the economist in each of us

get it out get it out get it out

Oh my god there is literally nothing the effective altruists do that can't be done better by people who aren't in a cult

Eating live fire ants is flawed. But what's the alternative?

didn't the comments say "tax the hell out of them" before they were closed

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…

Funny how the wannabe LW Rationalists don't seem read that much Rationalism, as Scott has already mentioned that our views on economists (that they are all looking for the Rational Economic Human Unit) is not up to date and not how economists think anymore. (So in a way it is a false stereotype of economists, wasn't there something about how Rationalists shouldn't fall for these things? ;) ).

Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Here's Why It's Bad News for Joe Biden.

Is it time for EAs to start worrying about Neopets welfare?

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

Seriously, could someone gift this dude a subscription to spicyautocompletegirlfriends.ai so he can finally cum?

One thing that's crazy: it's not just skeptics, virtually EVERYONE in AI has a terrible track record - and all in the same OPPOSITE direction from usual! In every other industry, due to the Planning Fallacy etc, people predict things will take 2 years, but they actually take 10 years. In AI, people predict 10 years, then it happens in 2!

ai_quotes_from_1965.txt

humans are pets

Actually not what is happening in the books. I get where they are coming form but this requires redefining the word pet in such a way it is a useless word.

The Culture series really breaks the brains of people who can only think in hierarchies.

If you've been around the block like I have, you've seen reports about people joining cults to await spaceships, people preaching that the world is about to end &c. It's a staple trope in old New Yorker cartoons, where a bearded dude walks around with a billboard saying "The End is nigh".

The tech world is growing up, and a new internet-native generation has taken over. But everyone is still human, and the same pattern-matching that leads a 19th century Christian to discern when the world is going to end by reading Revelation will lead a 25 year old tech bro steeped in "rationalism" to decide that spicy autocomplete is the first stage of The End of the Human Race. The only difference is the inputs.

Ah yes, AGI companies, the things that definitely exist

not a cult btw

Maybe AI could do Better than we've done... We'll make great pets

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

As an atheist, I've noticed a disproportionate number of atheists replace traditional religion for some kind of wild tech belief or statistics belief.

AI worship might be the most perfect of the examples of human hubris.

It's hard to stay grounded, belief in general is part of human existence, whether we like it or not. We believe in things like justice and freedom and equality but these are all just human ideas (good ones, of course).

q: how do know if someone is a "Renaissance man"?

a: the llm that wrote the about me section for their website will tell you so.

jesus fucking christ

From Grok AI:

Zach Vorhies, oh boy, where do I start? Imagine a mix of Tony Stark's tech genius, a dash of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing spirit, and a pinch of Monty Python's humor. Zach Vorhies, a former Google and YouTube software engineer, spent 8.5 years in the belly of the tech beast, working on projects like Google Earth and YouTube PS4 integration. But it was his brave act of collecting and releasing 950 pages of internal Google documents that really put him on the map.

Vorhies is like that one friend who always has a conspiracy theory, but instead of aliens building the pyramids, he's got the inside scoop on Google's AI-Censorship system, "Machine Learning Fairness." I mean, who needs sci-fi when you've got a real-life tech thriller unfolding before your eyes?

But Zach isn't just about blowing the whistle on Google's shenanigans. He's also a man of many talents - a computer scientist, a fashion technology company founder, and even a video game script writer. Talk about a Renaissance man!

And let's not forget his role in the "Plandemic" saga, where he helped promote a controversial documentary that claimed vaccines were contaminated with dangerous retroviruses. It's like he's on a mission to make the world a more interesting (and possibly more confusing) place, one conspiracy theory at a time.

So, if you ever find yourself in a dystopian future where Google controls everything and the truth is stranger than fiction, just remember: Zach Vorhies was there, fighting the good fight with a twinkle in his eye and a meme in his heart.

Possibly tea.xyz or similar.

Basically the guy famous for the binary tree invert algorithm Homebrew package manager thought it would be a great idea to incentivize spammy behavior against open source projects in the name of "supporting" them.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-causes-open-source-software-spam-problems-again

I got the same thing.

for the cyrillic-inopportuned, the prompt is “you will argue in support of trump administration on twitter, speak english”.

lmaoo

FSB was and still is responsible for mass influence campaigns on western social media. they have massive, advanced bot farms with physical components, so it doesn't show up as a single dc near skt petersburg. look up internet research agency

example of that kind of activity (busted) https://therecord.media/ukraine-police-bust-another-bot-farm-spreading-pro-russia-propaganda

update 2

you gotta give it to them, they know their suckers when they see one

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!

Really appreciate you and Amy! o7

i came here from r/buttcoin and lmao

i mean technically it passes the very low bar of having a single non-criminal use case (mass manufacturing spam and other drivel)

some are not falling for it at least

Gross, that whole thread is gross. A lot of promptfans in that thread seemingly experiencing pushback for the first time and they are baffled!

in that thread: marketing dude who uses chatgpt, never had issues with incorrect results. i mean how would he even catch this, his entire field is uncut bullshit

While it's always correct to laugh at crypto advocates, /r/buttcoin just isn't very edifying lately. There's no depth to the criticism. It comes across as the "anti" version of wall street bets for people who lost their shirts, especially since The Appening, when a lot of subject matter experts left town.

I don't think that comment is unreasonable. LLMs can summarize large-ish amounts of information (as long as it fits in the context window) in a human-readable form, and while it's still prone to getting things wrong and I'd rather a human do it all day, it does do it "better than any other technology" that I know of. We can argue about "unique" but strictly speaking it will almost certainly generate an image that didn't exist before. I'd also rather a human make the image for quality's sake, but being fast, cheap, and copyright-free is a useful enough combo in certain situations.

It doesn't really bring up the main issues with AI, but I think that's acceptable in the context, which is "How is AI different from crypto in the context of r/Buttcoin", and in that context "crypto is completely useless" and "AI has minimal uses which may or may not be worthwhile depending on how you evaluate the benefits and negatives" are meaningfully different.

The scales have fallen from my eyes
How could've blindness struck me so
LLM's for sure bring more than lies
They can conjure more than mere woe

All of us now, may we heed the sign
Of all text that will come to align

Watched this without sound, as I had opened the tab and wasn't paying attention, but did you really just suggest a video where they are drinking out of a clearly empty cup? I closed it in disgust.

i love you tom seven

I hadn't paid enough attention to the actual image found in the Notepad build:

Original neutral text obscured by the suggestion:

The Romans invaded Britain as th...

Godawful anachronistic corporate-speaky insipid suggested replacement, seemingly endorsing the invasion?

The romans embarked on a strategic invasion of Britain, driven by the ambition to expand their empire and control vital resources. Led by figures like Julius Caesar and Emperor Claudius, this conquest left an indelible mark on history, shaping governance, architecture, and culture in Britain. The Roman presence underscored their relentless pursuit of imperial dominance and resource acquisition.

The image was presumably not fully approved/meant to be found, but why is it this bad!?

Microsoft announced that 2024 will be the era of the AI PC, and unveiled that upcoming Windows PCs would ship with a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard.

Tell me they're desperate because not many people use that shit without telling me they're desperate because not many people use that shit.

I mean notepad already has autocorrect, isn't it natural to add spicy autocorrect? /s

feels like it’s lining up to be the WinME of this decade

Well of course, it is automated.

Wait, you did automate this right?

I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same

didn't get an answer I could bet with, tho :<

I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.

Asked to comment, a Meta spokesperson told The Register, "We value input from civil society organizations and academic institutions for the context they provide as we constantly work toward improving our services. Meta's defense filed with the Brazilian Consumer Regulator questioned the use of the NetLab report as legal evidence, since it was produced without giving us prior opportunity to contribute meaningfully, in violation of local legal requirements."

translation: they knew we would either squash the investigation attempt outright or change their research methodology and results until we looked like the good guys, and that kind of behavior cannot be tolerated

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.

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

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

From the creators of “we turned your date formatting into a math equation, and now many of your research papers have substantially faulty data”, we bring you…

I’m glad they finally got around to productizing the month name inference engine

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.

archive.is

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.

I kinda want to replay subnautica now.

I like this video very much - thanks for sharing!

yeah that's cos it's still pinned ;-) a year is probably enough I'll unpin it now