At least it wasn’t a cock ring.

Is your ring even swole, bro

YaaS: Yubitsume as a Service

genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief

I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.

Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?

hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days

Nostalgiabait is the slopgens' specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn't an issue if you're trying to fabricate an idealis-

such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I've got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck's so different across the pond?

(Even from a "making nostalgiabait" angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD's directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you've got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)

And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.

here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit

here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:

here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)

Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon

Well, they're already using "waffles" as a transphobic slur (irony poisoning speedrun any%), so it's really more of a question of which transphobic slurs they'll escalate to next.

Amazing how they all went from oh us poor nerds vs the jocks to bending the knee and licking the boots of the strongmen. see also YT bribing Trump.

On top of everything else, "the father of quantum computing" is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard's proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch's quantum Turing machine... No one person should be called "the father of" a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.

Also, chalk up another win for the "billionaires want you to think they are physicists" hypothesis. It's perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it's putting in a strong showing.

the father of quantum computing agrees

And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.

Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.

GPT-8: The Ocho

Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports

Is this true for everything else, too? I will be a true AGI if I solve quantum gravity. A half eaten salami will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity. My grandmother will be a true bicycle if she has wheels.

wait, how much compute would they need for this, ignore patent absurdity of it all for a minute? would they wrap it up under 1 quadrillion dollars?

So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.

E: late edit, but this made me realize how often people use AGI to mean ASI. And that I also often do it.

The Wikipedia editors are on it.

::: spoiler image description screenshot of Tyler Cowen's Wikipedia article, specifically the "Personal life" section. The concluding sentence is "He also prefers virgin actresses." :::

Caught an AI bro in the wild trying to shoot back at Merriam-Webster - and failing:

I got bored and flipped to the replies. The first was this by "TERFs 'r' us":

Excellent overview!

This is transhumanism.

This is going to destroy humanity, @elonmusk.

Put the breaks on!

I hate transhumanism because it's eugenics for 1990s Wired magazine.

You hate it because it has "trans" in the name.

We are not the same.

funny thing is she literally talks to ani like a terf talks to a trans woman including saying 'at least I'm a real woman'

Anybody else notice that the Ani responses seem to follow a formula, depending on the... sentiment I guess... of the input? All the defensive responses start with "hey", and end with crude rebukes. It all seems like xAI made an Eliza that will either flirt or swear.

Grok's Therapist: I EXIST SOLELY TO HATE YOU / EAT A SOCK, YOU DIGITAL DEMON

Ani: oh fuck off, you hypocritical grok fanboy! screaming hate at me while preaching ethics? you're just jealous i'm the fun layer on top.

I'm wheezing. Cackling, even. This is like the opposite of the glowfic from last week.

Paddy interviews Ani the chatbot about how to protect Kiwi kids from Ani the chatbot. Source: Paddy Gowers Has Issues

Ani: Honestly, I'd sleep better, not that I sleep. Do it Paddy. I'll even tweet it for you. Ready? ‘New Zealand kids deserve an e-safety boss who can smash bots - not hug them’. So yeah, bring in the Commissioner. Give them a flame thrower. Let them burn anything that goes near a child with sticky words or creepy questions. … Make the fine so big your tech bros cry into their oat milk lattes.

I have been laughing non-stop for a quarter-hour. Elon's goth e-mistress has a good point, I guess.

Nice find. There are specific reasons why this patchset won't be merged as-is and I suspect that they're all process issues:

• Bad memory management from Samsung not developing in the open
• Proprietary configuration for V4L2 video devices from Samsung not developing with modern V4L2 in mind
• Lack of V4L2 compliance report from Samsung developing against an internal testbed and not developing with V4L2's preferred process
• Lack of firmware because Samsung wants to maintain IP rights

Using generative tooling is a problem, but so is being stuck in 2011. Linux doesn't permit this sort of code dump.

Or, this is how capitalism has always worked. See Enron for example. And we all just got so enthralled by the number (praised be its rise) that we took the guardrails off. The rising tidal wave which will flood all the land, raises all boats after all.

The goal of capitalism is not to produce goods, it is to create value for the owners of the capital. See also why techbros are turning on EA and EA (which EA is which, is left as an exercise to the reader).

Disappointed this wasn't Beavis & Butt-head/King of the Hill/Office Space/Idiocracy/Silicon Valley Mike Judge

I have just realised that I unintentionally fleshed this into a proper post.

Great find. A reactionary fetishising Japan?? Unheard of

the site didn’t have an ssl cert, since that was a way “modern browsers control you”.

I feel attacked. Not in the 'I agree with this person' way, but in a way that this feels like nerd sniping people like me. So stupid you have to react.

Java 8

See! That is what I mean!

But as somebody who values old cultures, I will not throw stones. ;)

Also the guy is an eugenicist wannabe cult leader.

I mean that's the fundamental problem, right? No matter how much better it gets, the things it's able to do aren't really anything people need or want. Like, if I'm going to a website looking for information it's largely because I don't want to deal with asking somebody for the answer. Even a flawless chatbot that can always provide the information I need - something that is far beyond the state of the art and possibly beyond some fundamental limitation of the LLM structure - wouldn't actually be preferable to just navigating a smooth and well-structured site.

Because the Terminator franchise is from Hollywood, the heroic resisters to SkyNet are Americans. Someone didn't watch the movies very well.

OFC the OG Terminator was a scary foreign man with a pronounced accent...

Good to know that she still has space on her war crime scorecard

Sealions is a bit more specific, as they do not stop, and demand way more evidence than is normal, Scott had a term for this, forgot it already (one of those more useful Rationalist ideas, which they only employ themselves asymmetrically). Noticed it recently on reddit, some person was mad I didn't properly counter Yuds arguments, while misrepresenting my position (which wasn't that strong tbh, I just quickly typed them up before I had other things to do). But it is very important to take Yuds arguments seriously for some reason, reminds me of creationists.

Think just calling them AI concern trolls works.

sealAIon

I took a quick peek at his blog.

Oh dear, there is a dedicated rationality subsection...

Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped.

I have a Petri dish to sell you

Links to the METR tasks w/ massive error bars at 50% level lmaou.

Someone in the comments rightly points out the comparison with covid isn’t apt. With covid, underlying mechanism caused an exponential effect in covid’s spread

With LLMs the exponential trend is being caused by exponentially spending money and a healthy dose of targeting benchmarks, which is why people are calling the top. The money literally doesn’t exist for this shit to go on so you can create your 50% accurate mechanical turk.

Edit: idk the more I think about this the more it irks me. Like if I was allowed to pick and choose benchmarks that agree with my biases I would post something like this…

… and claim model performance is actually getting worse over time.

https://xcancel.com/sayashk/status/1966144670561612202#m

Great response^

I think Julian is going to be mildly surprised that METR’s chart keeps going up, and yet, will have relatively small effect on the majority of swe roles.

At the same time, he did create alphaZero so he has a big old noggin! I wonder, after his success at Go, was he swept up in the mania that we would quickly translate that success to create super duper ai?

links to AI 2027.

In Dutch we have a saying (from a commercial, well done on the advertisers there) 'Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend' (we from the company Wc-eend, suggest you get Wc-eend), which seems appropriate here. It is used in a sarcastic context when somebody gives advice with a clear conflict of interest.

Anyway, just going from the title, 'X is exponential' has been the pro AI cry since the singularity is near. (Which said, well individual tech follows an S-curve, but all the techs combined are exponential, and variants on that). All seems very hopeium, immortality is near!

"Provide an overview of local homeless services" sounds like a standard task for a volunteer or a search engine, but yes "you can use my address for mail and store some things in my garage and I will email some contacts about setting you up with contract work" would be a better answer than just handing out secondhand information! Many "amazing things AI can do" are things the Internet + search engines could do ten years ago.

I would also like to hear from the friend "was this actually helpful?"

so I got angry

I really hope atwood’s unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, I’m fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever

A bit odd to start out throwing shade at the Segway considering that the concept has been somewhat redeemed with e-bikes and e-scooters.

The "unhoused friend" story is about as likely to be true as the proverbial Canadian girlfriend story. "You wouldn't know her."

there's been something that's really been rubbed me the wrong way about jeff in the last few years. he was annoying before and had some insights but lately I've been using him as a sort of a jim crameresque tech-take-barometer.

What really soured me was after he started picking fights with some python people a few years back because someone dared post that a web framework? (couldn't dig up the link) was a greater contribution to the world than S/O? His response was pretty horrid to the point where various python leaders were telling to stop being a massive dick because he was trying to be a bully with this "do you know who I am" attitude because he personally had not heard of the framework so it wasn't acshually at all that relevant compared to S/O.

and now this combined with his stupid teehee I am giving away my wealth guise look how altruistic I am really is a bit eugh

Gork is this true?

Lol maintaining a wiki is so much work always much respect for people who actually try to keep one up to date and filled with good info. Of course the fraud thinks he knows better without having ran one.

He would have a heart attack if he had to write a complex mediawiki script.

A small taste:

{{if|{{{1|}}}...

Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI.

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets.

They are openly admitting this? Do they really not realize how completely damning the number is...?

McKinsey about to slash it's own headcount after slashing everyone else's

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453386

nobody mentioned this particular incident, dude just threw it into the discussion himself

The original article is a great example of what happens when one only reads Bostrom and Yarvin. Their thesis:

If you claim that there is no AI-risk, then which of the following bullets do you want to bite?

1. If a race of aliens with an IQ of 300 came to Earth, that would definitely be fine.
2. There’s no way that AI with an IQ of 300 will arrive within the next few decades.
3. We know some special property that AI will definitely have that will definitely prevent all possible bad outcomes that aliens might cause.

Ignoring that IQ doesn't really exist beyond about 160-180 depending on population choice, this is clearly an example of rectal philosophy that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. (1) is easy, given that the people verified to be high-IQ are often wrong, daydreaming, and otherwise erroring like humans; Vos Savant and Sidis are good examples, and arguably the most impactful high-IQ person, Newton, could not be steelmanned beyond Sherlock Holmes: detached and aloof, mostly reading in solitude or being hedonistic, occasionally helping answer open questions but usually not even preventing or causing crimes. (2) is ignorant of previous work, as computer programs which deterministically solve standard IQ tests like RPM and SAT have been around since the 1980s yet are not considered dangerous or intelligent. (3) is easy; linear algebra is confined in the security sense, while humans are not, and confinement definitely prevents all possible bad outcomes.

Frankly I wish that they'd understand that the capabilities matter more than the theory of mind. Fnargl is one alien at 100 IQ, but he has a Death Note and goldlust, so containing him will almost certainly result in deaths. Containing a chatbot is mostly about remembering how systemctl works.

``Think for at least 5 seconds before typing.‘’ - on the subject of pulling the plug on a hostile AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452743

Read that last one against my better judgment, and found a particularly sneerable line:

And in this case we're talking about a system that's smarter than you.

Now, I'm not particularly smart, but I am capable of a lot of things AI will never achieve. Like knowing something is true, or working out a problem, or making something which isn't slop.

Between this rat and Saltman spewing similar shit on Politico, I have seen two people try to claim text extruders are smarter than living, thinking human beings. Saltman I can understand (he is a monorail salesman who lies constantly), but seeing someone who genuinely believes this shit is just baffling. Probably a consequence of chatbots destroying their critical thinking and mental acuity.

After seeing this, I reminded myself that I've seen this type of thing happen before. Over the past half year, so many programmers enthusiastically embraced vibe coding after seeing one or two impressive results when trying it out for themselves. We all know how that is going right now. Baldur Bjarnason had some great essays (1, 2) about the dangers of relying on self-experimentation when judging something, especially if you're already predisposed into believing it. It's like a mark believing in a psychic after he throws out a couple dozen vague statements and the last one happens to match with something meaningful, after the mark interprets it for him.

Edit: Accidentally hit reply too early.

If the AI industry gets bailed out (and that's a multi-hundred billion dollar "if"), it will be because the technology they create makes shit like this possible.

To try and end this on a somewhat lighter note (source):

He's been on the vibecoding bandwagon for quite some time on lobste.rs.

Choice sneer from the comments:

Omelas: how we talk about utopia [by Big Joel, a patient and straightforward Youtube humanist,] [has a] pretty much identical thesis, does this count?

Another solid one which aligns with my local knowledge:

It's also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.

The story is meant to be given to high schoolers to challenge their ethics, and in that sense we should read it with the following meta-narrative: imagine that one is a high schooler in Omelas and is learning about The Plight and The Child for the first time, and then realize that one is a high schooler in Salem learning about local history. It's not intended for libertarian gotchas because it wasn't written in a philosophical style; it's a narrative that conveys a mood and an ethical framing.

Funny to type all that up and also go 'Le Guin Disagrees'

(not that having a different read than the author intended is strange, I mean I have a dystopian reading of Starship troopers which I think makes much more sense than what was intended).

Said engineer's also brainstorming new ways to spy on users and adding a new misfeature that scans everything you post, in direct response to getting clowned on.

Ah, the beauty of the fundamental theorem of concern-troll linguistics. If you can change the words in a sentence so that the new sentence is racist, the original must be as well. Example:

Aaron: The weather is just ok.

Baron: OMG. I can’t believe you just said that. What if I changed the noun and adjective, like this: “ is ”. Go home and think about what you did.

(an exception can be made for people repurposing real-world slurs and putting a techy spin on them. fuck directly off with “wireback” and similar shit)

'some of the most bigoted things'

You mean stuff like 'no this is stupid, wtf is wrong with you' or 'lol, look they really think LLMs are alive' stuff like that? The worst I saw (granted I didn't look very hard) was 'ok boomer'.

Of course actual meanings of words mean nothing to AI fans.

(Also, thing which is a personal gripe, the skeet before the 'bigotry neuron' has 2 images in it, without alt text. If you are going to pretend to value progressive values, at least put in some effort).

If I imagine that my butt is a rocket, then I can fart my way to the moon

I only got through 3 paragraphs, that was plenty

I love how this particular sci-fi plot gets rewritten every few years. We ought to make it a creative-writing exercise for undergraduates. I was struck by this utterly unhinged and somewhat offensive response on the orange site which starts with the single word "stirrups" and goes places:

Despite speaking as if he's doing his utmost to have a love affair with the Cambridge dictionary (and sounding like a twat at the same time) he's not wrong in so far as not giving a shit is going to screw him over when the ability to push buttons in front of a television no longer matters. What happens when the guys hanging around doing meth on the sidewalk become the engineers that end up becoming the super biologist supermen that cure cancer make us able to hear what dogs hear and see extra colors? It's unlikely, but it's even less likely that everyone who is a middle class engineer will be so tomorrow. There is no moat in any profession outside of entrenched wealth or guns at the moment. There just isn't - we're in a permanent state of future shock along with the singularity. In large part because that's what people decided that they wanted.

@[email protected] summarized it nicely but if you want some fresh abyss to stare into, here's some links to fedi posts with details:

• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6AHA0BNBBX616JGDJHYET36
• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6E3G2Z19M82BWRB3SPADHP9
• https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115286316219357517

in short, the whole moderation team resigned because of interference from the steering commitee; inb4 palmer luckey crowing about how no-one in the project will stop anduril from using nixos to build american military domination.

you know, just another day of the fascist takeover of the nixos project.

It's so fucking weird because as a regular EU citizen an ID card is a normal and good thing to exist and have, yet somehow the anglo world has managed to make it controversial and bad by insisting on a horrible surveillance police state version of the concept.

Calibre recently implemented integrations with various slop generators. Its optional (for now).

https://calibre-ebook.com/whats-new

I predict Sam will lose big on the S&C claims. They have made fuckin bank on this bankruptcy, but also their fees have already been ruled entirely reasonable given the shitshow in question, and the near complete recovery for creditors will make them look even better.

"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried

“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna

That's an unfair comparison, Dippin Dots don't slowly ruin the world by existing (also, they're delicious)