After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.

It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

For my taste, framing CCC as a “Washington/Brussels” project is a far too close to what Russian smearbots do (link everything unpopular back to their current hate objects, i.e. foster resentment against the EU, liberals, etc.).

It looks very much like the CCC is an international organization funded and controlled by the far right.

Their website states:

Which countries is CCC active in?

The CCC works currently with tens of thousands of consumers and partner organizations in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more.

Their colorful funding history:

Big Tobacco and right-wing US billionaires funding anti-regulation hardliners in the EU

I’m expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia’s campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.

Musk also opened Twitter’s doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.

Is this a case of “here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party” ?

But it’s good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren’t thinking/reasoning “AI” that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text (“context”). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.

I know this is naive, but sometimes I wish we’d be bolder in brainstorming alternative ways the economy could work.

Imagine, for example, the IRS would send a yearly, mandatory “happiness questionnaire” to all employees of a company (compare the “world happiness report”). This questionnaire then would have a major influence on how much taxes the company has to pay, so much that it’s cheaper to make employees happy and content than to squeeze them for every ounce of labor they can give.

Or an official switch to 6 hour days, except to get those 2 hours less, you have to use them for growing your own food. Shorter workdays, more time with family, more self-reliance. And a strong motivation for cities to provide more green spaces and community gardens.

Very naive ideas with lots of problems, yes, but I wish we wouldn’t have the concept of revenue generation so thoroughly encrusted in our heads as the guiding principle of all we do and dream of.

…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.