Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).
I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.
So I guess it's now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old "dog picking a food bowl" method of deciding championships.
I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same
didn't get an answer I could bet with, tho :<
People are so, so, so bad at telling what's a bot and what's real. I know social media is swarming with bots, but if you're interacting with somebody who's saying anything more complicated than "P o o s i e I n B i o" it's probably not a bot. A similar thing happens in online games, too, and it's usually the excuse people use before harassing someone else
But damn the lengths people will go to to avoid admitting they were wrong. This comment chain just keeps going on with somebody who's convinced {origin="RU"}{faith="bad"}{election_manipulation="very yes"}
must be real because something something microservices: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/russian_bot_falls_prey_to_a_prompt_iniection/l9pbmrw/ It reads like something straight off /r/programming or the orange site
Then it comes full circle with people making joke responses on Twitter imitating the first post, and then other people taking those joke responses as proof that the first one must be real: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dimlyl/twitter_is_already_a_gpt_hellscape/l9691c8/
This account kind of kicked up some drama too, basically for the same reason (answering an LLM prompt), but it's about mushroom ID instead: https://www.reddit.com/user/SeriousPerson9 I've seen people like this who use voice-to-text and run their train of thought through ChatGPT or something, like one person notorious on /r/gamedev. But people always assume it's some advanced autonomous bot with stochastic post delays that mimic a human's active hours when like, it's usually just somebody copy/pasting prompts and responses.
Sorry if you contract any diseases from those links or comment chains
Yeah I thought this one looked very very made up and far too on the nose. I think it's fine to label human-run spam/troll accounts as bots though.
Somewhat related I stumbled upon robots flirting with eachother the other day.
It's like young-earth creationists who believe that dinosaur bones were installed as-is at the beginning of time time in order to test us, so their existence proves nothing about geology or evolution.
well count me as bamboozled then. stupider, pre-gpt version of this consists of robocalls that are really operated by people, but they don't speak, they just choose one of several canned responses. why don't they speak? because most of them are illegal immigrants and it would be obvious by accent
Tom Murphy VII's new LLM typesetting system, as submitted to SIGBOVIK. I watched this 20 minute video all through, and given my usual time to kill for video is 30 seconds you should take that as the recommendation it is.
The scales have fallen from my eyes
How could've blindness struck me so
LLM's for sure bring more than lies
They can conjure more than mere woe
All of us now, may we heed the sign
Of all text that will come to align
NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)
lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh...
(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn't exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).
You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Lucky souls haven't found sneerclub yet.
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us...
rational_economist.webp
There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn't actually engage with them at all):
The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.
Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.
Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Here's Why It's Bad News for Joe Biden.
the economist in each of us
get it out get it out get it out
Found in the wilds^
Giganto brain AI safety 'scientist'
If AIs are conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they're monsters. Ergo: AIs are definitely not conscious.
Internet rando:
If furniture is conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they're monsters. Ergo: Furniture is definitely not conscious.
Is it time for EAs to start worrying about Neopets welfare?
oww god owwww official MS experimental LLM feature for Excel ow ow owwwwwwwww
From the creators of “we turned your date formatting into a math equation, and now many of your research papers have substantially faulty data”, we bring you…
TechTakes
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