FriendOfDeSoto

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

It’s designed to be an Instagram alternative as it was when all you did there was look at pretty pictures. They’ve added stories (so the snapchattisation feature, which you can just turn off) but did the tiktokisation separately. I’m glad they did it this way because I liked Instagram around the time Facebook bought it. Instagram today is a bloated, algorithmic mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. And I don’t need more short form videos in my life.

Why aren’t they automatically looking for business links between Slovenian domain vendors and the First Family? Melania is Slovenian after all and it would be such a misstep if not even her extended family got to profit from this one.

I didn’t call you a bad teacher. And I’m much more forgiving of your rant now that I know. And I’m sorry I explained your chronic underfunding to you, like you didn’t know.

I am more forgiving of ableist attitudes ≠ completely forgiving of it. You’re mad at the situation. Everybody needs to let off steam.

I’m going to assume you have already sent your problematic experiences up the flagpole, to no avail. How are your prospects for changing jobs? Not necessarily profession but maybe at a different school? It’s no use trying to ride that tiger every day when this affects you this much.

For your own protection, you need to take the venting offline. I think you may have already given enough details for your bosses to identify you here. The days of shouting anonymously into the digital void are over. An LLM has the computing power and patience of an army to find and ID you. So if I were you, I’d delete this post, delete the account, and look for trustworthy ears who won’t rat you out next time the pressure in your cauldron is redlining.

You were at the edge and took a step forward.

You’re raging against this in very general terms. As a snotty European I would throw in suspension as a disciplinary measure for humans in development, as all children in schools are, should only be the ultima ratio. So learning there are time limits on suspension terms for kids with disabilities sounds absolutely insane to my very snotty European ears.

If a school system in the US implemented inclusion without individual review when it isn’t working or is too disruptive for the other pupils, then I don’t mind you putting that term in inverted commas that much. I think you’re on the edge of ableism there though. If you’re trying to win an argument at a school board meeting, you might want to keep that in mind.

Many school districts are cash poor. They are being asked to follow guidelines for all sorts of things, not just the topic we’re discussing here, without also being given the financial means to fulfill them. The American teacher asking for go-fund-mes for classroom material is an established meme. That’s why out of principle I cut teachers and admins in the public school system some slack. So rather than running the risk of being misunderstood as an angry ableist, channel your anger at the people who make political decisions that affect your school district. Because I’m very confident at the heart of virtually every school related conflict lies chronic underfunding.

I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.

What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.

Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”

You’re formulating arguments why I’m wrong. With the greatest of respect, that’s defeatism speaking. Difficult? Yes. Checkmate? No. It may take a crisis to get this going; the New Deal didn’t come from nowhere either.

You cannot fix all of these issues at once. You probably cannot fix a lot of these issues without first improving education levels within the population. A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.

Term limits for SC judges to some odd number of years for any new appointees is something both sides will be able to agree on. If nobody tries though, of course it won’t happen.

The US has been checkmated …

I’m going to take issue with this statement. Nobody has checkmated the US. If we have to stay in this metaphor, the US checkmated itself.

One of the biggest mistakes was to allot the same number of votes to Rhode Island as to California in the senate. A more proportionate voting system would do wonders for half the issues you listed. Appointing judges for life is another one. Financing election campaigns like that is also mad. Nobody forced Americans to do business like that.

This isn’t a game of chess where checkmate is irreversible. The sooner folks stop formulating arguments why I’m wrong or why these are insurmountable hurdles, the better for all of us.

While I do agree that with the cult clown car people in charge of the executive right now, there is an added difficulty to passing legislation. The Epstein Act part 1 has shown though there are ways. So regulation on so-called AI is still possible and not late like the article seems to suggest.

What’s the point of this article? To highlight that the sausage maker that is a parliamentary democracy is slow? Or to show how narrow majority margins cause long delays in passing legislation? I can’t imagine it’s only the lack of knowledge about so-called AI. I imagine many members don’t know that much about tax law, the intricacies of the military, or drugs in general. Yet we don’t question their qualifications when they pass legislation on those subjects. We elect people to these bodies not on the basis that they are experts at everything but for their ability to look into issues and form an opinion that hopefully most resembles ours. They cannot know everything, no matter how much they pretend. If that is the standard we hold them to, you’ll only get braggadocios assholes who will stand for elections.

When has a legislature ever been on top of the latest developments, especially in tech? It’s pretty much always reactive. The seatbelt and crumple zone came after the introduction of the automobile. OSHA didn’t predate the industrial revolution. Section 230 came after the WWW. Not by much in the grand scheme of things but still. We are what now? 4-5 years into this madness? It’s not unusual not to have great regulations set in stone.

Fools! That’s exactly what was missing from creating Skynet! The workers were replaced with slop bots, now management gets replaced by slop bots too! It’s slop bots all the way down! Run for the hills!

Eight minutes can seem very long though.

I think if I was caught like this, the last thing I’d want to do is talk to the media about it. Not even under a pseudonym. But this story is probably not here to make Google feel bad and return some of the money. This is a reminder for parents everywhere to review payment and parental settings on anything their kids use online. You can be smug enough to say my 8yo doesn’t stream on Twitch or whatever because why tf would you let them anyway. But you’re deleting the credit card off of Google Play because you forgot it was there because parenting makes you forgetful at times.

They are a bit vague on this but I suspect all of these attack vectors start with LEOs having physical access to the unlocked phone. They then set up a trusted desktop without the phone owners knowing.

Which is clever, to be fair. Whether or not that’s legal is already a court case. The law is so frightfully grey.

Which is it?

Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.

Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.

Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I’m concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.

There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.

I don’t like the direction Google is taking Android. I’m not in favor of this enforced developer registration.

“Seems to” is not the same as “did.” With a couple of LLMs and a bit of time others could’ve dropped these rave reviews as well. It isn’t far fetched that it is Google. But from a PR point of view they’d be stupid if it was them. They gain nothing but bad headlines from a stunt like that. So we probably need a bit more proof than some screenshots.