My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said "good luck, mate".

It's so bad.

risk being left behind

Im also simply not sure how much of a risk that is, people keep saying that but I'm not sure being conservative on new tech has lead to much business closures the past 20 years.

Holy shit, I also got into crocheting last week. I have, however, managed to entirely avoid any hobby drama so far, but of fucking course this one is also being thrown into the fucking AI meatgrinder, ugh money people are so smart, man

I think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].

Yeah it's really bad, I've been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it's not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it's pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I've been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.

At least being on ravelry and checking out other people's project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.

@mirrorwitch

Also, why apply new technology to core product lines and communication with customers, and not back office number crunching crap.

I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My "Very Sane AI Newsletter" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.

other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it's inevitable because I really want it to, so don't be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.

Look he is right, if you redefine 'rent' to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.

In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).

Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition's obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?

TFG: Everything I don't like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me

I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I'm sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

So far I've come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and "rent seeking". If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it "better", and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn't stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.

I haven't really kept up, but it looks like Character's business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I'm assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)

My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison's belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.

How you look at "my company pays $14 for every $ from the user" and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.

@lagrangeinterpolator :thisisfine: :trashfire: @BlueMonday1984

This is great :D https://morewrong.lol/?post=im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage

My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.

🤌🤌🤌 Chef's fucking kiss

@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 "... sharp enough to cut with" is brilliant, I want to steal it!

The comments have some real gems too.

Fair. I've reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customers' remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.

@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 Firefox throws me TLS errors over that link.

@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 The comments are amazing

MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin

Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn

Anthropic really won't let this botnet thing go. It's so desperate & ridiculous.

1. 9B parameter models are so weak that they're essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.

2. Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.

3. Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It's simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.

4. Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can't get in.

5. Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.

6. Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic's models, not open-weight ones.

7. Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.

8. I'm pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it's eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it's impossible to believe it's being done in good faith.

It's funny how they're twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.

rats' best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton

I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory

Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way

I too have seen the documentary "Maximum Overdrive"

As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers

Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don't think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering 'her' texts in 'her' voice and selling her smut.

Cognitive surrender illustrated.

Pray tell, how is the chatbot going to know what you want to say if you won’t write it out? This feels a little too obvious.

I'm some random shitposter from TERF Island and I can definitely write better than Aella

as soon as AI is good enough to discharge feces out of my butt as good as I would if I had enough fiber in my diet, I intend to use AI to do so. I know how I want to poop, and I could poop so much more if I didn't need to manual labor little clumps out one by one

::: spoiler obligatory apology for the foregoing sorry not sorry :::

I thought GPT 2 had already hit the point of "Writing better than Aella"

Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they're probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.

They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?

thank god. horrid, parasocial site

This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.

Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.

This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. "If you really believe, you'll drink the koolaid"

Previously posted here: https://awful.systems/post/10025000

I recognise that the sloperator is pretty damn insecure about their AI usage. [YES][NO]

Right on buddy, I too want to live in a future where my diamonds are judged by their brilliance and my passion as a magnate, not by the child labor I employ to produce them.

Kind of fascinated by how this guy has gone into reddit threads about this to complain about being bullied, including complaining that people are sharing this screenshot with his full name and face unredacted. Buddy, I don't know what to tell you about who's responsible for that one.

what in the fuck

and I presume the answers default to yes

For copyright purposes, all patches must be substantially human-written. However, it seems that most patches are now prepared with chatbot assistance, so that effectively means that people are required to be psychotic centaurs in order to keep up with review demand. There's an LWN secret link from the documentation lieutenant which summarizes the linked LKML thread. My former lieutenant, in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem, is apparently having a bad time:

Airlie asked his sub-maintainers; most of them identified him as the biggest pain point. More seriously, it was that the DRM subsystem is still seeing too many regressions. There is a push within the subsystem to move development to GitLab in order to use its CI features; he is not standing in the way because he wants to see how it turns out.

This is a more systemic problem than one might expect, because DRM (and DRI, Direct Rendering Infrastructure) are partially shared between Linux and the BSDs. This subsystem has creaked along under the weight of corporate expectations for decades, mostly fueled by a kind of quiet sponsorship of young university folks from GPU vendors along with outsourced drivers produced behind corporate privacy and thrown over the wall. Every vendor, even our eternal nemesis nVidia, has made repeated concessions in order to try to figure out the maintainer burden, but it seems that we are still dependent on Airlie's stoutness and willingness to get shouted at by Torvalds.

"Yes I did it. No you can't see the work"

I think it was modern warfare 2 but they redacted all explicit references because activision or whoever was starting to make annoyed legal noises.

The insistence on using number of functions copied as a metric is weird, like of course a port isn't going to be a function-to-function translation, programming languages are never a 1-1 match with each other that's kind of the point of having more than one.

What we needed was an automated check that tells agents whether a reconstructed function matches the original. It should verify identical semantics. A simple PASS or FAIL signal would be enough and the agent can figure out on its own what’s wrong.

Uh, sure.

Also a lot of their recommendations come of as no-duh, like pressing the compact conversation button early to reduce tokens or using a common specification document across LLM instances to keep them more coordinated, how novel, are you kidding me.

Another one of their recommendations is that fixing stuff causes garbage to accumulate, so if something isn't working out you are better off starting from scratch, because tokens are cheap now! You just need to be doing the equivalent of maxing out dad's credit cards by using multiple private subscriptions in tandem, and I guess also make sure to time your dev cycle to coincide with the two major LLM vendors having a money burning competition on their way to an IPO.

Finally there's a whole hypecycle going on currently that this feeds into, that makes headline readers think that LLMs can convert binaries right back into code now, when they are actually using an MCP to control existing decompilation software which is so far from the same thing.

"so you're saying there's a chance Anthropic will be profitable?"

At this point I'm gonna dig a big hole in my yard and stick a sign next to it that says "AI datacenter" with a down arrow. I figure I can get a way better prospectus than anyone currently on the market.

I'm starting to think that simulating the future and past based on a single picture of a falling apple might be a little difficult.

Damn, and here I was all ready to download some tasty chicken and start fattening it up in MAME (Multiple Avian Maturation Emulator)

Can we just revoke these peoples' internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with "Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily" as a peer.

As someone who isn't totally uninterested in animal welfare the shrimp argument always makes me generally grumpy. Like, I'll grant that it's better to use a stunner than to not and that it's probably a good use of $15, but the whole problem with EAs is that they have significantly more than $15 at their disposal. Like, if you just do the naive multiplication you'll end up missing out on two things. On the one side opportunities that require a lot more than $15 to have a positive impact that are going otherwise underserved. On the other, more important side, their emphasis on economic efficiency leaves them blind to the completely avoidable harms that are inflicted in the accumulation of that much money. That's how grifters like SBF work their way in, and why the whole enterprise seems to be earning a reputation as a way to make tech billionaires feel better about themselves rather than actually making the world a better place.

charming.

What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI weren't serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist compound group house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.

Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.

Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because it's mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.

You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.

There is always RationalWiki but its not really equipped to deal with the polycule and abuse of sexual power stuff (or all the giant institutiions taking Internet cranks seriously). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

I haven’t tried it out in the wild, but I feel that Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse appropriately addresses a lot of noteworthy aspects, even though the title gives so much prominence to ‘sex’.

AI safety is mostly a sex cult

the guy who posted this is also a singularity fanatic, but this is a good enough summary

I was just listening to an interview with Emile Torres, it's an hour long but it is on the topic you're asking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt508VjX2H8

i also like how they skipped the part where it was 10k (or whatever) instances running in parallel

The IMF is basically always saying get ready to fuck the poors with a rusty chainsaw.

That's like their whole thing, their raisin dough etcetera as they say.

Looks like AI can be everyone's reason for everything. The rich can use it to get richer and make the poors poorer.

releasing something like a room-temperature superconductor could be beneficial

[…]

Other tech breakthroughs - an amazing video game

Okay.

"If only the fuckable stupor computer would cure cancer so that people would stop calling us sloperators"

If the world was really different I guess it would be.

god her appearance makes me feel like i’m being hate-crimed

It does look a bit AI-written though

I think a major influence was "Wisdom of the Crowds" which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There's an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml

CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie

Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.

Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?

He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.

RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.

Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hanson's blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.

On the topic, found another chart comparison thing