https://sg.news.yahoo.com/shaw-walters-going-automate-jobs-133434053.html ‘We’re going to automate all the jobs’
Sam Altman’s OpenAI ditches plan to become for-profit company
Category: Technology
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The Left Frets About Total Information Awareness Again
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/american-panopticon/682616
(archive of https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html )
Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.
President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).
What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.
“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”
Rest at link.
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AI Disruption in the Job Markets
An article from Harvard Gazette (the internal newspaper for employees of Harvard University).
But AI is also an undeniable factor. Even before Trump took office, tech giants were implementing mass layoffs while making huge investments in AI tech. Global management consulting firm McKinsey projects that by 2030, 30 percent of current US jobs could be automated. Goldman Sachs said that number could rise to 50 percent by 2045.
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The Real Problem with Spain and Portugal’s Grid
Reprint of https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/the-real-problem-with-spain-and-portugals-electrical-grid.2002/ (Monday, 4/28/2025) at the Phora, a private forum, to make thread from the ‘Electricools’ subforum public:
… in Electricool terms: There is ‘Grid Inertia’ and ‘Grid Frequency’ and sudden drops in power capacity (‘rare atmospheric conditions’) can cause a grid frequency instability
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High Attitude Low Oxygen Injections for Gaia
Good Lord. Someone has been playing too much HALO:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024EF005567
Low-Altitude High-Latitude Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Is Feasible With Existing Aircraft
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Whigdev (whitespace) BBS recovery project
Whigdev/Whitespace is down for the count | Phora Nova
I’m reconfiguring websites and in fact I’m reactivating my ‘web host reseller’ service from 10 years ago, that I used when sometimes hosting and web managing SI and TBB.
Current plans and timelines:
1/ whigdev will be completely rebuilt to prove safe to do so, using new infrastructure (ASAP)
2/ whitespace DB will be transfered and tested
3/ whigdev existing infrastructure, including whitespace will be destroyed and and DNS repointed to new home (by say Memorial Day)
4/ archive recovery from PHP breakage can commence, order of sites TBD (mine and those I’ve managed in the past, and requests I’ve received for archive recovery)I’ve made enough progress rebuilding old LAMP stacks with MySQL/Maria DB (not usually the problem unless you are cutting edge) and PHP (very definitely a problem if your webhost changes versions on you and trashes your sites), for the above to be feasble. I hope to publish my scripts for building the sites and Docker Compose files etc.
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Will AIs Kills Us all by 2027 postscript
Comment from https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/ai-2027-the-polycule-has-a-new-nuclear-threat-for-us.2999/
It’s a surprisingly dated projection. “Brute scaling will lead to AGI” was the party line two years ago because it was a great way to pull in investors but no one really believes it anymore. Without a winner-take-all effect ensuring that AGI can only be created by quasi-national lab, containment becomes infeasible because the big breakthrough could come from anywhere.
Scott Alexander and friends are still hung up on the AI box experiment and have a hard time conceiving of AGI as anything other than an Eliezer-like intelligence trying to reason its way out of jail.
It’s also a surprisingly “unagentic” view of AI. […]
I quite agree as far as the specific narrative proffered. The authors know that a good campfire story reels ’em in and that’s fine. There *is* a danger to Humankind there though, just not the exact way they interpret it. If you replace ‘artificial intelligences’ with ‘devils’, and ‘alignment’ with Podvig for the Greater Jihad, you will see that the article and even the narrative can be read with in-sight and profit. But I digress…
The models themselves and their training is ‘not the problem’ It’s not the models that need to be put in a box, but the people who use them.
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Vibe Coding with Macrobius
Me discussing the article with my family:
Going to bed now but I will add it’s rather long and the good bits are in the footnotes
It’s less of a must-read than a research project for follow up — very good for ‘situation awareness’
So I went through https://ai-2027.com and extracted and annotated the links I wanted (what we called in the 20th century ‘making an annotated bibliography’). I did this in the form of a markdown table.
I then took the markdown table, pasted it in https://dillinger.io and exported a pdf. However, I wanted to know how many rows were in the table and it was 9 pp. long (the answer is 80). Also, I wanted it in RDF format so I could import it into a knowledge graph and query it with the SPARQL language. I asked Claude 3.7 (‘sonnet’) to do this for me:
Labour involved:
- several hours of ‘human intelligence tasks’ (HIT, like Mechanical Turk) of clicking on about 180+ footnotes, capturing any links, and pasting those links into a table in a markdown editor)
- a few minutes to generate the PDF at a website that does that.
- a few minutes monitoring Claude doing the conversion (took a couple tries), a.k.a. vibe coding
- taking screen shots and ‘live blogging’ the experience.
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Will AIs Kill Us All by 2027?
H/T TBC for the link: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/ai-2027-the-polycule-has-a-new-nuclear-threat-for-us.2999
There’s the territory ruled by the Western Left, a generally less advanced territory ruled by the Western Right, a third territory ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, and a fourth ruled by Putin. Most people mostly confine their internet activity to one territory and conform their opinions to whatever opinions are promoted there. (That’s not how it feels from the inside, of course. The edges of the Overton Window are hard to notice if you aren’t trying to push past them.)
This is from the 2021 prediction by one of the authors of the paper.
The authors give important justification of their assumptions here. Click individual paragraphs to read each supplement.