The phrase "adorned with academic ornamentation" sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.

The implication that Soares / MIRI were doing serious research before is frankly journalist malpractice. Matteo Wong can go pound sand.

also, they misspelled "Eliezer", lol

The Atlantic puts the "shit" in "shitlib"

Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.

Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and they're a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man "agency" has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.

'set them up with'

Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?

Oh, looks like gemini is a fan of the hacky anti-comedy bits from some of my favorite podcasts

look at me, the thinking man, i update myself just like a computer beep boop beep boop

Clown world.

How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. They'll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.

So, as I have been on a cult comparison kick lately, how did it work for those doomsday cults when the world didn't end, and they picked a new date, did they become more radicalized or less? (I'm not sure myself, I'd assume it would be the people disappointed leave, and the rest get worse).

E: ah: https://slate.com/technology/2011/05/apocalypse-2011-what-happens-to-a-doomsday-cult-when-the-world-doesn-t-end.html

... prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a group’s legitimacy, those who are part of that group—and already accept its whole theology—may not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result.

I'm sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it's not the implicit racialization of everything, it's the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.

You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we're going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that's final.

Found this

Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?

We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic

E: googling “lintamande kelsey piper” and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged “Vladmir Putin/Sauron”. How fun!

No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.

Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. What's going to happen when they retire and there's nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? I'll have sold off my shares by then, I'm sure.

Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.

aum:

Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the "Aum Salvation plan", included claims of [...] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.

this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasan's network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one

Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I'll just comment on this bit:

Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.

The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney's PhD thesis. I've read both; Hughston's is more detailed and more clear.

Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn’t seem to be an out and out promptfondler.

Quote from this post:

I found myself in a prolonged discussion with Mark Bishop, who was quite pessimistic about the capabilities of large language models. Drawing on his expertise in theory of mind, he adamantly claimed that LLMs do not understand anything – at least not according to a proper interpretation of the word “understand”. While Mark has clearly spent much more time thinking about this issue than I have, I found his remarks overly dismissive, and we did not see eye-to-eye.

Based on this I'd say the author is LLM-pilled at least.

However, a fruitful outcome of our discussion was his suggestion that I read John Searle’s original Chinese Room argument paper. Though I was familiar with the argument from its prominence in scientific and philosophical circles, I had never read the paper myself. I’m glad to have now done so, and I can report that it has profoundly influenced my thinking – but the details of that will be for another debate or blog post.

Best case scenario is that the author comes around to the stochastic parrot model of LLMs.

E: also from that post, rearranged slightly for readability here. (the [...]* parts are swapped in the original)

My debate panel this year was a fiery one, a stark contrast to the tame one I had in 2023. I was joined by Jane Teller and Yanis Varoufakis to discuss the role of technology in autonomy and privacy. [[I was] the lone voice from a large tech company.]* I was interrupted by Yanis in my opening remarks, with claps from the audience raining down to reinforce his dissenting message. It was a largely tech-fearful gathering, with the other panelists and audience members concerned about the data harvesting performed by Big Tech and their ability to influence our decision-making. [...]* I was perpetually in defense mode and received none of the applause that the others did.

So also author is tech-brained and not "tech-fearful".

His Geometric Unity proposal, therefore, has all the hallmarks of an outsider attempting to revolutionize physics, casting him as an Einstein-like figure toiling alone at the patent office.

I hate this framing so fucking much, Einstein wasn't an "outsider"! He was known and respected! He talked to other prominent physicist all the time! Where does this myth even come from.

Weinstein released his Geometric Unity paper on April 1, debuting it on Joe Rogan’s podcast

Okay, like, you could've just started with this, this Weinstein person is clearly an idiot and cannot be taken seriously

Ultra-rare NIMBY W

Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don't learn how to do.

And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK

better, or equivalent to, a mass defecation event?

Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:

Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.

groks gunna make u fuck

Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.

Well if the bubble pops he will have to pivot to people who pivot. (That is what is going to suck when to bubble pops, so many people are going to lose their jobs, and I fear a lot of people holding the bags are not the ones who really should be punished the mosts (really hope not a lot of pension funds bought in). The stock market was a mistake).

The thing that kills me about this is that, speaking as a tragically monolingual person, the MTPE work doesn't sound like it's actually less skilled than directly translating from scratch. Like, the skill was never in being able to type fast enough or read faster or whatever, it was in the difficult process of considering the meaning of what was being said and adapting it to another language and culture. If you're editing chatbot output you're still doing all of that skilled work, but being asked to accept half as much money for it because a robot made a first attempt.

In terms of that old joke about auto mechanics, AI is automating the part where you smack the engine in the right place, but you still need to know where to hit it in order to evaluate whether it did a good job.

Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.

a quantum leap might actually be accurate

Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4

Sure babe, you keep telling yourself that.

Oh my god, they're showing signs of sentience.

has to? sigh

it makes me so deeply fucking depressed knowing how much near-abandon infrastructure spending is happening. minor win is that power plants can work for other things too, but it still runs headlong into a pile of other issues (transmission network, generation method side effects, etc etc)

Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!

He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.

It's always the people you most expect.

I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it,

Several hours of thought.

He is talking about an ice skating image where they are skating on flowing water, without skates. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/gene-wolfe/suzanne-delage/2023-10-28-gwern-midjourneyv5-germanexpressionistlinocutofsinisternewenglandtowninwinter.jpg this image. It is supposed to evoke the idea of a declining town under draculas influence.

(Imagine if had just spend those hours on something else and paid an artist the same hours to make something. Or if he had grabbed a pencil or charcoal himself).

What do we imagine that's going to end up smelling like? Especially if Peter really works up a lather, like he's done in his last couple of media hits

DavidG already posted this here: https://awful.systems/post/5382402

DAE remember when neel armstrong invented nasa and said his famous quote “That’s one small step for man, ok let’s fill this motherfucker up with GPUs”

Because of course why have a data ~~center~~ when you can have an ecumenskatasphaira.

The requisite refrigeration equipment causes "shrinkage," just like George suffers in that one Seinfeld episode, bing bong so simple

Now, getting the quantum hardware to the point of service, so to speak, is the obvious challenge, and that's why I'm seeking funding for multiple container trucks so we can realize Uber for QC

Surely they have proof for the already increased capabilities of coding. Because increased capabilities is quite something to claim. It isn't just productivity, but capabilities. Can they put a line on the graph where capabilities reach the 'can solve the knapsack problem correctly and fast' bit?

Ah yes let’s use AI to get rid of the drudgery and toil so humanity can do the most enjoyable activity of writing OKRs

Chat wtf is this curve?

So they're saying their present product can't do much of anything

I get the idea they're going for: that coding ability is a leading indicator for progress towards AGI. But even if you ignore how nonsensical the overall graph is the argument itself is still begging the question of how much actual progress and capability it has to write code rather than spitting out code-shaped blocks of text that can successfully compile.

That picture does indeed has words, numbers, and lines on it.

Announcing my sneerclub follow up to MAPLE: “Man, All These Losers Are Bonkers” aka MATLAB

That opening has a strong 'omg what the fuck happened there, and why are you still friends with these people if it is that bad' vibes.

Lots of ex Maplers I've talked to are variously angry, some (newly) traumatized, confused, etc., but the vibe has generally been "gosh it's fucking complicated

Lot of people told me they were mad, but I got the vibe it was complicated. lol what...

The product of monasteries is saints, at least in small quantities.

Wrong, it is beer.

I haven't seen anti-safetyist arguments that actually address the technical claims made by Eliezer etc.

I agree with him there. But hard to make arguments against something which doesn't exist. ;)

it will take some very unusual kind of virtue and skill

Love how we went from 'you need to learn rationality, and be aware of your biasses' to you need to have virtue. And ignore the screaming in the backgrounds, that is just the academics who studied ethics doing their normal thing again.

Anyway the rest gets pretty dark pretty quickly, and I just see red flags (for people who believe in data this devolves very quickly in just going 'people are prob better off due to this, the new trauma doesn't count because of preexisting conditions, consent and trauma always happening'). And this was the article they wrote not wanting to harm the project.

Wait one more remark:

Furthermore I think that probably with the exception of the one actual AI researcher there, people at Maple basically don't understand what AI is

Hahahaha, perfect.

It also reminds me of the interview with Metz where they got mad Metz used religious terms. (you know, last week).

well, Zen buddhism

Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.

I hadn't heard of MAPLE before, is it tied to lesswrong? From the focus on AI it's at least adjacent to it... so I'll add that to the list of cults lesswrong is responsible for. So all in all, we've got the Zizians, Leverage Research, and now Maple for proper cults, and stuff like Dragon Army and Michael Vassar's groupies for "high demand" groups. It really is a cult incubator.

this cult franchise was tangential to the Ziz cult, wasn't it?

And because it's the LA Times, there's a chatbot slop section at the bottom to provide false balance.

it is difficult to overstate the stupendous degree to which Peter Kyle's job is beyond him

On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.

If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

Why would you do waluigi and wario dirty like that?

i have on good authority (ed zitron's low effort skeets) that wario works for anthropic, and his surname is amodei

Even if they aren't actively relying on each other here I would assume that we're reaching a stage where all of the competing LLMs are using basically the entire Internet as their training data, and while there is going to be some difference based on the reinforcement learning process there's still going to be a lot of convergence there.

The true meaning of "pooping back and forth forever"

These fake people all have extremely 2025 voices

Lmao, piss-soaked fake nostalgia aside, what is even the point of this? How exactly is one supposed to go back to the 80’s? Is this an ad campaign for a toaster bath or something?

There's a part where they quote someone saying "I am not particularly confident [in my p(doom)]" and I'm still remembering getting talked down to about how Actually all subjective uncertainty can be represented as probabilities because Bayesianism and you wouldn't happen to be one of those stupid frequentists right?

In related news I've been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claude's emotional intelligence and value in working through life's challenges and listening to your relationship issues.

They're not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but they're getting about as close as the law would allow, I'm sure.

Interesting wondering if they manage to come further in the process than our gov, which seems to restart the process every few years, and then either discovers nobody wants to do it (it being building bigger reactors, not the smaller ones, which iirc from a post here are not likely two work out) for a reasonable price, or the gov falls again over their lies about foreigners and we restart the whole voting cycle again. (It is getting really crazy, our fused green/labour party is now being called the dumbest stuff by the big rightwing liberal party (who are not openly far right, just courting it a lot)).

29 okt are our new elections. Lets see what the ratio between formation and actually ruling is going to be this time. (Last time it took 223 days for a cabinet to form, and from my calculations they ruled for only 336 days).

Rolls-Royce are looking at this as a big sack with a "£" on the side.

From the people who brought you web3:

Furby3

In six months, they'll be making a killing selling em to people who are still mourning their AI waifuls and husbandos.

That's weird, The Register's versions of the quotes are different (not just pared down).