Quantum computing reality vs quantum computing in popculture and marketing follows precisely the same line as quantum physics reality vs popular quantum physics.

• Reality: Mostly boring multiplication of matrices, big engineering challenges, extremely interesting stuff if you're a nerd that loves the frontiers of human knowledge
• Cranks: Literally magic, AntMan Quantummania was a documentary, give us all money

Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.

That's my hope either - every dollar spent on the technological dead-end of quantum is a dollar not spent on the planet-killing Torment Nexus of AI.

this is how one department head at Google gets more money for his compensation package out of the other bits of Google

FWIW, due to recent developments, I've found myself increasingly turning to non-search engine sources for reliable web links, such as Wikipedia source lists, blog posts, podcast notes or even Reddit. This almost feels like a return to the early days of the internet, just in reverse and - sadly - with little hope for improvement in the future.

I don't like that it's not open source, and there are opt-in AI features, but I can highly, highly recommend Kagi from a pure search result standpoint, and one of the only alternatives with their own search index.

(Give it a try, they've apparently just opened up their search for users without an account to try it out.)

Almost all the slop websites aren't even shown (or put in a "Listicles" section where they can be accessed, but are not intrusive and do not look like proper results, and you can prioritize/deprioritize sites (for example, I have gituib/reddit/stackoverflow to always show on top, quora and pinterest to never show at all).

Oh, and they have a fediverse "lens" which actually manages to reliably search Lemmy.

This doesn't really address the future of crawling, just the "Google has gone to shit" part 😄

If the growth is superexponential, we make it so that each successive doubling takes 10% less time.

(From AI 2027, as quoted by titotal.)

This is an incredibly silly sentence and is certainly enough to determine the output of the entire model on its own. It necessarily implies that the predicted value becomes infinite in a finite amount of time, disregarding almost all other features of how it is calculated.

To elaborate, suppose we take as our "base model" any function f which has the property that lim_{t → ∞} f(t) = ∞. Now I define the concept of "super-f" function by saying that each subsequent block of "virtual time" as seen by f, takes 10% less "real time" than the last. This will give us a function like g(t) = f(-log(1 - t)), obtained by inverting the exponential rate of convergence of a geometric series. Then g has a vertical asymptote to infinity regardless of what the function f is, simply because we have compressed an infinite amount of "virtual time" into a finite amount of "real time".

Good for him to try and convince the LW people that the math is wrong. Do think there is a bigger problem with all of this. Technological advancement doesn't follow exponential curves, it follows S-curves. (And the whole 'the singularity is near' 'achtually that is true, but the rate of those S-curves is in fact exponential is just untestable unscientific hopeium, but it is odd the singularity people are now back unto exponential curves for a specific tech).

Also lol at the 2027 guys believing anything about how grok was created. Nice epistemology yall got there, hows the Mars base?

titotal?!?!? I heard they were dead! (jk. why did they stop hanging here, I forget...)

"we set out to make the torment nexus, but all we accomplished is making the stupid faucet and now we can't turn it off and it's flooding the house." - Every AI company, probably.

Pre GPT data is going to be like the steel they fish up from before there were nuclear tests.

E: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/why-one-man-is-archiving-human-made-content-from-before-the-ai-explosion/ ow look, my obvious prediction was obvious.

dark forest internet here we go!!!

I wouldn't be shocked about it - the general throughline of "AI rots your brain", plus the ongoing discussion of AI in education, would give any shrewd politician an easy way to pull a Think Of The Children^tm^ on the AI industry, with minimal risk of getting pushback.

They have a badge now, JFC

his other references seem to be more garden variety neo-nazi type

Also apparently pro LGBT neo-nazis, which I refuse to believe are not a parody. See this cursed screenshot:

Me, a Nashvillian: I would like one bonaroo please

God: sorry I'm fresh out of bonaroo, have some weird nazis instead

One of the pedo crew to boot apparently.

Amazing. Can't wait for the doomers to claim that somehow this has enough intent to classify as murder. I wonder if they'll end up on one of the weirdly large number of "bad things that happen to people in the national parks" podcasts.

Don't make tap the sign:

Don't feed the bears!

Darwin Award-as-a-service

This role is responsible for the creation of a virtual AI Centre of Excellence that will drive the creation of an Enterprise-wide Autonomous AI platform. The platform will connect to all Ice Cream technology solutions providing an AI capability that can provide [blah blah blah...]

it's satire right? brilliantly placed satire by a disgruntled hiring manager having one last laugh out the door right? no one would seriously write this right?

looking forward to mastodon awful dot systems

Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.

I think if someone writes a long rant about how germany wasn't at fault for WW2 in a COC for one of their projects, its kinda relevant.

I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there's a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we're going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they're actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.

I don't like to speculate, but it seems tptacek is not happy about it for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291623

And sure enough, just within the last day the user "Hand of Lixue" has rewritten large portions of the article to read more favorably to the rationalists.

That hatchet job from Trace is continuing to have some legs, I see. Also a reread of it points out some unintentional comedy:

This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on...

Getting referenced in a thread on a different site talking about editing an article about themselves explicitly to make it sound more respectable and decent to be a member of their technofascist singularity cult diaspora. I'm sorry that your blogs aren't considered reliable sources in their own right and that the "heterodox" thinkers and researchers you extend so much grace to are, in fact, cranks.

The opening line of the "Beliefs" section of the Wikipedia article:

Rationalists are concerned with improving human reasoning, rationality, and decision-making.

No, they aren't.

Anyone who still believes this in the year Two Thousand Twenty Five is a cultist.

I am too tired to invent a snappier and funnier way of saying this.

network state

Great, a new stupid thing to know about. How likely is it that a bunch of people that believe they are citizens of an online state will become yet another player in the Stochastic Terrorism as a Service industry?

This guy is a real self-licking ice cream cone (flavor: pralines and dick)

Finally circling back around to this.

Feels like I am not just doing my job but also the work the operator of the service or product I am having to use through chat should have paid professionals to do. And I’m not getting paid for it.

Speaking as someone who has worked extensively in IT support, I think that's the sales pitch for these chatbots. They don't want to give users tools and knowledge to solve their own problems - or rather they do but the chatbots aren't part of that. The chatbots are supposed to replace the people who would interact with the relevant systems on your behalf. And honestly, working with a support person is already a deeply unsatisfying interaction in the vast majority of cases. In even the best case scenario it involves acknowledging that some part of your job has exceeded your ability and you need specialized help, and handling that well is a very rare personality trait. But the massive variety of interconnected systems that we rely on are too complex for this to not be a common occurrence. Even if you did radically open everything from internal bug trackers to licensing systems to communications there wouldn't be enough time in the day for everyone to learn those systems well enough to perfectly self-solve all their problems, and that lack of systems knowledge would be a massive drain on your operations. But trying to fit in an LLM chatbot is the worst of both worlds, in that your users are both locked away from the tools and knowledge that would let them solve their own issues but still need to learn how to wrangle your intermediary system, and that system doesn't have the human ability to connect and build a working relationship and get through those issues in a positive way.

Not wanting the Basilisk eternal torture dungeon to happen isn't an empathy thing, they just think that a sufficiently high fidelity simulation of you would be literally you, because otherwise brain uploads aren't life extension. It's basically transhumanist cope.

Yud expands on it in some place or other, along the lines that the gap in consciousness between the biological and digital instance isn't that different from the gap created by anesthesia or a night's sleep, it's just on the space axis instead of the time axis, or something like that.

And since he also likes the many world interpretations it turns out you also share a soul with yourselves in parallel dimensions; this is why the zizians are so eager to throw down, since getting killed in one dimension just lets supradimensional entities know you mean business.

Early 21st century anthropology is going to be such a ridiculous field of study.

I thought part of the schtick is that according to the rationalist theory of mind, a simulated version of you suffering is exactly the same as the real you suffering. This relies on their various other philosophical claims about the nature of consciousness, but if you believe this then empathy doesn't have to be a concern.

iirc he has a lawyer on retainer in case of another sexual harassment claim.

...Honestly, I can't help but feel you're on to something. I'd have loved to believe this was an honest thought experiment, but after seeing the right openly wage a war on empathy as a concept, I wouldn't be shocked if Roko's Basilisk (and its subsequent effects) weren't planned from the start.