Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

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

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2 yr. ago

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

Sound like Oxford increasingly did not want anything to do with them.

edit: Here's a 94 page "final report" that seems more geared towards a rationalist audience.

Wonder what this was about:

Why we failed [...] There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important.

Sad upvote.

American white supremacist, pedophilia apologist, alt-right pseudointellectual, grifter, transphobe, anti-feminist, ableist, eugenicist and fake contrarian Richard Hanania jumps on the siskind-is-basically-a-prophet bandwagon in order to (checks notes) shill designer mouth bacteria.

If I had a 1980s sitcom mom sitting next to me here, she might ask “If Scott Alexander told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that too?” To which I’d respond probably not, but I would spend some time considering the possibility that I had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the laws of gravity.

HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can't help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI's next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4.

I tried finding the non-layman's version of the reasoning for this assertion and it appears to be a very black box assessment, based on historical trends and some other similarly abstracted attempts at modelling dataset size vs model size.

This is EpochAI's whole thing apparently, not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. I was just hoping for some insight into dataset length vs architecture and maybe the gossip on what's going on with the next batch of LLMs, like how it eventually came out that gpt4.x is mostly several gpt3.xs in a trench coat.

there are errors and you read them into the ai. Someone alerted that a build wasn't working.

Somebody set up us the bomb. Main screen turn on.

At least they get called on being a word salad merchant in that sub, the response in r/openai is basically rapturous.

Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)

To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific 'fixes' to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is 'major' and 'used by many' to the explicit '{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guys' tone of the post, it's just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.

Here they are explaining their process

It's code reading and copy pasta.

Surely an April Fools' thing?

Still, if it's just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers' recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don't DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don't start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to 'explain yourself' to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

Guy who was previously featured here for championing the merits of dropping the n-word when meeting new (white) people in order to judge them worthy had an extensive twitter rant about how scott alexander may be an actual prophet, while quote-twitting another similarly afflicted person.

If you bother, which I barely did, this is what you're in for:

Trace says Scott has given up his will to power. but it's not a giveaway, it's a trade: if you don't seek power you retain the ability to seek unpolluted truth. here's this tradeoff explained by Curtis Yarvin, another reluctant prophet, whom Scott has definitely read:

Model City Mondays is thing in siskind's substack, and Prospera is featured constantly.

It's seasteading that's the strictly libertarian thing where you fuck off to the ends of the earth to do drugs and marry twelve-year-olds. Despite the considerable overlap charter cities seem more of a rat/stembrained thing were you decide you're going to be the one to do a polis from first principles but get it right this time.

conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics [...] overcivilized and effete Teutons

Kind of off topic, but this piece of wall to wall insanity reminded me how Steven Pinker tried to explain away southern US crime rates that didn't fit with his Violence Is Declining And In Fact Everything's Improving Inexorably (As Long As You Don't Rock The Boat) thesis by randomly blaming irish-catholic sheepherder genealogy.

given the traffic patterns of our threads

Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.

On a lighter note:

[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.

But then you'll never find out what like a jellyfish surfacing at sea is in reference to.

The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

The writer says there's some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.

She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it's just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.

Still, it doesn't mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it's possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.

And then there's also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he's now looking at options for enlarging his wife's vaginal canal and entrance as she's been having a rough time of it, and who I'm sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.

An interesting read in general but the writers proclaiming themselves ethical hackers in the opening paragraph only to turn into wittle birthday boys as soon as it turned out their uh experiment caused major disruptions was mildly off putting.

stonetoss

What a botched circumcision does to a mf