Another research poet drops, this time Zoë Hitzig from Open AI https://archive.is/dfuzP Are research poets a thing I just didn’t know about?

She’s quitting because of the introduction of ads, but falls short of either realising or just admitting that OpenAI never cared about safety - they cared about hedging expensive legal risk.

Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?

Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?

Is this a political long play to maintain her desirability as a future hire?

Someone should write both a paper and a poem about that.

Especially for a guy named Sharma living in the US. It doesn’t take too many footsteps outside the Bay area for him to be in literal physical danger right now.

He also less cryptically posted his plans and resignation letter. (Edit: memory lapse) xcancel version of resignation letter post. Tl;dr moving to the UK (understandably) and doing a poetry degree (I didn’t accidentally critique someone into quitting, did I?)

Honestly, I hope he finds both what he’s looking for and also what he’s not looking for but still equally needs. For example, a personal perspective not entrenched in institutional ontological frameworks.

Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem is going to be very surprised when he hears about his conversion.

Oh yes, I understand how they go about smoothing everything over.

But, given the details we know, don’t you think:
• one corporate resignation,
• one months-prior bureaucrat firing, and,
• one investigation into a former PM,
is pretty far removed from could be considered a proportional fallout?

This is the theme of almost all of the “toppling”. Mostly they’ve just… resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there’s less heat.

Headlines like this make it sound like there’s been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it’s really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson’s firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that’s as harsh as it’s got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?

They’re all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.

I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?

The difference was that he fired his PR agents in 2020 who stopped him from ruining their carefully created advertising. He never was that person.

Perhaps something like this: https://lemmy.world/post/42528038/22000735

Deferring responsibility for risk and compliance obligations to AI is bound to lead to some kind of tremendous problem, that’s a given. But the EU has been pretty keen lately on embedding requirements into their newer digital-realm laws about giving market regulators access to internal documents on request.

This is not to suggest it’s anywhere close to a certainty that an Enron will happen though. There is still the exceptionally large problem of company executives are part of the power structures which selectively target who to prosecute, if their lobbyists haven’t already succeeded in watering the legislation down to be functionally useless before they’re in force. So it will take a huge fuck up and public pressure for any of the countries to make good on their own rules.

Given that almost all the media heat from the Trump-Epstein files has been directed at easy target single public personalities, completely ignoring the obvious systemic corruption by multiple corporate entities, I don’t have high hopes for that part. But if the impending fuck up and scale of noncompliance is big enough, there’s a chance there will be audits and EU courts involved.

It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

I read both of these and what struck me was how both studies felt remarkably naive. I found myself thinking: “there’s no way the authors have any background in the humanities”. Turns out there’s 2 authors, lo and behold, both with computer science degrees. This might explain why it feels like they’re somehow incredulous at the results - they’ve approached the problem as evaluating a system’s fitness in a vacuum.

But it’s not a system in a vacuum. It’s a vacuum that has sucked up our social system, sold to bolster the social standing of the heads of a social construct.

Had they looked at the context of how AI has been marketed, as an authoritative productivity booster, they might have had some idea why both disempowerment and reduced mastery could be occurring: The participants were told to work fast and consult the AI. What a shock that people took the responses seriously and didn’t have time to learn!

I’d ask why Anthropic had computer scientists conducting sociological research, but I assume this part of output has just been published to assuage criticism of trust and safety practices. The final result will probably be adding another line of ‘if query includes medical term then print “always ask a doctor first”’ to the system prompt.

This constant vacillation between “it’s a revolution and changes our entire reality!” and “you can’t trust it and you need to do your own research” from the AI companies is fucking tiresome. You can’t have it both ways.

Same for Japan. No chance they’re wearing full hiking boots or sneakers inside the house in Japan - the shoe cabinet is built in right next to the front door of houses, tiny apartments, temples, many restaurants, etc. I assume the schools still do too.

I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.

Pick Up That Can

Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.

Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I don’t know how much of that was because of Chomsky’s presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.

At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring

Glib jibes aside, I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that aren’t just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. I’m horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.

So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein

But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so

How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?

Commenting “This raises important questions worth discussing. The details matter here and I think we need more transparency around how decisions like this get made.” on an illustration of a hedgehog on a bicycle pulling baby hedgehogs in an egg carton AND on a post about using bullet measurements to help Americans visualize 1cm? Slop.

The CIA wrote a document in 1990 “Yugoslavia transformed”. It briefly discusses increasing repression of Albanian Kosovars advocating autonomy, and sporadic ethnic conflict, but at that point it even considered military force involvement in secession attempts unlikely. If there were a massive human rights abuse situation at the time of Laber’s article, also 1990, how did the CIA miss that?

It’s overall a good write up. I think for me there’s are some pieces missing though, which I would love to see further explored, although it is not possible yet to fully do so. For example:

• Why are Jeri Laber’s files on Yugoslavia between 1980-1984 restricted until 2060?
• Why is her correspondence with the dept of state between 84 and 87 restricted until 2060?
• Why are there almost no files listed at all from HRW between 1984 and 1990 for Yugoslavia?
• Why did she go there in 1988?
• Why are Ivana Nizich’s 1991 files on Yugoslavia and the World Bank/IMF information restricted until 2067?
• Why are Amnesty International docs by HRW also restricted?

If it weren’t for the now releases CIA files from the 80s and 90s, you’d think the area had simply disappeared entirely.

Who needs pure AI model collapse when you can have journalists give it a more human touch? I caught this snippet from the Australian ABC about the latest Epstein files drop

The Google AI summary does indeed highlight Boris Nikolić the fashion designer if you search for only that name. But I’m assuming this journalist was using ChatGPT, because if you see the Google summary, it very prominently lists his death in 2008. And it’s surprisingly correct! A successful scraping of Wikipedia by Gemini, amazing.

But the Epstein email was sent in 2016.

Dors the journalist perhaps think it more likely is the Boris Nikolić who is the biotech VC, former advisor for Bill Gates and named in Epstein’s will as the “successor executor”? Info literally all in the third Google result, even in the woeful state of modern Google. Pushed past the fold by the AI feature about the wrong guy, but not exactly buried enough for a journalist to have any excuse.

Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.