Turing Test is fundamentally based on fooling humans. Not sure it’s smart to pin humankind’s future on what a birthday magician can do.

One of the fun things about this latest cycle of AI is how the goalposts move. Not the ‘AGI in six months’ one. That might as well be mounted on top of a golf cart with a brick laid on the accelerator. But the one that talks about the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and goals of a product.

One of the things they tell people pitching VCs is that you should be addressing a reasonably big TAM (potential customers) and have sensibly large, yet attainable stakes. With AI, though, the TAM was always questionable. Who would want or pay for a chatty ‘bot,’ especially one that ‘hallucinated’ answers? So they pivoted to change the TAM and the stakes. Your personal assistant. No? Therapist? No. Project Manager? Teacher? Still no?

What we have now is a constant churning of THOSE goals. Now, the TAM is pretty much the whole world, and the stakes are either massive unemployment, widescale industrial shutdown, or destruction of the human race. It’s all getting silly. Once you’ve extracted all the investment money you can by maxing out the stakes and scaring the pants off people, there’s not much higher to go.

Meanwhile, all your actual income is coming from pedestrian applications, like summarizing emails, screening job applicants, or coding assistants. There’s just not enough revenue to cover all the costs you’re incurring to get it to hallucinate a little less. So you have to pump up the stakes. Next up: setting off all the nukes! Shutting down the sun and the moon! Inviting alien colonists!

Speaking of going bigger: https://youtu.be/R8SeysuMpA0

Out of curiosity, I checked online. You can find basic, LG-compatible remotes for under $7 USD. At that price, I can’t imagine it’s more than just infra-red. In that case, the TV’s network board can be disconnected without losing any functionality.

Fortunately, CEC alone is not enough to get out to the net.

I have ZERO doubt other makers pull the same shit. I’ve been through Sony and Samsung. LG just had the best picture quality. Didn’ think they would abuse the trust. They have.

LG also sells really decent home appliances. We have a few. Not sure I trust them not to be abusing that trust.

The remote is still needed so you can pick the AppleTV from input sources, adjust volume, or select picture mode. AppleTV, AFAIK doesn’t have HEC. You need it on both ends for one device to tunnel via Ethernet. AppleTV also doesn’t do ACR and has third-party Jellyfin support. Not so sure about other streaming stick/boxes.

Two other potential sources for the TV getting out: 1) TV may silently turn wifi on and scan for open routers nearby, and 2) if the REMOTE has wifi on it. Both would be easy to honeypot.

It’s pure madness we all have to speculate about ANY of this. Anyone in LG’s corporate line who approved this crap should be demoted for sheer stupidity.

I wouldn’t remove the network card. That also kills the Bluetooth remote.

Unplugging it from ethernet/wifi may also not be enough. If it’s connected via HDMI-HEC, it could get Ethernet over HDMI. LG doesn’t specifically list HEC support, but at this point, I’m not sure they can be trusted.

Safest path is to block its IP addresses at router level, unplug it from ethernet, factory reset it, only go through a trusted streaming device without HEC support, block all the LG servers at router level, and power the TV down when not in use.

What a stupid way to lose trust.

AI software can’t technically kill you unless:

1. It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
2. It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.

Oh, wait.

1. U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
2. Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview

See, nothing to worry about.

Anything Monty Python. Also, Gravity’s Rainbow.

Hitting ‘unsubscribe’:

• Takes you to website where you have to go through multiple steps of inquisition: your email, are you sure, want to just get less, are you really sure, give us a reason, ok it’s queued up and we’ll get to it whenever.

Or,

• Hey, this is a live email. Ok, whatever, thanks. We’ll make more money selling this email to data brokers. Mission accomplished.

If on gmail, hit unsubscribe.

Onion John: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_John

If there’s a sign, it likely happened more than once.

Long time ago, I had an indoor ginger cat. Rescue kitten. My girlfriend at the time kept teasing it, rubbing his belly, rough-housing with it. I kept telling her to go easy, but she thought it was fun.

Pretty soon, the cat learned about indiscriminate biting and scratching. All my family and friends hated being around him. I had to lock him up in another room when people showed up.

The girlfriend got a job out of town and moved out and I had to move to a place that didn’t allow animals. Fortunately, I found a friend with a farm who wanted to take him. Last I heard, he was having the time of his life riding on top of sheep and horses.

This isn’t literally about Manga.

France has a long history with Bande dessinée, aka graphic novels. Like Asterix, TinTin, Gaston, Lucky Luke, etc. Their version of Comicon is a massive annual conference in Angoulême: https://angouleme.org/en/comics-festival/.

There’s already a whole ecosystem around Asterix: movies, theme parks, conventions, etc. Not as much around the other characters. What Macron is likely talking about is taking outside investment to jumpstart other ecosystems, including popular Japanese manga series. This is all about increasing foreign tourism.

I worked on a project, prototyping these. I don’t think the tech is quite there yet to recognize YOU, adjust the price on individual items, and update the tag as you walk up.

But if they could figure out how to Minority Report it reliably, they totally would.

Never understood.

• “Kids, you’ll get penalized if you use AI for any of your school work. We have tools to check for that. That’s cheating.”

• “Kids, here’s a free subscription to AI. Go nuts.”

Humans encounter a wide range of tasks as they grow up from infant to toddler and beyond. We don’t have separate ‘training’ vs. ‘inference’ stages (or at least, it’s a very short window). We also generalize from tasks (as the glass jar demo shows). We also appear to have different types of storage for short vs medium vs long-range memory.

We can combine a bunch of individual tasks into complex, coordinated, goal-seeking tasks and keep them around for later use. Like riding a bike, or learning how to drive, or juggle. We can recall those years later, even if we haven’t done them for a long time.

Plus, we somehow have a meta-layer of ‘common-sense’ or ‘ethics’ that tells us when NOT to do something, or when we SHOULDN’T. Like ride a bike onto pedestrians, or juggle kitchen knives. Hopefully, the research will go into those areas as well.

In CalRX trial for GLP-1 meds.

• 1️⃣ Start screen recording yourself 🎦
• 🦟 Fix the bug and write up the PR, except…
• Throw in a lot of gratuitous emojis 🎉🏆🤝 – em-dashes – and “On the other hands”
• 📤 Submit it
• When they come 😡 screaming at you about no-AI, just show them the video 😎
• All their outrage will be spent on accusing you of using 🤖AI.
• Where it all started will be forgotten 🥳
• Profit 🏆

Comment written by 💯 human