TechTakes

I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.

Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!

ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong

it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says "okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn't a guy or a girl"

Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don't say I didn't warn you.

But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).

Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.

We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.

Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.

xcancel

im doing my part

I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we possibly can into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so

so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it

I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh

Amazing.

I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI's (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn't read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/'their own language'. Of course this was also a sign of it 'waking up'.

And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the 'AGI's' are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.

static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown

lol

'multiple realities'

Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn't make.

E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI's talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn't become incoherently weird. (like the example above).

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

Ehhhh. This is the identical PR they ended up accepting: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648

I have feels about the implied “the author behaves like a shithead because he’s ESL” but eh. If it works.

one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo

Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(

Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated "poetry"

Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn't it? Burn it all down.

When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don't worry!) I'll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.

My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice "You might want to check your blood pressure!" and "you still haven't completed today's tasks for Health+ points! But don't worry, there's still time!"

Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.

the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:

”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.

All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.

so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?

Q: Is this really free?

A: If it's not, you should already see a Pricing page.

this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”