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933 - We Can Grok It For You Wholesale feat. Mike Isaac (5/12/25) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-13 05:43:21
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

Tech reporter Mike Isaac returns to the show for a round-up of the latest AI news. From collegiate cheating to funeral planning, Mike helps us make some sense of how this wonderful emerging technology is reshaping human society in so many delightful ways, and certainly is not a madness rune chipping away at what little sanity remains in our population’s fraying psyche.  

We’re doing another call-in show with Matt for the midweek, so if you have any questions or comments, send an UNDER 30 SECOND voice recording to calls@chapotraphouse.com

We also have some new merch going up at chapotraphouse.store this Weds, May 14. So keep your eyes out for that!

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Comments

Goonba

Goon time people !!

tursi

gooning fr

Austin Lee

Eliza from Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation was the chat bot Will mentioned

Travis

Felix begins speaking at 3 minutes and 25 seconds

Mr Tu Damn Quoque

I want an AI bot that will allow me to interject in my favourite podcast with comments or jokes, then the hosts laugh and agree with me, maybe providing a bit of patter, like they would a guest, before returning to the conversation

Jonathan Whiston

Is this because you like Felix or don't like him?

Kyle Palmer

"Levo" by Recondite is the Young Pope song

William Siegel

whats the transition song around 42 mins

zeeee - Generation Chill

It's just a joke cuz there were a number of episodes where Felix didn't talk for a really long time and then suddenly he's there. So people would make comments about it and then they just started commenting the time he starts speaking regardless of how long it is into the ep

interzoa

It's not so much AI is impressive, it's we've also become easier to impress. Dumber by computer isolation. What makes AI the sensation that it is, aside from being an investment bubble, comes from the fact that before it's current existence we have already met it halfway by being conditioned by our consumption of media for ourselves to be the producers of slop, to have the mind of slop, to autorespond according to a dialogue tree of slop, to misinform manually. It was more often before that we were the flesh nodes to regurgitate a matrix of digital advertisement slurry and reconstitute it into a marketed product we embarrassingly call online culture/discourse. AI in commercial usage is the intensification of speed that transforms our understanding of what already existed. Like most technology. the medium on its way to be the absolute message. It's liberating in an unintended way, by disillusioning. This machine doesn't "kill fascists", it kills everything. Everything's Computer!

JD Nonce

Usually I come to the comments to say like ‘time for slop’ or ‘I’m naked’ or ‘who wants to goon’ or something else really smart and funny but it really does fucking suck that not only does this new shitty technology that I (and many others) don’t want threaten millions of peoples professions but it also increasingly at all times interjects itself like this unwelcome presence in our private/non-work lives. Really sucks! Wish it would go away! But it won’t so may as well get to gooooooooning!!

Mac daddy

As someone who just started a degree this year, can confirm these kids are 90% dumb as dogshit, even here in Australia - Will's thing about being Einstein for having read a book has proved true so far for me lol. And i am genuinely not that smart, its just that my high school habits from 10 years ago have left me WAY better prepared to just get a tertiary education than the Zoomers and Alphas, who rely on ChatGPT for almost anything academic from like 14yo-onwards. Strange new world

Wilko

So first these tech billionnaires like Zuckerberg create their inescapable social (!) media platforms where all your friends are active and you need to join if you don't want to miss out, then they spend a decade enshittifying that platform trying to find some way to squeeze money out of the users (I mean: MORE money, than they already did selling our data) to the point where you have to scroll for minutes through AI slop Facebook groups & ads to find a single post by a friend, resulting in a situation, where most of your friends don't even use the app for social interactions anymore, only for self promotion. And after all that, after doing that sort of damage to a whole social ecosystem they want us to befriend our computers? "Sorry we ruined your relationships, here's an AI friend." No thanks. And eff you.

Martin Seidl

I made people laugh in theater in the dungeons and dragons movie. I shouted cocaine owlbear. The cocaine bear trailer was before the movie.

Brent

Travis is providing a service orders of magnitude more valuable than grok

Brent

gnarly

Colin S

MST3K Turing test where you can only fully appreciate a movie when it feels like the real Crow and Tom Servo are in your airpod during a movie

Tristan

For the 'riddles' thing, there are a number of math and logic equations that if you figure them out right, it can demonstrate and teach some stuff that can really increase your efficiency in writing computer scripts. Back when 100kbs was a lot of space, those logic skills really mattered in writing code with as few lines as possible. Made programa better too. So making programs to solve various equations became a way to quickly test someones overall knowledge and writing style.

Mountain Dew Or Crab Juice

I like the idea of people looking at their phones during movies, never again will I have to suffer the embarrassment of a teenager pointing out that I'm eating beans during Cars 2 when I accidentally spill beans all over myself in the theater.

Ghordo

Go Groke, go broke.

Shane-A112

i don't use AI, I'm 24 shit freaks me out

LeZero

Man, Terry Davis truly was ahead of his time

Rusty Shackleford

Wait, is there a good Wikipedia article about this?

Throw Away

You did this to Tatum, Will. I blame you

Tristan

I dont know. I had a teacher in high-school who would have us go through some prompts from a site he pulled them from that I think was called "Eulers equations" or something, but that was a long time ago and I can't find the site easily now

Jean-Antoine

I will need to ask a version of Grok trained on the Catholic Cemetery Magazine archives if Russel Westbrook's AI funeral startup is ethical.

Michael Rosen

AI is turning it's users into Shinji Ikari

Chantz

Well at the very least he didn't use any racial epithets, no?

Tim O'

Walk the Night by Skatt Bros

b-rar

Kinda whiffed not calling this ep Grok Be a Lady

Steve Nutt

Don't underestimate how much AI can help you bullshit your way through a bullshit job. I'm a copywriter, and I can spend time writing stuff of actual value (fiction,history) when I wow my idiot boss with something chatgtp came up with in 30 seconds and take the rest of the day off.

zach

40:14 Reminds of when when Tim Heidecker used cgi to bring back little Tom Cruise Jr. It was very moving RIP

Bryan Williams

ChatGPT becoming Dr. Wendy Kobler bot ("blow off their self-esteem issues") absolutely what these tech companies deserve after whatever quadrillions in investment. (RIP Linda Lavin)

mariol struga

folks going crazy with the grok? gnarly.

Zach H.

People asking a program to help them with an original thought when it was designed to never have an original thought. The future is so bright I want to put out my eyes with knitting needles.

Sam

I use Google Teams for work and lately there has been a “do you want Gemini to take notes?” pop up for every meeting, theres no way to ask it to stop and there’s no X button. You can get out of it by clicking somewhere off the box but it sure seems intentionally unintuitive

HuffingGasInTheShed

You want an intense physical activity where you must maintain cognizance? Try roofing

Oliver Clozov

the defense literally just did the nathan fielder "so sorry i died, i'm in heaven now" dead dog skit lmfao

Ray

i watched xmen 3 in a city theater in philadelphia, and in the end you see Angel swoop overhead and a dude in front, loudly was like "i dont know why that ***** is flying away all majestic; he didnt do shit in this movie but make his dad cry" ... speaking of folks in a theater improving a movie

🐷

You're mad at AI for your shitty feed algorithm. Google sucked before AI because they wanted you to spend more time on Google to serve you ads. You angry luddites need to get a grip.

Kane Shirley

That elephant graveyard video was insanely good cool seeing Felix shout it out

Anomalie

KMFDM sucks! (affectionate)

Esteé Dee

Grok, go crazy on my shit.

Arid

The court thing was the opposite. The victim's family played the video of the AI-victim forgiving the accused. (The victim was the aggressor in a road rage incident). Makes it a little bit better but still crazy

John Harwood

Subscribe to Elephant Graveyard. Best comedy ever. Start with AI Neil de Grasse Tyson driving around NY trying out fast food for a new show called “Combos.”

suj 🐥

i thought my dad went crazy with the anti vaxx bs but he told me last week that chat gpt is his doctor 😭😭 my husband is a doctor😭😭

Bobby Lasers

I like it when Grok disagrees with right wingers and they get mad and call it communist or to stop using leftist data

Shane

This feels ….. unsustainable.

Michael Ehrenreich

There actually is a whole school of psychotherapy that involves listening to what the client is saying and repeating it back to them in an empathic manner, Carl Rogers discovered this decades ago, and yeah, it works!

Stealtreasure

I appreciate AI doing therapy for people because the people into therapy are already insane. Now they can be insane and funny

Well aged meme

I've tried a few times but it's just too weird for me.

Austin Williams

"Sir I am a large language model, not a rental house."

Maciek

After seeing this in a former developer friend who I distanced from because their ketamine abuse led them to believe they discovered god or made ChatGPT sentient after I introduced it to him. I’m firmly of the mind that all of this tech entihisuams for it is being cheered on by ketamine addicts. Not cocaine. Not adderall. Specifically ket.

Maciek

Basically ketamine was contained to uk party kids but for some reason when it hit the us party scene, specifically the burning man tech crowd it set off some sort of mind virus that makes them all assholes and all lose their shit when exposed to this chat buddy. I lost one friend, but he’s not the only burning man type person who also does crypto or tech or some kind be completely over the board with this shit. So mucbso that one wanted help getting investment in his burning man curated therapy bot lol. Fuck me

Antipaganda

That would be a seriously powerful AI.

Juan Suarez

chatGPT has not done anything useful! Machine Learning models and focused Diffusion models are not the same thing as chatbots! also studios are already trying to use generative AI to write scripts. they don't care if it's better or even as good as long as they can try to undermine unions.

Zen Ben

Felix is now transmitting his madness through the airwaves: I now have a persistent mental image of Pete Buttigieg dancing into a cluster of laser target lights singing, 'High Hopes'... it's lodged in my brain!

CS

Known as the Felix jump scare

Travis

I like Felix

BureaucracyNow

The cultural trend of passivity thing is unironically a really good observation and explains a lot!

Jonathan G

How does that refute google sucking now

Michael S. Judge

I will always remember the best non-movie moment I ever had in a movie theater, watching DRAG ME TO HELL at a dying dollar theater, there's one of those long takes from behind the main woman where the camera's slooowwwwly approaching her, and a scared-sounding guy right behind me yelled "WELL TURN THE FUCK AROUND THEN, BITCH"

CS

How many times are they going to reference Metallicas “One” on the pod this year? Not complaining, but there are other Metallica songs.

d.a.walker

Shout out Elephant Graveyard!

Rusty Shackleford

If you posted some stories about that, I would read the hell out of it.

Chachi uday

What did mike say about penguin books at about min 45? The guys groaned over it so i’m dying to know what he said

Dzmien Nzimad

My cousin speaks to her baby daddy exclusively through chatgpt. This is the actual singularity. Just people doing "employee sick be nice" chatgpt prompts.

Brian Johnson

I'm an elder millennial and I decided to go back to school because the software engineering market is very gated by degree now. Every typical college age students in my classes is not only using AI, they're so alarmingly dumb they turn in their papers with the flavor text like "Ok Olivia, I can certainly do that for you!" At the top

Matttttttt

Any m3gan slander is homophobic!!

Bygone Djinn

🎶 Grok is, enlightening me All that I prompt, absolute insights I cannot draw, I cannot write Chat with my bot, claude is my master 🎶

Sam

I saw Challengers in Theater 1 of Charles Theater in Baltimore, and in the climax where the Josh O’Connor character was about to do the motion w the tennis ball and bat the entire theater started gasping and giggling. I feel like if Will were to watch that movie in that theater his opinion of it would have changed a lot!!! God it was such a great experience

Peanut Horse

Genuinely baffling to hear most companies don’t track people’s input buttons and times to measure production for the day. From the moment I log on, my company knows what buttons I push in 80% of the systems we use daily to deter slacking off. Problem is that even the reporting system is off base because it reports to our execs that my team is over staffed by 90%, we have 11 people on the team, and it has been saying that for years now, even though we are definitely not. Sadly I think the higher ups don’t care to actually spend a day in our team because they truly believe we are over staffed when our department still falls behind every other quarter when volume spikes. So now, at my job, we are basically training an AI chatbot to take our jobs at the moment. Not a fun meeting when the suits come to talk to us about how much money this new chat bot will save them, how it does 90% of what we do supposedly, and that we still shouldn’t be worried about lay offs. With the more I hear about how newer college and HS grads are going to be more and more illiterate, I can’t help but believe unemployment will rise a lil bit, but mostly everyone in the working class will be forced into actually bottom of the barrel, minimum wage wage jobs, not even the half way cushiony jobs that are pretty abundant now.

jay k.

As a 20 y/o currently in college, i can corroborate the theory about us being in school as consumers. A lot of us don’t want to use AI at all, and we do view it as immoral to use for work, but sometimes you’re too tired, something is due, and tuition just can’t go to waste.

etienne

Idiocracy [Mike Judge; 2007] is a documentary

Noah Mickens

This is a room full of one-eyed men, clowning on the blind guys.

etienne

@grok says powerthirst is good for plants

Peanut Horse

Are students using it for mostly their intro classes and the easy university mandatory classes, or are they straight up using it for all classes, even the harder, specialized and more engaging classes for their majors?

etienne

i have a friend whose kids do stick figure drawings on midjourney, i wanna kms fr fr

etienne

im gay and my dick is small

Michael

Using AI to “answer” moral questions is truly an attempt to “technologize society” where is Rod Dreher on this rejection of “nature.”

Dinosaur

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Jessica S

On the “if this book is overwhelming you, visit ___ to listen…” - differences in reading retention is a real thing, for sure. I have a hard time maintaining focus, and retaining what I’ve read. (It’s probably part of having ADHD, but you don’t need an explanation for every idiosyncrasy.) My daughter’s 10, as is the same way, so she just stops at the end of a chapter and thinks of a couple words or a phrase that will jog her memory. Something I do is read in a non-linear fashion, for non-fiction I’ll use the index and choose what’s most interesting and I end up piecing it all together eventually. Fiction books I’ll often skip ahead and skim, because it keeps me engaged through boring part, aka the parts that “overwhelm” me. AI has its uses in education - people with blank-page block can have it “write” a rough outline, enough to jumpstart the process, or to take a stream of consciousness response to an essay prompt and organize it for better editing. But to the guys’ point on having it remove all possibility of error, there’s no reason is has to fill in for the brain. It’s just a tool.

Oliver Clozov

retaining nonfiction is hard for me too. i have a big notebook and i take detailed notes on every nonfic book i read. just the act of writing it down means i probably retain 3x as much as i would otherwise, but it's also great because when i finish a book i have my own sparknotes summary. because of this i really identify with what the guys are saying about putting in the work to learn something rather than just subcontracting your brain out to the computer.

Steve Nutt

I work for a small start up, I'm not on contract and invoice for my hours, I'm pretty good at making gtp sound incredibly human, but the main reason I get away with it is because the company is in a fairly constant state of chaos/disorganisation. Things are gradually getting more professionalised, and at some point they'll either start properly monitoring more than just my output, the company will get bought out and I'll either be subject to way more scrutiny or they'll just lay me off....Or investment will dry up the whole house of cards will come down and I'll be out of a job anyway. As the dude above says, it's unsustainable, but for now, fuck it.

justdave

"To read too many books is harmful." Mao Zedong

jay k.

From what I can tell, primarily the general education classes. A lot of people my age have so much mental energy used up by world news, home responsibilities, and work that homework for a class they don’t view as instrumental to their topic of study seems worthless to try on. I’m sure some people do that unfortunately, but many of us just use it for monotonous work that we don’t have time for

Monty

This all reminds me of the story of Terry Davis and TempleOS, but at least he built that whole damn thing from scratch.

Timothy Buttons

Competing with China by turning all of our children into illiterate troglodytes #LikeABoss

Brennan Burch

To answer your question, yes, that is exactly what Leetcode is. Riddles about magic that does nothing, and you’d better to do it in an environment as welcoming as a drug testing center.

Peen Israel

That elephant graveyard channel Felix mentioned is really good

Eric Jacobsen

"talking during movies" I went to the opening night of _Batman Returns_ (the Keaton/Pfeiffer/DeVito one) with a friend. At the beginning, there's the scene where the Penguin’s parents (including Mr. Paul Reubens, fresh off his “cancelleation”) put him in a carriage and push it off a bridge. At the moment when they peer over the bridge, my friend does a pitch-perfect Pee-Wee Herman “haha!”. The entire theater completely lost it.

Juan Suarez

that's exactly it. even if it's not intuitively easy, training your mind to do something makes you better at it.

etienne

the minute i saw the Hallucinated Frog from DeepDream in '18 or whatever i correctly identified all of this as the Demon from Hell

Juan Suarez

the site is project euler.

Rory

I am 23, life is horrific but at least Chapo is there to feel bad for me while everyone else tells me to go around with paper resumes still

Rory

This one of the few episodes I had to turn off because of how depressing this shit is

Toshio42

"Grokking" is bad enough, now people are "Thou Art God"ing their chatbots so hard they're getting divorced.

Austin Williams

Also as classes become more specialized the LLM's rapidly become unreliable. In engineering it'll do your first semester of physics homework no problem, but if you're in an advanced signals processing or fluid dynamics course it will confidently pump out pure horseshit.

Meatwad Cosby

My boss had me use Chat GPT to do math I could’ve done on a calculator. Best part was i saw her search history and last thing she used the ai search for was, “Where to buy sequins”.

Siddhartha

I was confused at first when Felix mentioned AI being useful in pharma, because the application of AI/ML in drug discovery and QC is a completely different thing from what social media and software developers are doing. Drug companies are not making drugs using AI girlfriends or uncanny valley inducing images.

Bushwald

This is what I'm seeing as an elder millenial CS student as well

GriftOfTheMagi

Knew a guy in the local jam scene who was straight up addicted to K (among other things but K was drug of choice) destroyed his kidneys and liver. Dead in his early 40s, sad

Sheep

One of my favorite movie moments was watching that Kawloon Walled City kung fu movie from last year in the smallest theater in the building sitting next to this rly nerdy black guy. Every time a big fight would start the guy next to me would go "Damn! Oww! Get him! Get him!" And it was fantastic. This is what Chat GPT wishes to take away from us.

Do Golems Dream of Ceramic Sheep

I still have no idea what Zuckerberg's on about when he says "the average American has only 3 friends but wants up to 15". Like, how the hell are you defining friends?

zenith

I cant find anything about this online at all

Maciek

What time frame we talking here? Cuz in having been in the Seattle party scene since I guess 06 up until I guess about a year now. Anyway in my experience this ket stuff is all post Covid, it was around a bit here and there but ya. Also did your friend convince himself his use was non harmful and actually helping him? Because my former friend, who follows that dick measuring tech docks supplement stack, this developer, rational mind set and all that. Optimizing his life to the fullest maaaaan. This motherfucker is telling me with a straight face that ket is under control as he’s going in and out of consciousness at his own friends thanks giving party lol. Following week he said I was actually the drug influence in his life. That’s when I cut ties, havn’t really touched party drugs since. Cocaine didn’t fuck up the party scene, bad mdma, the turn to Molly. Etc, nothing like I’ve seen ketamine do to otherwise very fun and functioning adults. They took the burning man ethos and a year of ketamine later think they’re god and want me to take home this custom designed ai slop art that this burning man support chat buddy made for me after my therapy sesssion. I’m ranting now but fuck me give me cocaine business talk all day over this nonsense

David Atkins

Will’s Cary Grant flipped my opinion of AI 180°

wigglybuddy

St. Anger references now!

CS

*bangs trash cans and calls it double bass*

Dirk

Elephant graveyard is so good. That Joe Rogan vid was incredible.

Noah Mickens

This bit about the guy going crazy from AI telling him he's the chosen one - exactly this same thing happened to an old friend of mine. He thinks he's basically the messiah because he spends all day talking to AI and posting the "conversations" - it's even using the same terminology that this lady quotes from her husband's chats.

Jaime Christley

They sent my AI to testify at my killer's sentencing and he ended up exonerating him and voiding his conviction fml

C. Ries

Using AI to cheat on your homework is badass. Shame about the other stuff though

Christian Bendillo

Whichever religion declares holy war on AI, I will convert immediately and give up anything they don’t approve of.

CS

Primus sucks

CS

You made far less sense than you thought you did.

Chachi uday

Also usually in college you are graded on a curve so if everyone else is cheating you should too. Its like steroids in bicycle racing.

Chachi uday

Me neither. It was something about reading a book and getting to a point where you felt overwhelmed or triggered.

Sheep

Is it? Lmao.

Greasy_Jones

I don't believe you, name One

Damen Irving

Taking my calculator and convincing myself I’m talking to god because I can make it say boobs

Lukas Kuligowski

The stupid interview riddle shit is so true, I wowed an interviewer at FB cause I was able to suss out how to make those calendar date dice you can buy, programming interviews were such a dumb mess even before AI

T33ny

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Leguminous Goth

Something that's improved my retention this year is setting my bookmark back a few pages whenever I set a book down, so I reread the last few pages when I start again next It's incredible how much I always pick up on those parts, and I feel like I'm clicking on all cylinders by the time I get back to new material. Initially, I was reluctant to slow down, but it actually gives the feeling of reading faster, since you've already taken a practice run on the first few pages. Can't recommend it enough, I'd recommend 2-5 pages back

CS

I don’t remember, but I think they referenced it on the Sam Seder episode. Maybe it was the Trillbillies one. Def recently.

drunk cig

The Dominicanization of the Western Male

Evan Kuhn

“The Trap” (2007) is the Adam Curtis doc featuring that chatbot anecdote

C. Andrew

The discussion around AI offloading critical thinking and students using it for everything made me think quite a bit. I had wrote several AI programs for very niche academic applications, diffraction data from electron microscopes and X-ray synchrotrons - that kind of niche - so believe you me I know there are applications for it. But it also had me thinking, am I really any different than those students? I guess, theoretically, I could have wrote traditional algorithmic code, maybe even learned something more about diffraction from a pure math perspective. But instead I had an autoencoder find and weight the patterns for me and because I had the computer do it many people congratulated me for being a clever boy and cited my paper. That's academia for you. Maybe Fourier could have wrote a novel calculus expression to do what I needed an Xeon processor to do, is my point. PS I'm gay.

Joe

the cary grant ai bit is legendary

Elliott Goods

literally got a slack message today from a coworker that they accidentally copy pasted from chatGPT that said “fix grammer: Just wanted to make sure my calendar invite isnt why it said she wasn’t avalabl” and i have been depressed about it all day. girl you don’t need chatGPT, you need to do some sight words from elementary school

Matthew Dunn

I’m about the same age as Will and a teacher in NYC. Gotta say phones have destroyed kids. The tech companies put a target on the kids, and turned them into zombies. Then the public schools do them no favors by being completely permissive and allowing all kinds of terrible behaviors. Liked how the guest mentioned empathy for the kids though cause teaching this generation of kids can be quite discouraging. Got to remember it’s not all their fault.

Flesh Colored Subaru

My favorite theater talk experience was during a theatrical release of Alien. Huge theater full of nerds, everyone is silent and locked in. It's the scene where Harry Dean Stanton is on the hanger with the chains and the dripping water. You could hear a pin drop on the auditorium. And then, a developmentally disabled adult man loudly said "THERE'S AN ALIEN IN THERE." like he was ordering dinner.

Andrew Cross

Butlerian jihad is needed now more than ever

Percy Plump

It’s because we have to know

No Relation to Henry

Can ChatGPT do math now? I remember chatbots not being able to relatively recently, but maybe they fixed that.

Naked Shitter

The Adam Curtis doc mentioned is "Hypernormalisation."

Shiv

I was stunned into good posture!

misterinterrupt

asking for the mods is the same old spiritual seeking (of god, etc)

ancrapistan

Martin Luther called it God, we call it GenAI, but the effect is the same: in the face of technology providing too much knowledge about the world, what is an “objective” thing I can point to that says I’m right no matter what?

curegore

Idk man shinji had two girlfriends and a boyfriend

Jaime Christley

I switched to Duck Duck Go, I think more than a year ago now, and don't miss Google Search one bit. They have AI features but they make it very easy to shut them off, unlike other companies. If you somehow can't quit Google Search but hate AI, enter a curse word into your search. Like "blah blah search for this and no AI bullshit". Techies are also prudes and will have no truck with "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits". Try it and see for yourself!

Obelisk the Tormentor

The “AI for work = bad and useless” stuff seems really disconnected coming from these guys whose only exposure to a real job is Twitter and articles. If I can use AI to cut down hours of mindless work at my soul-sucking corporate job and keep paying rent, I don’t get the weird boomer hard work mentality.

John Leavitt

Every single Chinese distinct has voted to remove phones and such from schools and considering how important phones are to state functioning to be willing give it for up all kids everywhere means it is turbo bad for everyone

Chris T

Hey! I spent 10,000 hours learning to play the violin. Started at age 12, became proficient at 24. My own sweat and blood! Just recently (late 30s) picked up the worlds smallest violin. Let me play it for you now. 🎻

Sam Lewis

That hereditary scene is my #1 theater experience

Eamon Short

I've said in previous episodes. It seems felix regularly finds a new work and for 1 week (two episodes) he will over use it (not shit talking him, it's cute). 10 minutes in I can already tell, this week's word is "Dolt"

JD Nonce

Regularly scheduled programming

tom

i love that an off the cuff chapo reaction to leetcode interviews was the most accurate and salient take i have heard in ages. i actually have to deliver these to candidates on the regular, answer me these riddles three. its fucking stupid, love you guys keep it up

K H

Felix has a good mic? Sounded oddly crisp compared to usual 🤔

raychilldolezal

One of my favorite and most profound memories is of an old couple turning around like it was a real documentary to shush me, my friends & mother for giggling at Borat at like age 14

RubbishBinMan

why do people like this always boil every systemic criticism down to being all about themselves? sorry you hate your job, doesn't change the fact that these tools and their proliferation are making everything shittier because they're not up to the tasks they being deployed for

K H

Elephant Graveyard shout out! Fuck YES!

K H

Did you use ai to misunderstand their point and write this post whining about it, or is this how you use the time you've optimized?

K H

How the fuck can butter stay out of the fridge without going bad reddit?

K H

Does it provide too much knowledge? It provides information, but it is increasingly poorly collated. A tower of Babel jus like that fr. It basically exclusively exists because making a few cents in missclicks and scams provides a life for people that would otherwise not be able to afford much luxury. If anything it is a demon to battle our curses coming home to roost.

K H

Idk, is that not close enough to what gradient descent is doing? If it was useful for the application does it matter? I think there is a difference between using it to solve a concrete problem vs avoiding difficulty in something explicitly intended as training.

K H

Are you North Korean?

K H

More time for gooning.

K H

Does he perhaps just have schizophrenia?

K H

Friend reserves are dangerously low and will run out by 2030 if we don't cut back. 1.5 friends maximum. People will have to do with only 1 polycule instead of 2.

C. Ries

Seek help for your homework addiction. Recovery is possible.

Noah Mickens

Nah. It's exactly the same syndrome they talk about in this Rolling Stone article, down to the details. I thought it was just him until I read the article.

Eric Wiley

A facebook friend of mine wrote this the other day: "I used ChatGPT to talk with an Ancestor and then turned it into a story. Very therapeutic and highly recommend"

Kelley

Hell yea, that channel is dope

Eric Wiley

According to Ed Zitron Open AI is projected to lose around 11 to 12 billion dollars this year so we could be looking at a dot-com bubble/08 housing level bubble burst

Ben

What is the sampled song at minute 43?

Matelda

The Cats 2019 movie may not be AI slop specifically but it's a defining text of our new era, because it is exactly what happens when someone who never learned how to sing, dance, compose, keep time, or follow a simple plot thinks "aside from that, i could revolutionize musical theater" and gets $200million to fill in the gaps with technology.

Chubby Justin

If I've learned anything about the tech world, it's that profitability doesn't mean shit anymore. Look at $TSLA. Until they finally figured out that musk was a psycho, they just kept buying that shit, regardless of fundamentals. Capitalism isn't about real value anymore. It's all speculation and hype.

gillianreed

*me, rubbing the temples of my head trying to imagine what having a non-manual labor job would be like: “well maybe the A.I. can do my synergy meeting homework”

Last Years Man

I'll bet Will is regretting leaving publishing now.

NitroDickclapp III

I genuinely think the reason Zuck does mma is bcos of his Augustus fetishism, I think he believes that to be the next emporer of the world he needs to be an expert in hand to hand combat, he believes it will give him an advantage somehow. He's one of the most terrifying freaks out there, he scares me more than Musk or any of the other freaks. There's something inhumanly sinister about Zuck

Gordon Schmidt

Hopefully someday I'll be able to market the fact that I was in one of the last classes to graduate before ChatGPT to potential employers

Chapo Bath House

I'm curious about the future of conspiracy re:AI. What we've seen highlighted in the Miles Klee piece, and elsewhere online, is this highly individualized conspiracy (ie your own babysitter tried to kill you, you are God). One of the things we've really seen in the pizzagate - Qanon sphere is boomers making friends and having something to do. We know GAI can help spread misinformation and paranoia, and to help paranoid people generate new ideas, but the social element of solving mysteries with your friends on Facebook and trying to smash JFK Jr the Italian hat salesman is missing. It's so sad

Chapo Bath House

Cats was the last movie I saw on theatres before COVID and it feels so appropriate as an epochal event

Paul F. Holzfäller

Each day we get closer and closer to Cinco e-Trial becoming a reality.

THEKILLERWHALE

Mike may be my favorite low episode count guest. He can really riff with the guys.

Michael Xin

Who knew that instead of crushing us with armies of robots, AI would crush us by destroying our mental faculties and ability to comprehend reality.

THEKILLERWHALE

Just a quick note on "AI" being used in microbiology. These applications are not directly linked to the consumer facing chat bots that we have started calling "AI". The idea is that LLM's can be used to predict protein structures and things like that (auto-completing the protein in a sense), but they are crucially trained on protein structure data and not Reddit comment sections. Thus, the underlying technology is the same but it would be a huge stretch to say that the advances in generative AI have precipitated any useful science as the publicly available technical advances are minimal (to my knowledge) and have not impacted scientific researchers as this research predated the chat bots.

🐷

Not knowing what leetcode is ffs get better guests

Mersham

Not all of us are giant fucking dorks

Chris

Can someone drop in the comments that report on AI usage that Will referenced?

bruce

people like to fret about ideas like nationalizing tech and Internet service companies due to ideas about free speech and expression, but how protected has your speech felt online lately? Are these private firms really doing anything to be meaningfully distinct from direct oversight and surveillance by the government? I don’t really think so

Jackiel

Listen to the most recent episode of “Hard Fork” to hear a NYT reporter proposing giving free subscriptions to ChatGPT premium to Chileans in exchange for depleting their natural resources

parker

Dude there's ATLeast three French dudes who've written books on this i think

parker

Dude he's literally has made like a few million doing what he is right now lol. That's more than anything he would of made doing publishing unless he literally was an editor/publishing agent on something like fucking twilight or some shit.

danny

I’m 26 at Rowan, for the reasons Mike gives, which makes me an elder Zoomer I guess. The amount of people clearly and obviously using AI is disturbing. My girlfriend (who is 24 im not weird) had to argue for days with a group member to remove and stop using AI in their project. It makes me terrified for a future run by morons who functionally cant read, but also probably fares well for the careers of the people who are actually attending school.

Chris

Does Felix not like Chuck Wendig? Anyone else have an opinion?

Last Years Man

I know. It was a bad attempt at sarcasm because the conversation delved into book publishing/reading vs. ai.

Duncan

If you swear at Google you can get it to stop giving you the AI overview, you can also use Duck Duck Go and there's is an optional feature to turn on or off

S

A “well, that just happened”-style author who attacked the internet archive in the past

Tea for the Tillerman

Same. Saw it on Super Bowl Sunday in an empty theater. I still argue it was a better movie experience than basically every movie released since (I liked Trap and the Scorsese one enough).

Eric

there’s a $1 safari extension that does it too (mobile and desktop)

tendo

I was pretty down on AI’s prospects but the amount of “mid” tasks it’s able to automate is starting to creep its way into more and more of daily life for many people I know. Yes it will never be as good as a human, but there’s so many middle man industries where this doesn’t matter. It’s going to take a lot of white collar jobs.

C. Ries

That’s a little bit of a generous description of his situation

Juan Suarez

i think there are things like machine vision and n-dimensional component analysis that could take a human their entire lives to calculate without computational assistance. on the other hand, we've evolved over millions of years to talk and bond with each other, so outsourcing that to a mechanical turk is basically lobotomizing yourself

Reece Coren

every time Adam Curtis says “but then something strange happened” i jump off the couch and go crazier than when Kris Jenkis hit the buzzer beater

Dan

Elephant graveyard shout out!!

Trelhouse

New York Mag: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College by James D. Walsh

Special Adeline

Damn... Episode came out a day too early to talk about Grok's malfunction today where it made every reply about white genocide against the boers

CS

Baudrillard, though he didn’t theorize about what we now call AI, just how mass media and modern culture obscures any sense of the real and ruins our ability to think.

Last Years Man

reading about that now. It's a gold mine

plastiq33

I laughed a bit as I am currently messing around with some AI image generation. It is mostly very stupid but seeing what other, more competent people can do with it is fairly terrifying. If you look at the AI image models you can download on civitai, it seems like people are mostly making furry AI waifus with it.

Crash Test Orphan

Between the uBlock extension workarounds and the ChatGPT woke therapist Felix is on a roll today

John

I need an entire AI Cary Grant Sex Bot segment

Arielle Curtin

Forever a Felix fan. In sync with his analysis of America as deeply anti-young person. 30 year old daughter, 26 yr old son: bleak future. Felix nailed it.

JASON

Will’s diagnosis of “bad companies with bad managers” is spot on for Wells Fargo. Pushing impossible goals onto employees is why they always get in trouble.

K H

I'm pretty sure the person in the article had schizophrenia or some like disorder.

Maggie+Al

on nationalisation, if you have questions about how publicly owned communications monopolies can still be part of a global network I would point you at the world's post offices and the universal postal union that binds them togeather.

rizzlord

How do they get these people who know nothing as experts on this topic.

rizzlord

This guy knows literally nothing about the topic he has been brought on to talk about.

LividEllen

Would anyone happen to know any details that might help me find the study Will mentioned at around 1:30?

MKatieUltra

We had this on our Commodore 64 when I was a kid! It was fun but also felt silly

protob1

Easily. They call upon their New York City socialite friends who serve coffee during the day and write articles by nights on shit they know nothing about.

sailor corellia

I didn't know you could turn off the AI stuff on Duck Duck Go. Thanks for the tip :)

Seymour Butz

Because all this “emerging technology” sucks absolute shit

M Varnzo

15,000 people chanting‘Die! Die! Die! Die! during Creeping Death at any Metallica show loud enough to make a hockey arena resonate and the stands shake will never be duplicated sitting at home with a VR mask on, or whatever. Whether you had a friend or fifteen with you or you went by yourself. And moshed solo. My man’s right.

Alex

Will is right about nationalizing the whole thing. This is something Marx talked about, nationalizing the monopolies when they become monopolies.

Chloe Interferometry

As for the riddles to get into a tech company, usually for big faang companies it's three technical interviews, some of them in which you do solve problems that have no bearing on what you actually do in your day to day. The riddles are dumb as hell and you have only an hour - some of these are hard enough problems that you get an week to solve them in college algorithms courses.

David Woodward

I’m so confused, what did they get wrong?

Micheline

Listening to this ep while I do a mandatory work training on AI :)

rizzlord

Almost everything. They have literally no idea what they are talking about. LLMs are transforming the entire software development industry. You can use them to write software to do almost anything you want right now. This changes not just the way people code but access to software development as a whole. This fact alone has huge consequences for labor.. The underlining technology is fast evolving to be used for the development of robotics with dangers and risks far beyond those posed By LLMs alone. The emphasis on foibles without any interest in capabilities (which is the real cause for concern) is the problem. Google's AlphaEvolve which was just released uses llms to write software autonomously, to test and develop new algorithms for things as consequential as 4x4 matrix multiplication (a process not improved upon for over 50 years prior.) They focus entirely on meaningless things. The idea that spending any time discussing a terrible start up idea about incorporating AI and movie theaters is utterly inane. They complain about the tool being used to offload thinking, but they do the same with their knee jerk half-understood politically poisoned takes.

rizzlord

Yeah cause robots that write code is not a technological advancement, gtfo. Also, see AlphaEvolve for LLMs used for narrow scientific advancement. Also LLMs are used as research assistants by academics and scientists across the world. Try openAI's DeepResearch tool and tell me that that wouldn't be a useful tool for researchers.

rizzlord

Ed Zitron is a literal dumbass. He calls AGI, Average General Intelligence. That is not what the acronym means. For a guy who's grift is to write about AI, to not know such a basic thing is utterly pathetic. Openai have 600 million active users. I think they'll be ok.

rizzlord

How do you not know that llms are currently revolutionizing software development?

rizzlord

It's cause he knows nothing about which he speaks.

rizzlord

They really are up to many tasks actually. LLMs are making novel discoveries in math and science, writing code about as well as most programmers, translating between dozens of languages, and successfully summarizing complex texts. It is self-delusion, or blinkered baby brain shit to think they are useless.

Mac daddy

I really dunno if its that interesting, its mostly just some 19yo saying "I used chatgpt to write this important assessment task, now I just gotta edit!" then me laughing and saying a silent prayer for them

Bean Blackett

love hank, but this was a huge missed opportunity to outro with Zapp’s “Computer Love” (1985)

PDubs

I need to know!

Cormac O'Brien

ffffffaaarrrrrrrrttttt ffftt... fft... fffaaarrrrttttt