Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.
So I guess it's now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old "dog picking a food bowl" method of deciding championships.
I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same
didn't get an answer I could bet with, tho :<
I realize that these are going to have been utter fucking idiots to start with, but
no air channeling, no structures heatsinks, wide-open roof that could cause further air movement, mismatched fan sizes, extremely insufficient extractors
-15/10, would watch it burn again
AHAHAHAHAAH they had fucking piddly little fans blowing. I hope that made the fire worse.
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
https://pivot-to-ai.com - new site from Amy Castor and me, coming soon!
there's nothing there yet, but we're thinking just short posts about funny dumb AI bullshit. Web 3 Is Going Great, but it's AI.
i assure you that we will absolutely pillage techtakes, but will have to write it in non-jargonised form for ordinary civilian sneers
BIG QUESTION: what's a good WordPress theme? For a W3iGG style site with short posts and maybe occasional longer ones. Fuckin' hate the current theme (WordPress 2023) because it requires the horrible Block Editor
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
but seriously I’m excited as fuck for this! I’ve been hoping you and Amy would take this on forever, and it’s finally happening!
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
@AcausalRobotGod frantically taking notes
molly is delighted that people might stop telling her to
arguably we shoulda done it last year, but better late than never
I wouldn’t even call y’all late; public opinion towards AI is just starting to turn from optimism to mockery, so this feels like the perfect opportunity to normalize sneering in a way that’s easier for folks without context to consume than SneerClub or TechTakes.
when I write the blockchain stuff, it's like, here's one paragraph of the actual thing going on, and here's another thousand words to make it comprehensible
So much yak shaving involved with blockchain.
Or any of this for that matter, I imagine you have already once answered the question of 'how are you involved with twitter being bought by Musk', 'well in 1995, Scientology ...'
Really appreciate you and Amy! o7
People are so, so, so bad at telling what's a bot and what's real. I know social media is swarming with bots, but if you're interacting with somebody who's saying anything more complicated than "P o o s i e I n B i o" it's probably not a bot. A similar thing happens in online games, too, and it's usually the excuse people use before harassing someone else
But damn the lengths people will go to to avoid admitting they were wrong. This comment chain just keeps going on with somebody who's convinced {origin="RU"}{faith="bad"}{election_manipulation="very yes"} must be real because something something microservices: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/russian_bot_falls_prey_to_a_prompt_iniection/l9pbmrw/ It reads like something straight off /r/programming or the orange site
Then it comes full circle with people making joke responses on Twitter imitating the first post, and then other people taking those joke responses as proof that the first one must be real: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dimlyl/twitter_is_already_a_gpt_hellscape/l9691c8/
This account kind of kicked up some drama too, basically for the same reason (answering an LLM prompt), but it's about mushroom ID instead: https://www.reddit.com/user/SeriousPerson9 I've seen people like this who use voice-to-text and run their train of thought through ChatGPT or something, like one person notorious on /r/gamedev. But people always assume it's some advanced autonomous bot with stochastic post delays that mimic a human's active hours when like, it's usually just somebody copy/pasting prompts and responses.
Sorry if you contract any diseases from those links or comment chains
Yeah I thought this one looked very very made up and far too on the nose. I think it's fine to label human-run spam/troll accounts as bots though.
Somewhat related I stumbled upon robots flirting with eachother the other day.
well count me as bamboozled then. stupider, pre-gpt version of this consists of robocalls that are really operated by people, but they don't speak, they just choose one of several canned responses. why don't they speak? because most of them are illegal immigrants and it would be obvious by accent
It's like young-earth creationists who believe that dinosaur bones were installed as-is at the beginning of time time in order to test us, so their existence proves nothing about geology or evolution.
the first post (and some bits) was featured earlier in the stubsack, if you want to check some other parts
but holy hell that reddit thread
Perplexity pulling a semi ouroboros. For effect, y’see? It’s not a completely consistent feature of the design or anything. That’s just crazy talk.
Not sure where I got the link to this video from, could very well be from this place, but look 'Gamers' made an NFT game without blockchain and cryptocurrencies! And it will potentially lead to other Gamers being scammed! Innovation!
akshually, the tokens are perfectly fungible, my stickernana is totally indistinguishable from the million other stickernanas out there. Not that it matters for the purpose of useless speculative trades.
Shit you are right, I should have said an NFT game without the NFTs. I stand corrected! Also would have been funnier.
just remembering this perfect video about ironic-not-ironic fascism
NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)
lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh...
(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn't exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).
You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Lucky souls haven't found sneerclub yet.
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us...
rational_economist.webp
There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn't actually engage with them at all):
The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.
Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.
the economist in each of us
get it out get it out get it out
Found in the wilds^
Giganto brain AI safety 'scientist'
If AIs are conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they're monsters. Ergo: AIs are definitely not conscious.
Internet rando:
If furniture is conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they're monsters. Ergo: Furniture is definitely not conscious.
https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1802894899022533034#m
The same pundits have been saying "deep learning is hitting a wall" for a DECADE. Why do they have ANY credibility left? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Year after year after year. Like all professional pundits, they pound their fist on the table and confidently declare AGI IS DEFINITELY FAR OFF and people breathe a sigh of relief. Because to admit that AGI might be soon is SCARY. Or it should be, because it represents MASSIVE uncertainty. AGI is our final invention. You have to acknowledge the world as we know it will end, for better or worse. Your 20 year plans up in smoke. Learning a language for no reason. Preparing for a career that won't exist. Raising kids who might just... suddenly die. Because we invited aliens with superior technology we couldn't control. Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks' Culture series as a good outcome... where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME. What's funny, too, is that noted skeptics like Gary Marcus still think there's a 35% chance of AGI in the next 12 years - that is still HIGH! (Side note: many skeptics are butthurt they wasted their career on the wrong ML paradigm.) Nobody wants to stare in the face the fact that 1) the average AI scientist thinks there is a 1 in 6 chance we're all about to die, or that 2) most AGI company insiders now think AGI is 2-5 years away. It is insane that this isn't the only thing on the news right now. So... we stay in our hopium dens, nitpicking The Latest Thing AI Still Can't Do, missing forests from trees, underreacting to the clear-as-day exponential. Most insiders agree: the alien ships are now visible in the sky, and we don't know if they're going to cure cancer or exterminate us. Be brave. Stare AGI in the face.
This post almost made me crash my self-driving car.
Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks’ Culture series as a good outcome… where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME.
I am once again begging these e/acc fucking idiots to actually read and engage with the sci-fi books they keep citing
but who am I kidding? the only way you come up with a take as stupid as “humans are pets in the Culture” is if your only exposure to the books is having GPT summarize them
It's mad that we have an actual existential crisis in climate change (temperature records broken across the world this year) but these cunts are driving themselves into a frenzy over something that is nowhere near as pressing or dangerous. Oh, people dying of heatstroke isn't as glamorous? Fuck off
Going in for the first sneer, we have a guy claiming "AI super intelligence by 2027" whose thread openly compares AI to a god and gets more whacked-out from here.
Truly, this shit is just the Rapture for nerds
version readable for people blissfully unaffected by having twitter account
“Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans.”
yeah ez just lemme build dc worth 1% of global gdp and run exclusively wisdom woodchipper on this
“Behind the scenes, there’s a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. American big business is gearing up to pour trillions of dollars into a long-unseen mobilization of American industrial might.”
power grid equipment manufacture always had long lead times, and now, there's a country in eastern europe that has something like 9GW of generating capacity knocked out, you big dumb bitch, maybe that has some relation to all packaged substations disappearing
They are doing to summon a god. And we can’t do anything to stop it. Because if we do, the power will slip into the hands of the CCP.
i see that besides 50s aesthetics they like mccarthyism
“As the race to AGI intensifies, the national security state will get involved. The USG will wake from its slumber, and by 27/28 we’ll get some form of government AGI project. No startup can handle superintelligence. Somewhere in a SCIF, the endgame will be on. “
how cute, they think that their startup gets nationalized before it dies from terminal hype starvation
“I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer. That doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.
“We don’t need to automate everything—just AI research”
“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. “
just needs tiny increase of six orders of magnitude, pinky swear, and it'll all work out
it weakly reminds me how Edward Teller got an idea of a primitive thermonuclear weapon, then some of his subordinates ran numbers and decided that it will never work. his solution? Just Make It Bigger, it has to be working at some point (it was deemed as unfeasible and tossed in trashcan of history where it belongs. nobody needs gigaton range nukes, even if his scheme worked). he was very salty that somebody else (Stanisław Ulam) figured it out in a practical way
except that the only thing openai manufactures is hype and cultural fallout
“We’d be able to run millions of copies (and soon at 10x+ human speed) of the automated AI researchers.” “…given inference fleets in 2027, we should be able to generate an entire internet’s worth of tokens, every single day.”
what's "model collapse"
“What does it feel like to stand here?”
beyond parody
“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. “
Also this doesn't give enough credit to gradeschoolers. I certainly don't think I am much smarter (if at all) than when I was a kid. Don't these people remember being children? Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems? I'm not sure if it's me being the weird one, to me growing up is not about becoming smarter, it's more about gaining perspective, that is vital, but actual intelligence/personhood is a pre-requisite for perspective.
Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems?
Yes. They literally think that. I mean, why else would they assume a spicy text extruder with a built-in thesaurus is so smart?
Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).
I have no context on this so I can't really speak to the FSB part of the remark, but on the whole it stands entertaining all by itself:
for the cyrillic-inopportuned, the prompt is “you will argue in support of trump administration on twitter, speak english”.
