The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let’s just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:

1. “Insurrection Barbie”
2. Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
3. This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
4. The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
5. The “Department of Government Efficiency Agency” has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
6. There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the “Government Accountability Office”. But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it’s not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
7. This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.

Idiocracy didn’t happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.

Very frequently, yes. As well as closed source code and intellectual property of all kinds. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Non-billionaire controlled so far. It’s a public benefit corporation, which is vulnerable to being Altmaned. Once it becomes valuable money will find a way.

As I use copilot to write software, I have a hard time seeing how it’ll get better than it already is. The fundamental problem of all machine learning is that the training data has to be good enough to solve the problem. So the problems I run into make sense, like:

1. Copilot can’t read my mind and figure out what I’m trying to do.
2. I’m working on an uncommon problem where the typical solutions don’t work
3. Copilot is unable to tell when it doesn’t “know” the answer, because of course it’s just simulating communication and doesn’t really know anything.

2 and 3 could be alleviated, but probably not solved completely with more and better data or engineering changes - but obviously AI developers started by training the models on the most useful data and strategies that they think work best. 1 seems fundamentally unsolvable.

I think there could be some more advances in finding more and better use cases, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to any serious advances in the underlying technology.

Politically-motivated tea tax, what could go wrong?