Absolutely: the goal of "more money" reduces it to a simple proxy goal vs. complex holistic ones. It's a hard sell, especially in the face of media overload. We need a simple articulation of liberalism that's more compelling than greed in all the ways that matter.

Bit of both, maybe? I'm wondering how the writer would respond if it were pointed out he's unwittingly shilling for Sam Altman.

I know there's a bit of a public interest thing there, in that it's in the zeitgeist. But it seems pretty clear these articles are doing the AI industry's stock pumping for them.

The promise of impending AGI is far more compelling to the markets than data analysis utilities, albeit useful ones.

In the world of home automation, the word “smart” is applied liberally and loosely. In this case, for your adjective you get the ability to block neighbourhood cats and foxes from getting in, and also Mystery Beeps. It also puts cat icons on a map when they’re home, which I find vaguely amusing.

You know those prank boxes you plant in someone else’s space to drive them slowly nuts? I appear to have acquired 500, attached to every device in my house. Smoke alarm low on batteries? Dying smart cat flap? Ajar fridge? Humidity sensor? Alas, it stopped on its own, replaced by a nagging anxiety.

I believe the mistake here, Alec, is in bringing facts to the ongoing bullshit party. I wish we knew how to deal with this problem.

100%. I had a BMW i3 with the range extender engine, because it felt
essential when we bought it, and then regularly only remembered it existed when it occasionally started mid journey to avoid seizing up, I’d used it so infrequently. Switching to full EV was a no brainer.

This is true, it is an excellent fact, and he is also a lovely guy and I can heartily recommend him for all your guitar repair needs.

There will be someone in upper management at the BBC looking at that cravat, the headline, and sobbing.

Hey, remember when the Democrats were so pleased with themselves for having the balls to call Republicans "weird"?

In November, I moved my RSS hosting, setup a content filter on my home network and fiddled with Blueky's keywords to filter out all the Things I Can't Affect And Will Just Make Me Stressed For 4 Years. Not exaggerating, my daily routine is immeasurably better. Let's bring back You do You, huh?

...for clarity, as a pro doing due diligence on startups, there *is* some cool deployed AI stuff, in specific use cases where ML can cut through noise, spot patterns, help with data triage etc. No-one's writing whole production apps just with ChatGPT. It's a "give me a starting point" utility.

To be dangerously optimistic, outside the hype, employers still employ actual coders, writing real code. The "AI will replace coders" noise is just AI bro share price inflation tactics, plus whitewashing layoffs to correct for over-hiring. It's not real, at least not with this gen of LLMs.