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Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming

nytimes.com

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming

#31
If we scratch out the Christian folklore and metaphors, god it's the Logos, the source of knowledge, the pure logic, verified facts through reason. Kinda like programming in Lisp.

Sins are just a metaphor on human (animal) impulsiveness due to faulty instinct; the Church just said 'think before you act, you might screw up greatly'. LLM's are like loaded dice in nature, thus, the output will never be reproducible but pretty much close enough in the 99% of caases, like a Markov based chatbot on stereoids (small LLM's and a GB trained Hailo will mainly converge in how to behave internally).

LLM based products are actually much closer to the Christian 'devil' -human prejudices causing bad acts, instead of slow analysis with reproducible proofs- than anything else. Because over time the accuracy gap without human revision will just get bigger and bigger upon feeding LLM's between themselves.

Re: Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming

#36
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ross Douthat is author of ''The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success'', which, when read along with ''Amusing Ourselves To Death'' by Neil Postman, might put a lump in your throat in the face of today's rampantly compulsive tech broligarchs and their enshittification of society.

Palantir turning into a movie villain caricature on the internet through breathless journalism is a great example of "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Journalists turned it into a great story that sounds straight out of a thriller TV show. But trying to spin unchecked growth in government power, a lack of accountability, and mindless consumerism as some sort of side effect of the new cabal of tech-bro elites rather than…

You should probably come out of your comphy cave.

Centralization of power isn’t a narrative it’s an accelerating reality.

I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.

Re: Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming

#38
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir turning into a movie villain caricature on the internet through breathless journalism is a great example of "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Journalists turned it into a great story that sounds straight out of a thriller TV show. But trying to spin unchecked growth in government power, a lack of accountability, and mindless consumerism as some sort of side effect of the new cabal of tech-bro elites rather than…

You should probably come out of your comphy cave. Centralization of power isn’t a narrative it’s an accelerating reality. I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.

> I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.

Electrical power. That used to be almost entirely centralised, but it's increasingly easy to be off-grid.

Manufacturing power. I don't know the full dynamics, but there's clearly a lot of cheap good tools easily available, so the term "cottage industry" still makes literal sense.

Comms. Twitter becoming X pushed a lot of decentralised alternatives with similar vibes.

That said, if you go back 20 years, you get the pre-Facebook world and the pre-Twitter world for comms, but you lose cheap good home 3D printing and a specific district in China was becoming the obvious heavily centralised place for all modern consumer electronics to get made.

Of course, go back to 1800 and you get something like, IDK, 70% of the world's internationally traded cutlery being made in Sheffield? I may be off by a lot there, that's just a rough guess given its dominance.

Re: Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming

#39
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ross Douthat is author of ''The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success'', which, when read along with ''Amusing Ourselves To Death'' by Neil Postman, might put a lump in your throat in the face of today's rampantly compulsive tech broligarchs and their enshittification of society.

Palantir turning into a movie villain caricature on the internet through breathless journalism is a great example of "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Journalists turned it into a great story that sounds straight out of a thriller TV show. But trying to spin unchecked growth in government power, a lack of accountability, and mindless consumerism as some sort of side effect of the new cabal of tech-bro elites rather than…

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