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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

    As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

    Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

    Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

    Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

    So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.


  • I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

    If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

    I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

    So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?


  • The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

    I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

    Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

    But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.




  • It’s extremely interesting to watch them give trump leeway here. I saw polling recently that many of the trump faithful believe that the tariffs will bring short term pain but it will be worth it for the long term benefits.

    What’s going to turbo suck is that they will take the exact wrong lesson from this. It will enforce their short term thinking because they will remember this time that they experienced short term pain for long term gain and the gain never materialized.

    I just wish we had the ability as a society to have a more nuanced conversation than sound bites. Ok we disagree about tariffs, one side thinks they are real fucking dumb and the other thinks they are great and will have long term benefits. It would be amazing if we could have an adult conversation about this, how it’s expected to work, how likely that is, what issues might be in the way, etc.

    Perhaps it’s decades of being an engineer, but I propose designs that are meant to achieve goals and other engineers check my work, ask questions about things I might not have considered, help play out scenarios that aren’t accounted for and at the end of that we have a better design. As a nation we now seem so incapable of having an honest dialogue between the two major parties that not only are we advancing ideas that obviously won’t work but it’s clear we have no feedback mechanisms to correct course. So now we will just blow up the economy because a group of people think it might, somehow, using mechanisms no one can identify, lead to a future that is “better” where no one can meaningfully define “better.”

    And that’s the state of discourse.