Even though things are bad now, the conservative movement in America is likely to be severely fractured post-Trump. I don’t think there’ll be a unified movement there for Yud to flop into. I think the shape of Yud’s conservatism will skew towards a) conserving the pop culture he lives and breathes and b) conserving the idea that computers are (or can become) inscrutably superintelligent entities that are wholly separate entities from their users, rather than tools for humans. He’ll probably always find an audience among SaaS CEOs who are desperate to cling to their annual recurring revenue.

and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance

Calculus III, vector calculus

Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It’s not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There’s at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That’s the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn’t slop-adjacent.

Thank you @Kiriko for relaying this. The following will be directed at the original author. As the official KDE fedi account sharply responded to David earlier, I’m assuming there’s a chance they might see it. Charitably assuming this is not chatbot slop (likely a bad assumption),

where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.

This is flatly nonsensical. How would this be in any way better than secure synchronization of existing configuration files? I.E. an integration with existing tools like, say, rsync or SyncThing? An interface that changes itself while the user is using it is a recipe for end-user frustration and, ultimately, rejection. I use KDE across a couple of devices, both conventional desktop and touchscreen, and its existing tools for panel configuration and the like are acceptable and worthy of further effort. Continuous “per-moment” automatic reconfiguration of the user interface – what seems to be the proposal here, if this fanciful jargon is at all parsable – is making the assumption that your black-box, poorly-debuggable inference engine knows what the user wants better than the user does.

Do I even need to mention how ridiculous it would be to replace discrete settings files, parsable by both human and machine, with a black-box database of vector weights that may have variable performance across mobile and desktop hardware?

The glaring risk here is taking the alienation users feel at a point-release interface change, say, from Win10 to Win11, and turning it into a continuous-integration experience. The experience being proffered here is very likely to end up being, “Where did that option go that I only need 1 time in 20? Why was it hidden without my express input? What the hell is this stupid fucking computer doing???” and the user taking their friend’s suggestion to try out Xfce or similar.

This brings to mind Steve Jobs’ insistence on using magneto-optical drives for the early NeXT black hardware; the idea being that the user wouldn’t be tied to one specific machine, their files and user identity would live on the MO disk that could be transferred from machine to machine. The problem was that the MO disks were horribly slow and expensive, leading to the impression that the NeXT machines weren’t worth the exorbitant price tag. Frustration was baked into every user encounter with the interface. The proposal here risks being slow on lesser hardware AND continually incoherent, a recipe for an abandoned project that isn’t even as well-remembered as NeXT, with no potential to be adapted into something like OS X or iOS.

Lastly,

Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation:

This sentence seems even more nonsensical. I understand and can agree with current European anxieties surrounding US dependencies in their tech stacks, and I can definitely understand KDE as a European-led project that ameliorates that. But as our community here understands, the word “sovereignty” has also been thoroughly colonized by cryptocurrency bros, most of whom became resolute enthusiasts of the current generation of AI. If “sovereignty” is going to continue to be your watchword for this crap, you may ultimately be operating at cross-purposes to your stated intent.

You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yud’s conversion process

Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. “You know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!” is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly

As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of “normal”, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality

When I give my usual points about their expense and their failures in other domains, I am given the usual spiel of “it’ll get better in other areas” and “it’ll get cheaper”.

This increasingly seems like one of those “priors” that people should “update on.” One tell is that the leading chip design firm has abandoned sensible power consumption targets, and gone all-in on shoving as much power as possible into as physically large a chip as they can possibly reliably get out of the fab. (Of course, you wouldn’t notice this unless you work in a data center or can afford the more expensive desktop hardware.) I’m trying to think of a pithy catchphrase for social media purposes; best I’ve got so far is that there’s a huge amount of people who have stranded themselves below the upper knee of the S-curve.

Do not overweight the current struggles, comrades; we will have attained full Communism as soon as 1995.

just like our favorite TV show, right? surely a comprehensive description language for physics can’t be THAT much more complex than a steaming hot cup of Earl Grey tea!

Never realized Stallman did a Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg did, that’s worth knowing and definitely not a point in his favor

It is my strongly-held personal thesis that chatbots are a direct design descendent of short-form social media such as Twitter. No, I will not be taking questions at this time

I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.

The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someone’s character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.

Keep in mind that Butt-Face Chester Cheeks is simply a special case of Tickle Me Elmo, and strategize accordingly

No way there’s any recency bias when the training data is heavily weighted towards the contemporary cesspools of Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow/etc., right? Such timelessness, very archetypal

This is terrible, absolutely horrible, disendorsement is only a few short steps from defenestration. How could these people do this

Was she floating around the David Chapman/post-rationalist corner of TPOT? That seems to ring a bell for me

I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldn’t finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. He’s put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.

I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesn’t seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time I’ve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about “anti-woke” bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backers’) real objective is.

Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till they’re so bleeding-edge that they’ve become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.