2026-05-07
the court of the crimson king
Nathan Lambert describes his general impressions of Chinese AI researchers following his trip to China.
Brian Potter with an interesting piece on how efficient modern technological invention is.
ARX-Han with some interesting schizoposting on the future of the “permanent underclass”, which in noting that “technology can increase or decrease human agency and the average person’s ability to compete with others” gets at a perpetual confusion of mine, which is a sort of strange belief that it’s the competition, and winning the competition, which is what intrinsically matters, and not the fruits that competition engenders. There’s something in the disdain that people have for the prospect of basic income which indicates that complaints about disempowerment are not actually about survival, but in claims of “dignity” which are really about wanting to retain the ability to control and lord power over other people. Or rather, as a description between the often unstated conflict between producers and consumers, which retrospectively are either greatly disempowered or empowered by AI1. It’s not quite correct to say that aristocrats were disempowered because they were useless and unskilled at resource production, because that’s something that was always the case, even when they were the ones in charge.
Buck Shlegeris with comments on OpenAI’s report on the recent incident where reinforcement learning was inadvertently performed on the outputs of model chain-of-thought.
Briffin Glue reflections on the inverted nature of interiority within the medium of social media, which while interesting seem to me to be somewhat overreaching, since after all we’ve always externalized our inner thoughts into objects like diaries, the reading of which is a violation; likewise, we’ve always expressed ourselves via external objects meant to be perceived recursively, whether through fashion and other more indirect forms of artistic expression. If there is any qualitative difference, it’s that the feed is more responsive than a diary, while the creator doesn’t even get to pretend that they’re making the content for their own sake: the consumer is now king, live in Versailles, in the court of the Bourbons.
Steve Newman on the current trajectory of AI 2027, correctly noting that the next couple of years are the actual major crux of disagreement between those who believe in foom and the bottleneck-believers (like Tom Reed).
Adin Richards on various aspects preventing aerosol transmission of viruses, whether through PPE or the construction of bioshelters, possibly taking advantage of attention on a recent hantavirus incident.
Decoding Bio linkthread.
Related, Naomi Kanakia review of Shy Girl, which describes a case of how with AI even purely consumption-driven creation can now beat production at its own game.