BeefstickAI, which wants to build generative AI for dogs and doggy daycare providers, raised a $14M series A led by Gullible Ventures and LPSwindler (TechCrunch)
Jackboot, which wants to build an artificial intelligence to menace the populations of rebellious vassal states, raised an $8M seed round from guys who didn’t realize that women had sentience or human dignity until they had daughters (Bloomberg)
@danilo I see no evidence those (hypothetical, for legal reasons) guys can or did actually generalize their realization to all women. Their behavior is better explained by trying to protect their property (daughters, and more to the point, their future grandsons)
@matt@danilo fwiw somebody saw/boosted one of my posts from hachyderm the other day so probably not our whole instance? (and huge empathy for the "didn't know when to stop" — personally always feel like a guest/outsider on social media, but sure been there done that in other contexts 🫣)
As both incumbents and investors rush to do Everything With "AI," their singular focus ignores multiple areas that are ripe for building something new.
Here I argue that the rise of LLMs is converging with larger social issues that provoke demand for:
@danilo The section "Video as a counter to text spam" makes me really uncomfortable. I'll try to explain why in a constructive way.
First, of course, video poses accessibility challenges, particularly for blind and deaf people. Of course, these problems can be more or less overcome using computer vision and speech recognition, or "AI" if you prefer. But the results aren't as reliable as having the content in text in the first place.
> It can give you enormous detail about its creator. You can learn things about their identity, economic circumstances, where in the world they live.
sounds to me like a big step backward from text. There are real people who have worthwhile things to say but have reasons to keep those things hidden, or at least keep them from biasing their audience against their actual message.
Spam is a problem. But I'm not ready to give up on text.
Democratic leaders could put the same urgency into their official actions as the breathless, bullshit text messages I constantly get trying to push my limbic system into panicked campaign donations
@danilo the phrase "sorkinese liberalism" is going to haunt my nightmares. now if you'll excuse me I am going to ineffectually mutter "expand the court" under my breath while I scroll through a list of explainer articles that expound at length about what it means that 5/9 justices are open supporters of the confederacy, including, inexplicably, the only Black one
@danilo Constant screenshots and saving them where, Microsoft? On my hard drive, where I don't want that much space taken up? No, of course not. On your servers, where you'll undoubtedly use them to pull advertiser-friendly data.
When MS said Windows 10 would be the last version I install I wasn't expecting this to be the reason.
I don’t consume much YouTube but for years I’ve been making an exception for Jenny Nicholson’s deep dives on theme parks, which are a matter FORENSIC special interest for her
She offers us this FOUR HOUR post mortem of the Star Wars Hotel, and I’m going to watch every minute of the detailed analysis
@danilo is think the clearest example of heads-up-asses economic thinking involved with that is that guests didn’t get free Disney+ in their rooms (had to sign in to their personal accounts) despite the fact that the rooms were ridiculously expensive And it’d be a great way to give free tests to a captive audience who would likely sign up afterwards
you watch all these movies, read all these stories
it’s always an accident that the computer fucks us
it’s always “SHIT, despite the best of my intentions, there was an angle of this I did not consider, and it was from there that humanity was destroyed”
but the Silicon Valley guys are like “let’s make that one dystopia we saw, I call being the rich guy”
@danilo I think there‘s however an ontological break. Those sci-fi stories tend to be critical of one or more developments (capitalism, militarism, algorithmic value models) that billionaires and execs see as "has brought progress to the human society."
They‘re not critical of the execution in the first place.
@Sevoris@danilo that speaks even more to the lack of imagination. Phillip K. Dick didn’t feel the need to show why maybe manipulating a consciousness into being and dooming them to paranoid and violence might be a bad thing especially because of the dystopian backdrop.
There are more and more stories that ARE far more on the nose, like Ex Machina, where the billionaire weirdo is literally murdered and guys still stand up like “we have our own Eva!”