The generational discourse (younger folks don’t like ‘boomers’) is useful as a series of observations about how things are harder now for young people. College costs too much - it didn’t for boomers. Houses are too expensive in major cities where work is located. Healthcare is ridiculous. But most boomers are not really responsible for this - they’re passive observers like everyone else. It’s more an accretion of structural problems over time. Growth of government and concentrated business working together - at the expense of the middle class. Mass immigration and H1b visas for instance - this isn’t your grandparents screwing you over. ‘Boomers’ didn’t really do this - some very powerful people did who are still in control. Both parties contributed to it - so you can’t claim it was this or that voting block by age. Generational discourse sometimes strikes me as a distraction from the real targets.

REM Derangement Syndrome is real. REM’s first record came out in 1982. Before Miracle Legion was even a band. No shade on Miracle Legion but this ain’t true.

California is incomparable for its grandeur, beauty and ancient majesty. I say nothing of the people here, most of whom are a pack of fools. It’s the land, the soil and the earth here, damn you. Nature rejoices and emanates magic healing energies, secret mysteries of life.

Werner Herzog saw it coming

Actually, come to think about it, academia is populated with wimps & gamma males good at taking tests but crippled with a total absence of imagination.

Capra's The Name Above the Title, Kazan's A Life, Sam Fuller's A Third Face and all the writing of Werner Herzog tell the stories of men with the courage to truly live.

The West always wins by quality over quantity. If you haven't lived, don't write. More garbage won't make the Spirit take pity and show up knocking at your door. You can't out fuck Third World Rapists but you can grow a pair, live with honor and create something beautiful & true.

I've been so AI pilled, that I've done a complete 180. AI is a money incinerator. It's a collective hallucination. Everyone sees everyone else shoveling money into the incinerator and starts doing the same. Everyone just keeps shoveling money hoping that one day the engine starts running. And maybe it will. But it isn’t. AI is expensive. Especially when you have to actually pay for tokens. And the real systemic work, the stuff that replaces people because it is autonomous, runs on tokens. The question isn’t whether your AI systems are cheaper than Americans. It’s whether they’re cheaper than people in Latam, Southeast Asia, or Africa. They aren’t. AI also suffers from broken clock syndrome. When we task AI with doing a specific task, it can often give a quality or correct output. But the problems arise when we ask an AI to produce that type of output with different inputs. If you don't know the process it used to give you the initial correct output, there's no way to know if it can take your input type and generate a quality output repeatedly or if it is just a broken clock that happened to be right. So in order to build durable results with AI, you need to build the process the AI is going to use to generate the output. You need to build in oversight. And the more varied the inputs, the more complex the output, the more granularly you need to control the functions within the black box. Otherwise, your fail rate is going to be high. And this failure rate increases whenever there is nested processing and thinking. Then there is the cost of building these systems in the first place. If you actually want something that works, you need to invest considerable resources into the build. Senior talent to develop it, token costs during calibration, ongoing maintenance when it breaks, etc. The common argument against this is to “let AI do the building on its own.” The problem with this is AI doesn’t think. It doesn’t reason. It guesses the next most likely thing in a series. So it will build something for you that will look like a house, but you go in the basement and the foundation is upside down. It’s got wires running through water pipes. The hot and cold water taps are reversed. It looks right from a distance, but any deeper level of scrutiny the illusion falls apart. Nobody is making money from the “work” that AI is doing. If they were, we would have such a rapid consolidation of wealth nobody would know what is happening. Every industry would be consolidated overnight into unassailable monopolies. I hear from lots of people who say they are making money from using AI. And my question to them is how much did it cost to build and what’s the payback period. Large companies are pulling back on AI investment. These are the companies that should be most able to realize a positive ROI on AI. So the question is whether they are uniquely incompetent at development and deployment or are smaller businesses bad at calculating cost and ROI? This results in our current environment: The only people making money in AI are the people who are selling it. It remains to be seen when using AI is profitable and how much work it can profitably replace.

I think worst two things you can do now as a film-maker or fiction writer is to a) "write what you know" unless you actually make huge efforts to travel/personal research outside of your immediate social environment and b) plan carefully scenes and "moments" much ahead of time

Why I Believe Neither the AI Singularity nor Apocalypse are Nigh There are several fundamental errors that I believe the "maximalists" are making: (1) "You can sit down in an empty room and think really hard to figure out what's true." Also known as Aristotle's Folly, it's incredibly easy for humans to think this, but thinking this is probably what led to ~2000 years of technological near stagnation after Aristotle. This is relevant here because of folks thinking that AI will discover new technologies - for good or ill. Nope! People have been thinking that - and being wrong about it - for millenia. Sitting down and thinking really hard can give you new hypotheses, but the real world is SUPER complicated, and so you actually have to do experiments. They also can't just simulate it - you can calculate the size of computer needed to simulate from basic principles even really simple systems... and they turn out to require more bits than the number of atoms in the universe. Turns out that the only thing that simulate the universe is the universe. In other words, no new technologies are going to be found here(Footnote 1). (2) "They're maybe only so-so now, but look at the pace of development! They're self-improving, so they can become infinitely smart!" This is about like saying "In 1886, cars could only go 10 mph. By 1894, they were going 20 mph, and 40 mph by 1896. Average doubling time was 5 years, so by 1917, they'd be going the speed of sound, and breaking light speed by 2016. It ignores limitations inherent in the technology. First, current LLM are based on a very particular technology, around language. So they're SUPER good at language! And we've been saying for ever that programming and math are basically just languages... and it turns out that more or less, that's true. So they're great at that. But they have several really inherent constraints - first is that they're really just not structured to have a world model. Global consistency of a latent world just isn't a thing for them. This is inherent... and there's only so far you can go there. It's why they're NEVER going to be AGI, or be able to improve beyond a certain point. Could some OTHER basic approach produce AGI? Sure - but we might be trapped in a local minima here, and so development of really good LLM might make the production of machine super intelligences LESS likely. In any case, it doesn't really change much about their likelihood of arriving, aside from the improvement they may cause in any line of research. (3) Related to the above - they require a lot of physical plant. Note the other controversy associated with them - datacenters. So they can't have runaway growth, because they're already as "grown" as the data centers are. If you posit that they could Van Neumann machine their way out of it ... just build robots that built more physical plant, until the entire universe was converted to paperclips ... that's ALSO precisely as likely now as it was 10 years ago. It posits the existence of a human ability to generate nearly infinite industrial potential. Honestly, I'd be super happy if that was true - but it turns out physical plant is just about never that easy. There are potential catastrophes associated with AI - but they're more about enabling bad HUMAN actors. They will make it easier to hack computer systems, for sure, but they'll also make it easier for bad actors to do other nefarious things, because while they may never be AGI, they ARE already "artificial expertise" - and that alone is pretty powerful. But it's a very different kind of threat. Footnote 1: That's not saying they won't be really useful for research; I find them useful myself. But in the end, you have to do the work.

In the land of yappers, the man who reads even one book a month is king

Internet memes and jokes are fun. They're fun to make and fun to consume. It's also fun to learn new stuff, and discuss new ideas and concepts. But memes, jokes, and essays don't translate to cultural influence or political power. To gain actual power one needs to actually do things in the real world. Posting is low-effort. It's the most low-effort thing I do, which is why I do it for fun. But creating something tangible is hard. It takes a tremendous amount of work and a decent measure of competence. There's a huge gap between complaints and jokes and building something tangible. And people who are good at commenting and complaining are often shocked at how hard it is to actually get shit done. Often they're not up to the task. Because they don't have the drive or the competence (or the intelligence). Because again, creating something tangible (aka doing shit in the real world) is hard. Ironically this inconvenient fact about the nature of the world gives the pundits (amateur and professional) more to complain about. And since angry complaining is good for online engagement, they're under the illusion that the needle is actually moving--that they're actually influencing the world. But successful pundits have no such illusions. They know that what they're doing is mere entertainment. As such they'll say whatever is needed to keep you entertained. And if they're really good, they'll make the audience believe that listening to the pundit actually changes the world. Punditry as entertainment isn't necessarily a bad thing, because everyone need to be entertained. I need it, just like you need it. But don't make the mistake of thinking you're helping move the needle. Because you're not. Because that shit is actually hard. And you and the people you follow aren't competent enough to handle it. (Skin for engagement, because lord knows we all need engagement...)

AI will create Universal Basic Khat

I identify as Canadian-American

Raise your hand if you are part of the Canadian Diaspora. ✋🏿