Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.
He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.
Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.
Even as someone who is generally inclined to agree with his thesis, I find Ed Zitron's discussions as to why AI does not and will never work deeply unconvincing.
I don't think he fundamentally gets what's going on with AI on the tech level and how the Moore's law type improvements in compute have driven this and will keep doing so. He just kind of sees that LLM chatbots are not much good and assumes things will stay like that. If that were so investing $1tn would make no sense. But it's not true.
The original meaning of AI is what some now call AGI. Some don't choose to follow meaning shifts forced by large companies for advertisement purposes. Same like Full* Self** Driving***.
How do you want to define grifter? He shows up, makes a lot of big promises, talks a lot of shit, doesn't actually engage with any real criticism, gets paid for it, and then exits, stage left. He could be right, he could be wrong, but he leaves no room for debate. If all you want is someone to yell at you about how right your feelings on something are, I mean, hey, I have a therapist too. I don't ask her for financial advice though.
If you say something like “if you invoke the word "fascism" in the context of today's politics, your opinion is immediately worthless”, your opinion is immediately worthless.
Those "histrionics" were your own words, slightly duplicated, with "say something like" added. While I don't disagree with this comment, I would recommend that you take the implied advice before expecting others to.
Dismissing someone's opinion because they compare those they don't agree with to literal fascists is not the same as dismissing someone's opinion because they do that. One leads to people being targeted for violence and potentially assassinated, the other calls out incitement to political violence.
At what point in history would it have been acceptable to call Adolf Hitler a "fascist" in the modern sense, assuming that neither he nor any contemporary political group identified with that term?
Only people who already live in a position of privilege get to have "little time" and settle for worldviews which advocate for a sort of bland tolerance of extremism. I can assure you, for people who are being actively harmed by hateful rhetoric and political policies, "those who are not with us are against us" is absolutely a reality.
Extremism is in the eye of the beholder. Trying to kick a founder out of a hugely successful project because he thinks there has been too much immigration to London is also an extremist view.
Excellent point, I can't help but feel gem.coop is essentially Ruby Together 2.0 which reinforces my opinion that the merger of RT with RC was a huge mistake. (It certainly made sense at the time…hindsight is always 20/20…etc.…but still.)
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