side note, but I freaking love Machine of Death. what a cool book that came into existence in such a weird way

The really annoying thing is, the people behind AI surely ought to know all this already. I remember just a few years ago when DALL-E mini came out, and they’d purposefully not trained it on pictures of human faces so you couldn’t use it to generate pictures of human faces – they’d come out all garbled. What’s changed isn’t that they don’t know this stuff – it’s that the temptation of money means they don’t care anymore

Psh, I only use the Flushvalve Pro Vowel Pack. You can’t beat them in terms of value for your money.

The bill mandates safety testing of advanced AI models and the imposition of “guardrails” to ensure they can’t slip out of the control of their developers or users and can’t be employed to create “biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.” It’s been endorsed by some AI developers but condemned by others who assert that its constraints will drive AI developers out of California.

Man, if I can’t even build homemade nuclear weapons, what CAN I even do? That’s it, I’m moving to Nevada!

It’s so wild how ChatGPT and this “style” of AI literally didn’t exist two years ago yet we’re all expected to believe it’s this essential, indispensable, irreplaceable tool that people can’t live without, and actually you’re the meanie for suggesting people do something the exact same way they would have in 2022 instead of using the environmental-disaster spam machine

Unbanking the banked

yeah, I was more thinking of like my phone’s notes app lol. Also, freeform computer note-taking requires weird hardware and can’t search the text of my notes, so, still a tradeoff…

I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.

Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.

God, that would be the dream, huh? Absolutely crossing my fingers it all shakes out this way.