On 11/17/25 2:34 pm, glen wrote:
There's a very real risk.
guessing you are referring to the "entropy minimization strategy"
reference?
The itch the chatbots scratch is partly (mostly, imnsho) vocal grooming.
I don't know about vocal literally but perhaps if you mean "verbal" or
more generally "linguistic"? This is a significant component of the
"bar friend" mode I've referenced. Someone I can "rattle on with" and
get a variety of disagreeable agreements and vice-versa... at best
exercising social muscles with the main reward being the tiny bits of
fatty protein I find down in the fur to pop in my mouth and down my gullet.
But it's also partly co-construction/collaboration. I'm antipathetic
to the former. So I don't miss that part. But the 2nd part is
critical. Conversations with the chatbots *feel* to me like living in
a planned community ... i.e. flat-out yucky ... no stigmergy ... no
graffiti ... no crabs living in soup cans.
It does remind me from time to time of those all-agreeable conversations
(some) sports fans and political-awfulizing gaggles do when we get
together... on a good day it feels like chatting with someone who
really does want to understand my point of view and (if encouraged to be
argumentative)help me explore the negative/complementary space I've
neglected. A little like the conversations I'd get stuck in when I
went to college with Jesus Freaks (the hippy/jesus looking ones, not the
overgroomed, back-from-mission versions).
In this case, no long-winded friend constantly polluting the air with
tangent after tangent. >8^D No bent threads. Etc.
I resemble that comment! Just think of it as Performance/Graffiti Art?
I suppose if you want your world to be all grids and bullet points,
hyperreal veneer, then fine. Have your chatbot.
I rarely need help bulleting/gridding my unruly garden, but it is nice
to have a plow and seeder that normalizes the planting grid (a little)
in spite of being more of a one-straw-revolution kinda guy. My garden
art is more edward-scissorhands than Disney but ... not. a forest either?
But the world's looking a bit grim to those of us who prefer the
forest to Disney World. And if you run across someone who can't tell
the difference between a forest and Disney World ... well, IDK ...
that's "uncanny" to me ... like talking to a sociopath.
Maybe I have a fetish for drawing the inner sociopath out in people?
Or just recognizing it. Maybe not sociopathic but more
socio-divergent, but not the performative kind, the deeply
ideosyncratic, unselfconscious kind... like the roadrunner who seems to
be trying to join my small herd of 6 chickens. I hope she's teaching
them some anti-wiley-T-Coyote tricks... on that note, I'd better go
run them into their coop before they freak out over the northern lights
again?
On 11/17/25 10:41 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
I don't even know if I will send my response to this thread, I've
come to delete most of my "usual" offerings without sending, some
without finishing, others without starting. Some kind of
entropy-minimization strategy on "y'all's" side of my Markov Blanket?
Lots of rich stuff here. I don't think I disagree with any sentiment
here (can they ALL be compatible?). Tom's original (implied)
question is probably as much about "should those of us with fat ETF
portfolios switch their mix from high-performing AI-fueled to some
other place with better risk/reward ratios?" as it is about "is there
even a 'there there' in the AI cascade of new affordances and
competencies being offered (hyped) by 'the market'. But maybe they
are fundamentally the same question in this highly human-conditioned
manifold of intersubjective reality we inhabit together?
Obligatory anecdote: when a moved to my current property (2000), A
huge russian olive (50' tall, 3'diameter trunk, broad reaching
branches) hosted a huge magpie nest in one of the forking horizontal
branches... maybe 6-8' long made of branches from all over the
property (area) and many other elements. It had a half-dozen babies
in it when I first came to review the property but by the time we
moved in, they had fledged and the nest was fully abandoned (only for
the season?) Within the year we took it upon ourselves to remove the
nest and found the myriad bits of interesting detritus they had
gathered. The structure of the nest seemed fully rhymed and
reasoned in spite of being opportunistic to the
branch/twig/grass/fur/??? at hand and wabi sabi in the extreme, but
the strange bright bits of yarn, string, fabric, bottle caps, broken
glass, etc cetera, were much more arcane/occult-to-me. But
nevertheless alliterated, rhymed and likely reasoned. As did our
own slow picking-apart of the structure with the help of Jays,
Packrats, and the weather which had it's own uses for these "objects
of desire"?
Within 3 years West Nile flared up the Rio Grande, killing (most
notably, but not exclusively) Magpies. Even now, 20 years later, the
populations have barely begun to recover in a small way, probably
migrated back down from the Chama/Rio-Grande headwaters and
environs? This anecdote could tangent into the (very few) people I
know of who contracted (and one died) of West Nile during that time,
and the cascade of influences/effects that had on the lives of the
people I know, but except for a vague "where did all the Magpies go?"
I hardly registered the *devastating* effect it had on the Magpies
(and likely many other corvids/birds in the region?). Or tangent to
the "Rabbit Hemorhaggic Fever Pandemic" which coincided with human's
COVID 19 which devastated the Jack and Cotton populations here (and
many other regions globally)...
This is probably an allegory or parable or something. Re:Cautionary
Tales starring NRA wankers - I did just (re) watch two Charlton
Heston classics from my "coming of age" era: "Soylent Green" and
"Planet of the Apes" but was spared (paywalls) from "Omega Man". I
didn't tangent to "Ben Hur" nor "Moses" for different reasons, but to
quote Glen (who might have been quoting David Byrne?):
"Same as it ever was!"
On 11/17/25 10:57 am, glen wrote:
That's the point. Some of us line our nests with robust things like
straw. Others line theirs with fantasies peddled by grifters and
then expect the rest of us to share our nests when theirs collapse.
We will *definitely* bail out the capitalists again ... and again
... and again, even after/while they['re] deport[ing] us, abusing
us, killing us, sending us to kill foreigners, stealing our water to
run their data centers, etc.
We are the gift that keeps on giving.
On 11/17/25 9:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I remember where I was when I saw Torvalds’ first Linux release.
I started downloading pretty much immediately and looking for a
PC to sacrifice. It was hardly capitalist hype.
*From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of glen
<[email protected]>
*Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
*To: *[email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot
Com stock collapse?
Exactly. That's Chris' basic argument. Even his point about fscking
Twitter. To argue that it's "running just as well as it did" seems
a bit discordant. But at some altitude, he's right. It's just as
much of a toxic wasteland as it was before. Every time it crosses
my gaze, I wonder why people still use it ... or bluesky, or
reddit, or <arbitrary-tag>.
My experiments with Cline have just about ended. I've decided to
avoid it. It works great with Claude (and some others), but not
with gpt-oss or codestral. Both of those work fine if *I* manage
the prompting. Chris also mentions linux, which I've been using as
my daily driver since ~1995 (?) ... IDK, maybe I was mostly using
ultrix & minix in '95. But sporadically, as with the Windows 11
update breaking recovery, all the dorks get all riled up and talk
about linux finally being ready for the desktop. [sigh]
The fact is that we're no smarter than rats or birds who'll fill
our nests with whatever stupid little shiny thing the capitalists
bother to hype.
On 11/17/25 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
The first example that comes to mind are malls. Malls aren't
needed now so many of them are closing.
Some people see something bad about that. I see something good
about that: Ruts get erased and new opportunities arise. Power
gets redistributed.
We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and there's
some adaptation that is required.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 8:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot
Com stock collapse?
But Chris' argument isn't really about AI. Chris is as guilty of
preemptive registration as the others. Short-term markets distort
everything. The task is to free up the terms coercively bound by
the grifters and marketeers. Once the terms are unbound, we can
discover which formalisms fit and which don't.
If we're charitable, Chris is right that *something* is amiss. The
disagreement is about *what* is amiss. Same as it Ever Was.
On 11/17/25 7:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
But what ARE these investments right now? It seems to me they
are well established companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and
Google. NVIDIA has existed and will exist should AI revenue dry
up, just like it outlasted Ethereum mining.
The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI has a
longer path to profitability, but Anthropic (technical users) is
already making good progress @ $7B. AI has already penetrated
education and will likely spread more. People will become
dependent on it like they are dependent on cars.
*From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Prof David
West <[email protected]>
*Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
*To: *[email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the
Dot Com stock collapse?
Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem that they do
not, the fact that the vast majority of users/adopters of AI are
dramatically less technologically compentent than either of these
gentlemen. The manager that is positive that AI will eliminate
most if not all of his human employees, the student using an LLM
to "cheat," the social media addicts taken with the latest AI fad
bots, etc. etc. almost certainly will become disillusioned and
turn away from AI.
Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see
immediate—not long term—return on investment are not going to
remain invested. Lot's of other peoples money will be lost as a
byproduct.
The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to sustain all the
current investment. Maybe one large AI company will survive (ala
Amazon that lost tons of money for a long long time).
davew
On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot com analogy
may be apt, but it also smells too easy an analog. I find the
K-shaped AI adoption to be bizarre. Personally, I do not believe
LLMs, nor any particular architecture, to be the be-all-end-all.
I suspect we will see a transition away from throwing money at
developing the most general form and a move toward more
idiosyncratic instantiations. For instance, I continue to think
that Deepmind did meaningful work going the RL path with
AlphaGo/Atari games and it has yet to come to my attention what
happens when Transformers attempt to replicate these successes.
Almost every LLM I have met is really really bad at go. This
said, AI in their current form, and from this perspective, has
been here for a decade. Some have adopted it and use it to
surprising effect, others treat LLMs as nothing more than a
robust database querying language. What people do with it and how
they perceive it will undoubtedly have an impact. In the
meantime, I am excited to see what happens as programmers
learn to use formal type theories as pidgins and LLMs become more
amenable to compositionality.
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