The Pnictogen Wing

and don't get me wrong. I am not reflexively against nuclear power and one of my major beefs with the militarization of the atom is that it's made nuclear power about a million times harder than it ever needed to be

but just imagine being someone who experienced the initial TMI scare—a child at the time maybe—and being frightened by the accident, and then the place just becomes a tomb after that. and finally it's maybe gonna be recommissioned, finally maybe the TMI reactor can do some good again, and what happens? OpenAI or Microsoft or whoever spreads a lot of bribe money around in Pennsylvania in exchange for a twenty year exclusive deal to power some LLM trash generator.

powering homes? pfft that's not "effective altruism", wasting precious nuclear electricity on the common herd, they just waste it! anyway it builds character to learn to live with brownouts. it's more efficient to channel all that juice into a giant Microsoft-branded forgery machine.

[expletive deleted]

~Mono 🦄

Saying "I called it" is not particularly elevating as most folks paying attention could've seen it coming but it's really funny that they've effectively reinvented a new angle from which to conduct a bad "clip art/fan art used as placeholder and not removed before entering prod" fiasco

for tens of billions of dollars in CapEx and terawatts of electricity wasted, all to save some now-fired consultant 30 minutes of time browsing fuckin IMDb

Even worse it's easy to imagine a scenario in which these chatbots didn't exist and this would've never happened because an hour of research (that you could've delegated to your assistant, even!) instead of asking the bot would've proven the concept, either with actual quotes from the misquoted or different critics to quote from!

We saved one guy a bit of work in the draft phase but cost them at least a few tens of thousands in ad buys and edit time and days of reputational damage

What really burns me up about all this LLM bullshit is knowing that it's basically a refined Burroughs method, chopping up texts and rearranging pieces, only with more statistical knowhow for jigsawing appropriate pieces together—and I want to scream. They want enough silicon and cooling water for a small planet so they can do something they might as well do with a stack of printer paper and a pair of scissors and some frickin' imagination!! Heck they might as well use tarot cards if they need something to jog their brains. ~Chara