“Sam Altman Absolutely Hates the Idea of People.”

FTFY.

When we think of kings we tend to think of their late medieval/early modern European incarnation, but that was a bit of a historical anomaly—the end stage of a thousand-year-long process of the monarchy being captured by the aristocracy. But the aristocracy was the older institution of the two, and the more malignant.

In ancient times kings were generally opposed to aristocrats, drawing on popular support to curb the natural tendency of the aristocracy to extract so much wealth from the lower classes that violent revolutions would result. (Think the Roman Republic, where wealthy senators were terrified of a popular leader becoming king and eliminating the Senate.)

So it’s not that CEOs are becoming kings—it’s that plutocrats are subverting yet another in a long line of institutions designed to contain them.

Spez: “I’m not logged in here with you—you’re logged in here with me!”

This article reads like an advance obituary written ten years ago—it doesn’t mention anything he’s done since 2015, or anything about the circumstances of his death.

Funny—the only segments of the academic community where Haidt is taken seriously are the right-wing anti-“woke” sections that Meta otherwise promotes. I guess his push to ban teens from the internet was too extreme even for them.

If there’s any hope of reforming the presidency in a meaningful way post-Trump, it’ll be necessary to show how the intended methods failed. Not using them out of expediency will just maintain the illusion that they could have been an effective solution.

Then I realized it’s a Libertarian organization

What organization, Mondoweiss?

grand-theft-GPU

You have to steal the hardware IRL before you can play the game on it.

Sure, but the Chinese and other models in the source study were no better than the US ones.

Customers having their own AI-generated art printed isn’t consumption, though—how many people are getting prints of art that someone else generated?

I think generating AI slop from their own prompts feels empowering to people because it’s still closer to what they had in their heads than anything they could have created otherwise. But on the consuming end, it becomes clear that there’s no actual information content that couldn’t have been conveyed more easily by the source text.