@Heliograph I went down this rabbit hole with Amazon’s seller code of conduct. It’s pretty lightweight and basically says “you can’t do anything prohibited by the US federal trade commission (FTC) guidelines on deceptive practices.” Well, I went and looked that up. One of the canonical examples of deceptive practices that the FTC publishes is advertising ecological benefits to something like single-use plastic that doesn’t have them.

I found a polyurethane table cloth that literally advertised itself as “eco-friendly” despite having no justification at all: just regular old PU. I sent in a complaint. Crickets. That was like 6 years ago, before the current crop of LLMs took over.

This is funny:

Citi sent employees another email asking them to not use the more powerful models unless they absolutely had to.

You have told a bunch of non-tech people to go hog wild using unlimited magic. Then you tell them to make a technical decision like determining what model they "absolutely have" to use. These people have no frame of reference for that.

In their mind, the best is always the best. Why would they use something less? They don't have any concept of understanding the nature of the problem, or how different LLMs vary. These are people that, until a year ago, couldn't write an excel formula. They can't determine the right model to use for a problem.

https://www.404media.co/companies-are-throttling-employees-ai-use-because-its-too-expensive/

@hoppla Somewhere around here there’s a collection of newspaper clips. And it’s like 10 variations on “People just don’t want to work any more” editorials. And they’re dated from like 1901, 1930, 1948, etc. It just shows how that sentiment has been (incorrectly) humming in the background for a very long time.

@hal_pomeranz I guess a lot of older folks have done it a few times. So they can remember when they knew nothing at all about something, and then learned or practiced or something. Doing that again in a new domain isn’t as scary or uncertain if you’ve done that before.

The sooner people dive in and experience that satisfying transition from n00b to non-n00b, the easier it gets to do it again.

@aesthr Next month Microsoft will release a feature that finds Word documents written by other people at your org who relied on the numbers in your spreadsheet. Then, if you undo in your spreadsheet, Copilot will go adjust the text their documents too.

(And now you have to go do an internet search and try to figure out whether I made that up or if it’s real!)

@la_rosa Yowch. What I find bewildering is that the SPLC characterises them as “an image-obsessed organization” and this is the image? This is what they think some kind of good America looks like??

@SecularJeffrey

I just got this bill from #microsoft for #github usage. See if you can spot what is ridiculous about this bill.

@blogdiva This is 600% growth year on year! It’s amazing!

OpenAI will go down in history like the Roman Empire: it’s not surprising that it ended. It’s surprising that it lasted so long.