fiasco

Ah, le fumé monsieur.

It's always worth experimenting. I will say, this tea has a pretty peculiar flavor that, even when you taste it black, you can strangely sense that it would go well with sweetened milk.

This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone's already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.

I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called "hallucinations") is that it's neither a bug nor a feature, it's just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there's no meaning in that. Deep learning can't be said to generate "true" or "false" information, or rather, it can't be meaningfully said to generate information at all.

So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it's pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they're either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.

I understand that, but the amount of money that gets fed into political campaigns already generates staggering amounts of spurious text. It's hard to remember what happened the day before yesterday, but "fake news" originally meant sites that were set up to vaguely look like news sites, all for the purpose of pushing one or two entirely made-up propaganda pieces. Yes, deep learning can partly automate this, but automation isn't necessary in this case.

There comes a point of diminishing returns with spurious text, and I feel like we're already past that point.

The only thing deep learning has done is make forgery more accessible. But Stalin was airbrushing unpersons out of photos sixty years ago, so in principle this is nothing new.

When it comes to politics, there's already enough money floating around that you don't need deep learning to clog the internet with shit. So personally I'm not expecting anything different.

Also it was a D&D campaign that they turned into a video game series. Or at least that's what I've heard.

Things are politically stagnant because people believe that politics is about systems. Politics is about power, and politics will always be an expression of the dominant power dynamics. Governmental systems are just how power is explained to outsiders; it's a mythology that's told to disguise the real nature of power.

So the question of systems is a red herring, that's been carefully instilled. This has been true for all history: Many kings don't really rule, courtiers do. Only kings who can effectively wield power rule, and they're historically in the minority. This should also be obvious in the US: corporate power is only ever checked in the presence of enormous public action. Not public bitching, public action—general strikes being the most important example.

Or to put it really bluntly, while there's a lot of pageantry in politics, what politics actually is, is power struggles. But they sure don't want people to recognize this, which is why there's so much pageantry and partisanship.

This is also why the government is going so hard against Trump, but letting Pence, Clinton, and Biden slide. It's not because they cooperated—if you or I had security clearances and just took documents out of a SCIF and kept them at home, we'd be in jail. It's because Trump clumsily challenged existing power, namely the federal bureaucracy (which he conspiratorially calls the "deep state"), and he wasn't up to the task.

This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I'll spell it out.

There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you'll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it's because there's a ton of stuff about the world you just don't know.

If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.

This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We're capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.

Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.

Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn't even bother trying. But I guess you don't need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.

Similarly, if the Earth can't survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.

I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn't be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it's something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.

It isn't sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.

It is possible to buy a car in less than an hour, though I agree that you can't buy real estate that quickly. New Yorkers might be able to pull off stocks, if the money comes to them while the NYSE is open, but I'm not in New York (or Chicago, for the Mercantile Exchange, or...)

It's kind of a bizarre question, though. I have several small business owner friends. Could I get them to mark up a croissant to $1M, with the understanding they'll cut me in on the revenue?

If not, then what really are the terms of the question? Arms length transactions only? How will that be adjudicated?