Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.

That's a good way to put it. Another thing that was really en vogue at one point and might have been considered hard-ish scifi when it made it into Rifters was all the deep water telepathy via quantum brain tubules stuff, which now would only be taken seriously by wellness influencers.

not a fan of trump for example

In one the Eriophora stories (I think it's officially the sunflower circle) I think there's a throwaway mention about the Kochs having been lynched along with other billionaires on the early days of a mass mobilization to save what's savable in the face of environmental disaster (and also rapidly push to the stars because a Kardashev-2 civilization may have emerged in the vicinity so an escape route could become necessary in the next few millenia and this scifi story needs a premise).

You’d think AI companies would have wised up by this point and gone through all their pre-recorded demos with a fine comb so that ~~marks~~ users at least make it past the homepage, but I guess not.

The target group for their pitch probably isn't people who have a solid grasp of coding, I'd bet quite the opposite.

The yt comments are indeed delightful

Was the pitch what if A24 made commercials?

MidsommAir

Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused

Definitely, but the current narrative is that you don't need to do any of that, as long as you add three spoonfulls of AI into the mix you'll be as good as.

Then you find out what you actually signed up for is to do all the manual preparation of building an on-premise search engine to query unstructured data, and you still might end up with a tool that's only slightly better than trying to grep a bunch of pdfs at the same time.

I mean, that was definitely a thing when I was at school, only it was mostly about teaching undergrads graph search algorithms and the least math possible in order to understand backpropagation.

As an aside, weird that we don't hear much about genetic algorithms anymore, but it's probably just me.

That's it!

There's a bit in the beginning where he talks about how actors handling and drinking from obviously weightless empty cups ruins suspension of disbelief, so I'm assuming it's a callback.

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.

This is fascinating.

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable on the subject might have chimed in to provide some context by now, like are bioelectric circuits legit or is this sheldrake all over again, and why can't I find anything on the very interesting phenomenon of deer antlers maintaining acquired deformities between fall off and growth cycles, and apparently trophic memory is an hapax legomenon to your linked article according to google.

It's both, probably. Sounds like the Alice and Bob of compsci security parable fame, except pretentious, and Mallory is the writer.