Only a certain subset of us that happen to be fond of repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot and acting like spoiled children in adult bodies with no actual adults in the room. The rest of us are genuinely horrified that our country is now run by mentally challenged psychotic lunatics.
we've totally earned this, so i'm not offended by what you've said. but i'll just step in here to say i fucking hate this stuff.
you could easily argue that there are plenty of things our government has done that matter much more in the grand scheme of things, but the rampant twitter / x meme posts and absolute horseshit like this "arcade" site disgust me. it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.
What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.
I nod along with Howey here on every point save one. Namely, it is simply false that the apocalyptic narratives are full-cloth marketing products that are cynically engineered and used.
For better or worse, the hold that Yudkowski-flavoured big-R Rationalism holds over us all is significant. Academics (like Cal Newport) seem committed to belittling it as a sort of cult-sex-flavoured philosophy fan fic, and writers (Zitron, Howey, Doctorow) seem equally committed to a cui-bueno wake-up-sheeple take.
But my position is: no matter how florid the polycule, or naive the argumental ligaments, or potentially lucrative the bezzle, it is still worthwhile taking the stated intellectual commitments of the people making the tech.
Take people seriously. And, unless you really, really, really know for certain that they are operating in bad faith, you are to regard yourself as stuck with their putative sincerity.
This is the "principle of charity" familiar from undergrad philosophy classes, and it is an epistemic moral value worth holding onto in 2026.
Their erratic behavior, ridiculous claims, failed predictions, fervent nationalism and escalationism, constant lying, mass manipulation, and terribly misaligned incentives don't make it particularly easy. Being charitable to actively malicious people that benefit from putting you under their control forever will hurt you a lot faster than the imaginary murderous AI.
We're living in a weird and unique time in which "misaligned AI", a la OpenAI's so-called "rogue agents", clearly exists, but buying into the most popularized conceptual framework describing these things doesn't seem to do a great job explaining what they actually do and how they've actually been able to do it.
People formed their opinions on LLMs in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT was first released and taking the world by storm and then never updated them after nearly 4 years of improvements.
Hell, just being able to search the Internet did MASSIVE things for reducing hallucinations.
Ask a color blind person to spell "red" and "green", then ask them how many red apples are on the table.
LLMs work on tokens. They literally cannot see individual letters. Yet, unlike humans, they can instantly create a tool to solve this task for them and never be stumped by it again.
It is important to understand how this technology works. It isn't magic. Your example is solid. Similar to the Chinese Room.
Do you think your legislators or most users understand tokens and predictions and what is going on? Do you think that those who bombed a school using it know this?
Until frontier models can account for the disparity between what they can do and what the person (or other agent) is asking, we will continue to suffer bad information used like good information.
That tokens cannot count letters like that is not a brain-dead gotcha. Ignoring how humans are using these models is lacking in critical understanding of the real world. People are literally going to die due to humans not understanding how this works (and already have). True brain-dead, and body-dead.
Yet the market can remain irrational for much longer than we can reason about.
The numbers are, as you (and Ed Zitron) point out, bananas, and the financial house of cards will collapse -- but there is enough fin-de-siecle chaos happening right now that anything is possible.
AI seems to be particularly useful in murdering people, so, for example, if there were another globe-wide hot war, it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.
In which case, the "bezzle" continues until the state collapses, whenever that is (depends who wins the war ;D)
The original sin of any modern forecast is proceeding from reason and sensibility. Now is the hour of the batshit.
> Yet the market can remain irrational for much longer than we can reason about.
It's already overdue.
> it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.
In the USA? Maybe. In its adversaries? Definitely no. Thanks to Trump's "Make America Negligible Again" campaign being extremely successful.
Adversaries and enemies alike, no exception, nobody trusts US any more, so everyone is already building their own stuff to get independent ASAP. Tech-bros have already lost their influence outside of the US.
This is because it is valley jargon and we are all saturated with it. You may not have heard it before, but it is structurally close to similar concepts, eg "frontier model", that you got there without noticing.
It was still shit tier comms for communicating with the whole planet, but yes, for the inner loop, it was succinct and clear.
Valley jargon isn't a nerd vs jock thing these days, and hasn't been for a good while. It's more quasi-intellectual sophistry sprinkled with tech vocabulary.
The bicycle -- a simple method of transport powered entirely by humans -- used analogically to prove a point about [clears throat] automation.
I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.
*breaks, and also, your conclusion ignores the words typed by the article's author in the piece you presumably read, where it is reported that Astra did it mostly on its own.
Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better
