Nope. You don’t exist for that time. Anesthesiologist counts down 10, 9, 8, 7, and then I was teleported to the recovery bed.

I consider it incredibly weird and very unlike sleep. Consciousness is off, instantly, then back.

I've heard tons of rumors about a get-laid angle to the Rationalist(tm) cult, but I have no first hand knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me much.

Movements and capital-I Ideologies are not your friend. They're basically all grifts. If they don't start out that way, that's what they turn into.

Oh, of course they have good intentions. They want everyone to benefit and everyone will be equal. They'll just be a little more equal than everyone else, of course, and because they are so virtuous they will of course have more power, which they would never misuse... they're too smart and enlightened for that, so they don't need safeguards... they only need safeguards for everyone else because everyone else is obviously less enlightened...

All cults, political movements, religions, and ideologies are always like this. It boils down to more power for the leaders. If it sounds altruistic and enlightened, be extra afraid.

Creative people love to play with new tools. Photography was supposed to destroy all art, but it became its own art form. Did synthesizers destroy music? Musicians even figured out how to turn a record player, a device made for nothing but replaying existing music, into a musical instrument. Look up "turntablism." Give an artist anything and they'll start fiddling with it and seeing what it can do, and they'll do that with AI just like they did with electronics and record players and anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

The people flooding e-book markets with slop are doing a new variation on the dropship get rich quick scheme, not trying to create books. They don't care what's in there, just that they can game reviews.

I expect artists playing with AI to get into hacking models and model runtimes themselves. It's one reason I think open weight models are so important. They're hackable, remixable, re-trainable.

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.

Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.

If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.

-- From the link:

“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied,

“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

You still have to check the work and shouldn't trust it blindly, but in my experience it's pretty damn good.

My guess is that there’s someone making money for getting DCs permitted. Like the paperwork done.

474 GW of capacity is silly woo woo land. I’m not sure you could get enough chips made to use that in the next 10 years. The cost of fuel or solar/batteries or reactors or gerbils or whatever they plan to use to make that would be bonkers.

It just blows my mind sometimes when designers don't learn insanely obvious lessons from the past, basic stuff like "complexity is evil" and "make the fast path overlap with the most common use cases" and "a standard with N optional extensions is actually N! (N factorial) standards."

That being said all real world architectures seem to have messy corners and warts. RISC-V was a chance to do away with a lot of that and they... didn't?

If it won't attack my stuff, it won't help me build my stuff to be secure.

I ran some numbers on energy use a while back. In general: if you skip one 20 mile drive, you make up for heavy use of e.g. Claude Code for a week.

So telework one day and you're making up for your AI use.

If AI is using too much water, it means the data centers are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll magically discover ways to reduce water consumption.

The Texas natural gas mega-data-center story: that's a political problem. Tax carbon emissions and they'll suddenly realize they can power it better with solar, wind, or nuclear power. I'd also speculate that Texas made gas power a contingency to build it, since fossil fuels own Texas.

Is it possibly excessive? Yes. But this is insane hyperbole.

Of course that's how you get attention, I guess. Rational discourse is ignored. To get people to pay attention you have to make everything extreme and stupid.

Is a very sophisticated computer driven adaptive control system making decisions for the user? Arguably yes. If your car has a bunch of assist tech you are not driving. You are commanding a nonlinear control system.

AI today is quantitatively far beyond these systems but internally it is still just a giant decision table. It’s just a differentiable table that can be automatically programmed by back propagation at what would be unimaginable scale for manual implementation.

As soon as you put a machine between you and the target action that is more complex than what you can hold in your head and that has multiple layers or feedback loops, you are ceding fine grained direct control in favor of a simpler abstract control surface.

I will change my mind a little if I start seeing evidence of genuine volition, but as of now I suspect that’s a property of life not intelligence. One interesting result of AI when viewed as an experiment is: I think it proves that life and intelligence are separate phenomena and that consciousness and intelligence may actually be unrelated.

I have the hypothesis that consciousness (and therefore true volition) is a property of life. You have to be metabolic and tied in some intimate way to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Solid state electronics doesn’t have this property. It’s unrelated to intelligence. A bacterium may be conscious.