumers but they’ve aligned their product development pipelines behind AI and apparently we all have to suffer for it. It’s tempting to reuse a Thiel-ism: they promised us artificial intelligence and all we got was short substandard letters.
The negotiations about crypto doubtless take place in "vape-fiiled backrooms"
Hold my ketamine.
My conspiracy theory explanation for crypto sustaining is it got big enough and is facially legitimate enough (now that the crazy coins period has passed) that the haves recognized it as a tool for further wealth diversion and capital manipulation. It makes their giant piles of thinking money more flexible. Outside that use case, which really only benefits you if you are a hedge fund, crypto is a waste of resources. Full stop. It is like a traffic circle in the middle of a one way road. This also makes the haves happy because it is a wasteful activity to no good end that makes things overall worse for most people. So, they can make money, do more things with their accumulated wealth, and also screw with consumers in an indirect, difficult to tie back manner (buying up all the power and water and chips and whatnot, increasing demand for fossil fuel use, all to make fake money for criminals). If the haves had any imagination they'd have taken it over years ago.
That Meta ad is particularly bizarre. The pitch seems mostly to be that it will... automate using a search engine??
Fortunately the BBC Olympic coverage doesn't have ads, but I've been at the cinema a lot lately and hoo boy! The two stand-outs were a hilarious Crypto Dot Com ad presenting crypto as the plucky underdog ("They counted you out... mocked your ambition..."), and a more baffling Samsung ad for some kind of AI home. Apparently in my AI house of the future, "the washer knows what it's washing, the fridge knows what's in it, the oven knows what you're cooking, and the TV shows you the moments that matter". I'd say none of that seems particularly useful even if it works as advertised, but it's honestly unclear from the ad what it even means.
It honestly feels like Big Tech is just trying to do smart speakers again - but without any plausible new reason why their expensive toy is actually a home essential.
As election margins shrink, every niche constituency seemingly matters more and more, no? And while folks might not care about crypto or bitcoin, for a long time the crypto lobbyist have been pitching that these folks exist and are real / obsessive and...at least that last part is true (it's unclear to me just how many single issue crypto voters there are in reality tho).
Personally, these mythical crypto only voters seem like mythical pot legalization voters...folks always talk as if the first Party to endorse decriminalizing pot will win by 10 pts but at a state level it hasn't really happened that way...people split tickets with regards to ballot initiatives / elections.
Either way, seems like a pretty straight forward campaign promise to essentially buy votes...if the Executive Branch buys a billions in crypto...it will drive the price up and thus value up for folks owning bitcoin. Also, there is no legislation required to do that AFAIK.
It's unclear to me how real this purported "outreach" to crypto folks is, tho...seems more like freelance wishful thinking meant to disarm a ploy by Trump to literally buy votes...but we will see.
It is so stunningly depressing that Walz’s stances that help people are considered a liability while they are seriously considering a VP that wanted to join the IDF. We live in insane times.
"There is no anti-crypto constituency."
... Warren literally fundraised off of "raising an anti-crypto army" (her words, not mine!).
I suspect anyone that could or should be classified as anti-crypto, you would deem as directionally correct and merely reasonable. That doesn't mean there aren't people opposed to it!
"It's hard to think of a more depressing sentence than 'Young men in their 20's and 30's from all walks of life and regions of the country are incredibly passionate about their right to buy, sell, create and hold digital assets,'": So true. That's pretty much what I thought about that sentence.
I doubt they really are from all walks of life, though. I suspect they're mostly white and bougie, because even if they can't really afford to lose the money they're losing, they need enough that they don't feel in immediate danger of becoming homeless or starving - most of them probably have at least some instinct for self-preservation.
This is really great stuff. Would love to get Jacob Silverman's take on this morass as well.