Spray paint the sensor as you walk by?

It’s bad, but also… it’s extremely complicated. China has a surveillance state. The EU, UK, and US are all flirting with surveillance state technology. You have companies like Palantir, Pegasus, Flock, … promoting their products to governments like magic hat solutions to issues such as terrorism. You have data aggregation companies selling private data to the 3 letter agencies. You have cops willingly using these networks because it makes their job slightly more effortless. You have Trump And Co with their own motives, who would love to find any possible leverage over their perceived enemies. You have AI companies riding the bull of the US economy, all desperately looking for catchy use cases. You have this idea of an AI arms race.

Whatever world we walk into, it’s not looking pretty. It’s looking like we might actually develop something which is going to be damn near impossible to turn off.

I am also an engineer (data platforms). I similarly thought the only other field I might enjoy is law. I like complicated, technically-you’re-wrong kind of shit. I also don’t want to work for these giants anymore. Fuck them.

I once had an alternative dream, where I believed I would start my own business one day. I really wanted to live off my own contributions to the economy, with (eventually) enough spare time to actually be with my kids more often.

Now it feels like everything is a fucking scam. I need to go to paper-mill college just to impress the dumbass class of billionaires, so that I can make them more money via their capital machines. This would be my path to building enough wealth such that I can take on the risk of starting a new business. A risk that is all too risky, right now. I have kids to feed. Costs of everything going up, and who knows what’s to happen after the AI bubble pops.

I feel kind of trapped.

Yeah but there’s also some interesting nuances. I’ve seen smaller models on HuggingFace that, if I interpret them correctly, were tuned unsupervised using the output of larger models. So it seems there might be some validity to doing some things this way, so long as the other model is larger.

When you’re buying drugs from schotty research chemical production facilities in foreign countries, those are called “love letters.”