Does it even matter that/if this guy wasn't a leftist? The left has been celebrating and condoning the murder -- isn't that what actually counts? (I say this as someone who's mostly leftist, slightly liberal.)
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that condoning violence and committing violence are morally equal. I'm saying: we can't simultaneously celebrate and condone the murder and also act like we have the high ground for for not being the party of political violence. That's having the cake and eating it too.
Fair enough, but I think we shouldn't be basing our inferences about the shooter from his family's political leanings. My feeling is that somebody who does something so drastic is likely enough to be an outlier from their family that we can't really know one way or the other.
But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you're eating almonds at all then you're being inconsistent.
Is this actually true? There's too much disinformation about the shooter, his motivations, his identity, his family, his partner going around that I have no clue what to really believe about him.
(Please, nobody respond to this comment telling me "that's exactly what they want" without providing a credible source for your claims about the shooter. If you do provide sources, then you are welcome to make fun of me for being skeptical.)
It's true, I fear AGI, not the current state of AI if it were to remain frozen and not improve at all. I am also not terribly afraid of climate change if the climate were to remain fixed at this point. Sure, we have lots of forest fires, and people are dying of heat, but it could get much worse.
I think maybe the root of our disagreement is that we're appraising the current state of AI differently. I'm looking at AI now vs AI five years ago and seeing an orders-of-magnitude increase in how powerful it is -- still not as good as a human, but no longer negligible -- but you're looking at both of these and rounding them to zero, calling it snake oil. Perhaps, in the Gartner hype cycle, you're in the trough of disillusionment?
I don't want to be a shill for big AI here, but I reject the idea that AI in its current state is useless (though I would agree it's overhyped and probably detrimental to society overall). It's capable of doing a lot of trivial labour that previously was not automatable, including coding tasks and graphics, and while it can't do it with great reliability, or anywhere near as well as a human expert, and it's much worse in some areas than others (AI-written news articles are much worse than useless, for instance), it's still turning out to be a productivity benefit (read: reduction in jobs) for those who know how to use it to its strengths. I think the "snake oil" aspect is when lay-people are using it expecting it to be reliable or as good as a human -- which is basically how big tech is pitching it.
I think we're looking at this from completely different angles if you are "hope"ful that AI will improve.
Also, you're looking at AI completely wrong if you're analyzing its performance on traditional CS problems in terms of time complexity. Nobody credible is hoping that AI is going to be solving NP problems just by feeding the problem into its context window like a quarter into a vending machine.
I don't think it's ready to put anyone out of a job. But if you're not worried about AI, then why bother being in the fuck-AI community? Like, why agitate about AI at all if you think it's all snake oil.
Does it even matter that/if this guy wasn't a leftist? The left has been celebrating and condoning the murder -- isn't that what actually counts? (I say this as someone who's mostly leftist, slightly liberal.)
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that condoning violence and committing violence are morally equal. I'm saying: we can't simultaneously celebrate and condone the murder and also act like we have the high ground for for not being the party of political violence. That's having the cake and eating it too.