I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.
A lot of the DOGE-era bizarro stuff seems to have involved just throwing an LLM instructed to have MAGA conspiracy brainworms at every problem. It would not surprise me if this list was partially generated in that way.
Or it could be one of the conspiracy brained dead-eyed little brownshirts they sicced on the task that put it in there. Who knows. I'm not sure they even knew themselves.
I got curious about this and found a lot of people in older threads saying that farming sardines can't be done. Apparently small schooling fish are typically very difficult to farm because they're pretty fragile and easily stressed.
Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.
If you've ever looked over the shoulder of somebody naively prompting an LLM about some broad issue, they're being fed this horoscope-like analysis where a bunch of vague stuff gets thrown at the prompter, and whatever they respond to is what the machine starts iterating on.
Some people are basically doing oldschool TV psychic cold readings on themselves.
"Computer says no" is about unhelpful bureaucracy. Being knowingly locked to a specific procedure and unwilling to divert from it is a different thing from mistakes being made that you are blissfully unaware of. The problem is now invisible and the patient is dying for no reason anyone can discern.
The "unhelpful bureaucracy" arises precisely because the process is structured so there's no point in the chain that can actually consider and solve your problem directly. The process is the point, outsourcing work to the opposite end of the globe has long been a perfect way to guarantee no it's robust against errors like "compassion" and "helpfulness", and that's as true of LLMs performing those functions tomorrow as it was of people doing it yesterday.
Well, possibly. To paraphrase the great American philosopher Donald Rumsfeld - there are known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. And making the actual process a black box for the people managing it will create a lot more Unknown Unknowns.
I wonder if it's actually anything to do with mentally mapping digital areas per se, or if it's more to do with the fact that you're not engaging your senses in the same way as when you're moving around a physical space.
If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair.
Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill.
Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.
I think this is definitely part of the problem. The senses are designed to all be involved in navigating a single, mostly-permanent world. Proprioception is supposed to orient within this permanent space. Whereas my proprioception has "nothing to do" in video games, and all my senses are only experiencing the world outside the game, which I am giving none of my attention.
This is very much my experience too. The difference between stout, newer buildings and old tenements are night and day. I used to live in a place made of massive thick concrete slabs with airgaps, and the only time you could hear neighbours was when somebody was using a drill, or on occasion, one neighbour singing in the shower so it travelled along the water pipes.
Other places, you can follow conversations through the wall if you're attentive and they're raising their voices.
Well, the issue is that it's difficult to know beforehand how good the soundproofing is. Even if you go to visit and it's quiet, is it because the neighbors are away or simply considerate? What happens when new ones move in?
I used to think living in a new building would be insurance enough. According to a colleague who lives in an apartment built in the 2010s, it's not.
For reference, this is in Paris, where there were laws passed in the 2000s supposed to enforce soundproofing in new developments.
