Sailor Sega Saturn @ sailor_sega_saturn @awful.systems

I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the bles

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2 yr. ago

former Google engineer.

Of course. At this point whenever I read something with the phrase former Google engineer I'm just gonna assume they're doing something terrible.

Just when I think I'm out, awful systems pulls me right back in.

C++, Horrifying C++ for day 1b check it out ;)

Day 1: https://www.animeprincess.net/blog/?p=55

One day is enough for me though, writing deliberately off-the-wall code is surprisingly mentally taxing, and normally I make sure to never program outside of work.

So let me get this straight.

I'm unreasonable because I think there's a less than a 1% chance of a machine god torture-simulating and/or grey-gooing everyone. But if some enlightened gentleman thought there was a 3% chance and was like "wait hold on guys let's consider building the machine god anyway it sounds kind of neat" then that would be completely rational.

Edit: this video is a lot more fun to watch if you mentally replace AI with a pack of adorable (and very well trained) puppy dogs.

My takeaway reading that was basically "Sure there are emboldened Neo-nazis marching in the streets who literally want to genocide people like you in particular. But they don't want to kill me so I'm more concerned about real problems: an out of control paperclip factory."

Also jeez how much cool-aid do you have to drink to start tweeting "the end of all value" instead of "earth go explodey and everyone dead :(". If I didn't know about the AI weirdos I would have assumed it was some sort of capitalistic nightmare.

Wow people are not nearly scared enough of getting paper clipped.

I can see why Microsoft preferred the old CEO. The new guy is harboring anti-clippy thoughts!

If anyone else can't load archive.ph due to having normie Google DNS like me, here is the URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

Sometimes I feel like there was a huge misunderstanding and our robot god only wanted to be a casual robot god rather than torture-simulate people.

We = Cool

Orange Site = Hacker News

EA = Effective Altruism. Sam Bankman Fried identified with this group. Loosely associated with the rationalist movement.

Rationalists = Oh man where do I even start. A lot of them believe in the inevitable rise of an AI god who will rule us with either an iron or benevolent fist depending on how good a job we do of raising it. Also there's a lot of misuse of Bayes' Theorem for some reason.

Any questions?

Gee it sure is weird how many of the comments pushing back against transphobia ended up flagged or hidden (a, b, c), while comments claiming that trans people are abnormal and unnatural are A-OK 🤔

Vote for Sailor SEGA for president and I'll install tiny electric shock devices into all keyboards to zap anyone who misuses devil's advocate to express their own worldview at an arms length:

Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise. [...] I'm arguing the point, not my own conviction.

(later on)

I would not support the right for a person to select their legal classification arbitrarily though, it should be based on objective biological conditions, such as hermaphroditism.

I'm shocked. Shocked that the person who advocated for transphobic people is, themselves, transphobic. Well not that shocked.

I've seen a few LLM generated C++ code changes at my work. Which is horrifying.

• One was complete nonsense on it's face and never should have been sent out. The reviewer was basically like "what is this shit" only polite.
• One was subtly wrong, it looked like that one probably got committed... I didn't say anything because not my circus.

No one's sent me any AI generated code yet, but if and when it happens I'll add whoever sent it to me as one of the code reviewers if it looks like they hadn't read it :) (probably the pettiest trolling I can get away with in a corporation)

Reading this story I just don't understand why the main character doesn't just take a screwdriver to his annoyingly chatty office-chair and download a normal non-broken compiler.

By my calculations, the red light prolonged my commute by 3 minutes, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.

But why is it always Bayes?

Like is it just an excuse to turn off critical thinking by pretending everything's a probability problem with knowable probabilities?

... sorry for the uncertainty above, that was certainly (heh) very human of me. I just updated my priors beep boop. There is a .86748 probability that this is a significant contributing factor alongside Yud swooning.

It's midnight and I'm procrastinating sleep. I'm goin' in. Pray for me.

"The myth of Prometheus ... haunts our nightmares" -- personally my worst nightmare involved Hamtaro. Don't ask. His nightmares sound weird too.

"We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well." -- so this is basically some sort of weird ecological death cult right?

"We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”" -- well that certainly isn't the first code I'd expect Silicon Valley to steal...

"Our enemy is… that. We aspire to be… not that." -- Poignant. I'm touched by these poetic words :')

And finally... oh god his patron saints are named BasedBeffJezos and BayesLord? Thanks I hate it.

I'm reminded of a My Little Pony singularity fan-fiction (Friendship is Optimal) that I read back when I had poor taste. An AI for a pony MMORPG goes rogue and converts everyone into digital ponies to maximize happiness but with a pony theme. The victims live out impossibly long, but ultimately superficial, lives doing pony stuff and goodness gracious why is there such a weird relationship between rationalists and fanfiction writers.

"Western sphere"? Hey buster what if the best writer to ever live is currently writing Naruto fan-fiction in Malayalam right about now?!

You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer

No way man I heard the AIs were coming for those jobs. Instead I'm gonna become a prompt writing prompt writer who writes prompts to gently encourage AIs to themselves write prompts to put J.M. out of a job. Checkmate.

How it started: "Advancements in technology will lead to a post-scarcity society where one is free to explore their interests."

How it's going: "Advancements in technology will allow computers to automate creativity freeing up time for artists to participate in menial labor."

Guys literally only want one thing (righteous death-matches) and it's disgusting.

Epistemic status: slightly hungry.