gerikson

This landed on HN like a dead fish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41722985

Another submission with what looks like a lot more positive spin got more reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726603

Edit choice comment from the latter

If you assume that the costs of inference would continue to decrease while they would be able to get billion people hooked on 42 per dollar plan..

That’s $0.5 trillion revenue rate

A billion people. Paying the equivalent of a premium streaming service. For something that can't even generate pr0n.

Color me skeptical.

To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.

The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!

Yeah I’m sure it’s helpful sometimes. The issue is it useful enough to enough people to justify burning billions of dollars on training?

Ed isn’t criticizing GenAI, he’s criticizing OpenAi’s business model. Big difference.

As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they're actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

Thank you Ed for validating my off-the-cuff comment I made on the train this morning:

https://lobste.rs/s/92qcme/insatiable_hunger_open_ai#c_vgiyrk

ask an AI generated podcast bro

Oh wait, you're actually serious.

I am neutral on MSFT - to me it's a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it's not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it's really impressive how they've gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple's 1984 ad, via the "Halloween Papers" era where they were every Linux weenie's biggest boogeyman, to today's bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they're not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot's Recall feature also know they're the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything's "political", I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as "countercultural" but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.

Stephen King is busy working him in as a villain in a new novel.