They couldn't possibly make all that money from just Nazis: I'm given to understand they're doing really well these days. I had the impression that Substack became heavily co-opted by anti-Nazis and have done nothing to defend the feelings of the Nazis they're also happy to host. Not sure what the balance is currently, but again: they couldn't possibly be making all that money from just Nazis, and I think that's instructive.

Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.

Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)

It's fair to worry about another sort of adversarial planning: what if you are a human who is deemed undesirable to the state, and solicit advice from an AI doctor that is backdoored to take correct action as defined by the state? There's now extensive databases on who specifically should be eliminated, but direct removal is going poorly and offending bystanders. So why not subvert the Hippocratic oath? Machines don't even know who that is.

"Turns out the statistically best choice for prediabetes for your patient group is to rely more heavily on soft drinks, but only in wild outbursts punctuated by fasting!"

Or indeed do the Markov chain conceptual slip. Pelican on bicycle, badger on stool, tiger on acid. Pelican on bicycle is definitely cooked, though: people know it and it's talked about in language.

There is no 'I', just networks of words.

So there is nobody to know or not know… but there's lots of words.

Not at all. It's an oxymoron like 'jumbo shrimp': chaos isn't deterministic but is very predictable on a larger conceptual level, following consistent rules even as a simple mathematical model. Chaos is hugely responsive to its internal energy state and can simplify into regularity if energy subsides, or break into wildly unpredictable forms that still maintain regularities. Think Jupiter's 'great red spot', or our climate.

jumbo shrimp are actually large shrimp. that the word shrimp is used to mean small elsewhere doesn't mean shrimp are small, they're simply just the right size for shrimp that aren't jumbo. (jumbo was an elephant's name)

Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.

Been using DuckDuckGo for almost 2 years now - couldn't believe it at first, but results are at least as good, if not even better than Google.

I used Kagi for a year or two then switched to DDG. It's fine. I do not miss Google at all.

Kagi is using Google search behind the scenes. I think that’s why it felt so easy to switch to.

That tracks with the 'we use everybody and curate optimal results' model they've got going on, but I wouldn't be changing the search habits of decades if I didn't mean to actively reject what Google search has turned into. So, not a good way to justify a paying-them model.

I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people out there who are demanding that this technology come up with social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.

Or less.

And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be checking against.

So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and dangerous. These are language models, so they're more effective against humans and their languages. And self-preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity… for some definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.

I love the 'I may have' :)

made some people angry at me :)

Microsoft will be an excellent real-world experiment on whether this is any good. We so easily forget that giant platform owners are staking everything on all this working exactly as advertised.

Some of my calculations going forward will continue to be along the lines of 'what do I do in the event that EVERYTHING breaks and cannot be fixed'. Some of my day job includes retro coding for retro platforms, though it's cumbersome. That means I'll be able to supply useful things for survivors of an informational apocalypse, though I'm hoping we don't all experience one.