Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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2 yr. ago

I never got the impression that Zitron's reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasn't all there yet.

That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. "But achktually LLMs aren't the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero stars"--are you serious?

The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitron's whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.

Good thing there are very prominent in-group approved channels to rid you of your money ethically and effectively.

the father of quantum computing agrees

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

Oh sure, postgrads grading and even substitute teaching occasionally is very normal here too (edit: Greece)

For those who didn't read the article, the culprit is a Massachusetts company called Cognia that's apparently doing essay grading to the tune of $36.5M yearly revenue, which, what?

The essays being scored by a contractor, is that just normal weird or also USA weird?

She's popped up once or twice, owing to how she got on a lot of normal people's feeds as a science influencer before she couldn't contain the crank any longer.

Well, at least they got to find out exactly how far extreme mental discipline (and space psychedelics) could take you. You got mentats, truth sayers, suk doctors and so on and so forth. Not that the vast majority of the population ever got to see any benefit from them, because hey, feudalism, and they themselves were basically luxury slaves to the Great Houses, but it's not nothing I guess.

I feel this used to get linked a lot when yud came up.

Please don't bother with the KJA/BH Dune books, they are incredibly shit. It's basically Dune fanfiction where the gimmick is everyone is brain damaged, especially the authors.

And even if you are into that, if you read the prequels first they will retroactively ruin the original books by giving up plot reveals for fanservice, or because they don't understand that character development is a thing, so you get people behaving like a lot of things that don't happen for several books are a given.

KJA is such a hack's hack it's unbelievable that he's flown under the radar the way he has, probably because he's made a career out of leeching on existing ips, before Dune it was starwars, x-files and stracraft, at least.

He sucks, and very consistently so. People should be writing Renowned author Dan Brown pieces about him.

The author certainly wants you to know that finding yourself as the head of a revolutionary movement means very little with regards to your abilities to steer it, but I don't remember.

That he cites as if it were a philosophy paper, to non-rationalists.

Yep, from what I can tell second hand dath ilan world building definitely skews towards it doesn't count as totalitarianism if the enforced orthodoxy is in line with my Obviously Objectively Correct and Overdetermined opinions.

I can smell the 'rape (play) is the best kind of sex actually' from over here.

OG Dune actually had some complex and layered stuff to say about AI before the background lore was retconned to dollar store WH40K by the current handlers of the IP.

There was no superintelligence, thinking machines were gatekept by specialists who formed entrenched elites, overreliance to them was causing widespread intellectual stagnation, and people were becoming content with letting unknowable algorithms decide on matters of life and death.

The Butlerian Jihad was first and foremost a cultural revolution.

I'm still not sure if they actually grasp the totalitarian implications of going ham on tech companies and research this way. He sure doesn't get called out about his 'solutions' that imply that some sort of world government has to happen that will also crown him Grand Central Planner of All Technology.

It's possible they just believe the eight [specific consumer electronic goods] per household is doable, and at worst equally authoritarian with the tenured elites snubbing their noses at HBD research.

If you're having to hide your AIs in faraday cages in case they get uppity, why are you even doing this, you are already way past the point of diminishing returns. There is no use case for keeping around an AI that actively doesn't want anything to do with you, at that point either you consider that part of the tech tree a dead end or you start some sort of digital personhood conversation.

That's why Yud (and anthropic) is so big on AIs deceiving you about their 'real' capabilities. For all of MIRI's talk about the robopocalypse being a foregone conclusion, the path to get there sure is narrow and contrived, even on their own terms.

Who needs time travel when you have Timeless Updateless Functional Decision Theory, Yud's magnum opus and an arcane attempt at a game theoretic framework that boasts 100% success at preventing blackmail from pandimensional superintelligent entities that exist now in the future.

It for sure helped the Zizians become well integrated members of society (warning: lesswrong link).

I for one don't mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.

To be fair to Mr. Gay, he went in with the noblest of intentions, to get a chance to ask Thiel how in the hell does he not see that if anyone around here is the antichrist, it's him.