Amazon unveils AI-Powered AR glasses for delivery drivers.

The response I’ve seen from actual drivers has been somewhere between “eh? I guess?” and “fuck you, pay me”.

The quote that sticks in my head is

You are not expected to believe any of this stuff, but rather to believe in the predatory utility of saying it.

Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that “crime is now legal”? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.

Ave! True to Flexor Digitorum!

I guess we’re moving into the “take advantage of the mentally unwell” stage of trying to figure out a way to make money off this shit, also known as the Gacha Gambit.

Bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it pays off. (It pays off in human misery)

Count me as excited to see where this goes. Absolutely fascinating to see this guy dredged from the abyss of history and see how cleanly it rhymes with modern horrible. And to see that the inability of bigots to write a goddamn joke isn’t a recent loss.

Also the intro and outro compilations were beautiful. Very well done.

Have they checked him for scurvy? Apparently scurvy can be a problem for these asshats.

That sounds really neat for all of 30 seconds before your cat knocks over their water bowl mid-fight and needs your immediate attention, thus reminding you why pause functions exist at all.

Scott’s Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don’t forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.

Parasitic Disruption is a great name for the overall structure. I think another way of framing it in economic terms would be to talk about the opportunity cost of innovation. Even if we take hucksters and monorail salesmen out of the picture (which is exceptionally generous steelmanning imo) we’re looking at the fact that the “disruptive” option has a whole lot of unknowns on the cost side of the sheet in terms of timeline, monetary costs, downsides and tradeoffs, etc. The upsides are also unknown, but are usually assumed to be “perfectly solves the problem”. On the other hand, the boring, well-understood option is going to have very specific answers to those questions. That skews the discussion strongly against actually doing anything, and creates a lot of room for the aforementioned grifters to work.

I think this framing also gives us some tools to fight back. You can easily turn those unknowns into horror stories of boondoggles past, and focus on the major advantage of being able to start today. The opposite of state-of-the-art is rarely “unusably antiquated” and the cost of leaving the problem - be it energy independence, mass rapid transit, or whatever - unsolved and festering is something we can push.

I mean that’s the fundamental problem, right? No matter how much better it gets, the things it’s able to do aren’t really anything people need or want. Like, if I’m going to a website looking for information it’s largely because I don’t want to deal with asking somebody for the answer. Even a flawless chatbot that can always provide the information I need - something that is far beyond the state of the art and possibly beyond some fundamental limitation of the LLM structure - wouldn’t actually be preferable to just navigating a smooth and well-structured site.

Also I can guarantee that “her” system prompt includes the phrases “truth-seeking” “fun loving” and “kinda hot”.

You know, I think that even the brick comparison still favors the traditional dictionary. After all, if you wanted to use it for traditional brick purposes like holding doors, weighing down papers, or throwing at [redacted], you would need to invest in a bunch of GPUS and burn them out generating a bunch of worthless slop, spending God only knows how much water, energy, and time. I want to save the rainforest as much as the next guy, but I think it’s obvious that the paper brick is far more cost-effective for both the user and the environment. And provided you can clean the dirt and blood off afterwards, you can even still use it as a dictionary.

I imagine it helps with the slightly plastic look that skin still gets too

Shaka, when the walls fell?

Sadly no. Though thank you for making my life immeasurably worse by sharing that.

God save me from arguing with HPMoR readers.

I need you to understand how nearly I added myself to even more watch lists because of that analogy. Avalanche!

My name is Rocco Pa’perclip Basilico Yudkowski Way…

It is kinda fun to think about the counterfactual world where this shit had worked as expected on the first try but for obvious reasons didn’t hold up in copyright court, making the entire catalogue used for training functionally public domain.

Don’t mock me dammit, I’m allowed to dream.