Oh, hey, I’ve run into this in the wild–the Kalendar AI people keep ineptly trying to start a conversation to sell some kind of kiosk software by referencing factoids they scraped from our latest press release. They’ve clearly spent more effort on evading spam filters and rotating domains than they have on anything else, but they helpfully use “human” names ending in “Kai,” so creating a wildcard filter wasn’t too hard.

Credit where it’s due: I’d never heard of Kalendar or the software company who hired them, but this experience has told me everything I need to know about both of them. If you don’t sweat the details and rate sentiment change using absolute value, that’s kind of impressive.

Addressing the “in hell” response that made headlines at Sundance, Rohrer said the statement came after 85 back-and-forth exchanges in which Angel and the AI discussed long hours working in the “treatment center,” working with “mostly addicts.”

We know 85 is the upper bound, but I wonder what Rohrer would consider the minimum number of “exchanges” acceptable for telling someone their loved one is in hell? Like, is 20 in “Hey, not cool” territory, but it’s all good once you get to 50? 40?

Rohrer says that when Angel asked if Cameroun was working or haunting the treatment center in heaven, the AI responded, “Nope, in hell.”

“They had already fully established that he wasn’t in heaven,” Rohrer said.

Always a good sign when your best defense of the horrible thing your chatbot says is that it’s in context.

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren’t fit for purpose, but he’s 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack.

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

If they’re really lucky, they’ll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.

Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

B.S., a former partner at Andreesen-Horowitz

Lmao, of course.

and former chief technology officer of Coinbase

I.e., the company that survived by shedding a ton of employees, like 40% of headcount or something. I do not see this tactic working well when they’re trying to win friends and influence cops by hiring their failsons into sinecure positions.

What makes all this funnier is that it’s trying to thread the needle of embracing fascism while simultaneously seething with contempt for 99.999% of the people in the movement.