One thing that is weird about current examples of the genre is this attention to ~tactical realism~ in like the exact guns or jargon used but the central motivating conflict is either ‘evil PMC that might as well be cobra commander’ or ‘mumble mumble hand wave’

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Old middlebrow military or spy thrillers were much more willing to take place in some kind of Hollywood version of the actual world, with (caricatures, sure) of real countries, agencies, etc. Even sort of campy outlandish shit like James Bond often referenced real conflicts.

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I think a ban on TV political ads actually makes a lot of sense as policy. You really don't want the people who find TV ads convincing to vote

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Maybe this is all unfair and based on surface level engagement in this stuff many years ago. I still find some of it impressive, like Gwern in 2020 writing about GPT-3 and scaling a few years before chat GPT.

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This model of what would happen is no doubt "less wrong" than some others, but if this is more about which kind of people that drawn to ideas that happened to work out, rather than special insight about what LLMs can do, that obviously affects how much one should listen to their predictions.

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