predictions for the trump admin?
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!
But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
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now seeing EAs being deeply concerned about RFK running health during a H5N1 outbreak
dust specks vs leopards
The way many of the popular rat blogs started to endorse Harris in the last second before the US election felt a lot like an attempt at plausible deniability.
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If H5N1 does turn into a full-blown outbreak, part of me expects it'll rack up a heavier deathtoll than COVID.
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My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real
gentlemen, this means war
-me imagining myself paying to sit through that
He's using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment
I'd pipe up and go "uhhh hey prof, aren't you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?"
(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand it's not always viable to do)
"So, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?"
It was there and gone fairly quickly and I wouldn't say I'm a model student so I didn't say anything. I've talked to him about Chat GPT before though...
I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldn't have room to complain? Not that I'd recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.
We're going to be answering two essay questions in an in-class test instead of writing a paper this year specifically to prevent chat gpt abuse. Which he laughed and joked about because he really believes chat gpt can produce good results !
I'm pretty sure you could download a decent markov chain generator onto a TI-89 and do basically the same thing with a more in-class appropriate tool, but speaking as someone with dogshit handwriting I'm so glad to have graduated before this was a concern. Godspeed, my friend.
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're Underage
Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.
automated grooming is just what progress is and you have to accept it. like the printing press
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HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
Ohhhh, so this is a forced-birther agenda item. Got it
I think the author is just honestly trying to equivocate freezing shrimps with torturing weirdly specifically disabled babies and senile adults medieval style. If you said you'd pledge like 17$ to shrimp welfare for every terminated pregnancy I'm sure they'd be perfectly fine with it.
I happened upon a thread in the EA forums started by someone who was trying to argue EAs into taking a more forced-birth position and what it came down to was that it wouldn't be as efficient as using the same resources to advocate for animal welfare, due to some perceived human/chicken embryo exchange rate.
rat endgame being eugenics again?? no waaay
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf
Did the human pet guy write this
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This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesn't crumble.
Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.
Dog, you've lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.
Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, you’ve lost! I activate my trap card: 「Bayesian Reasoning」 to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw the「Domain Expert」 card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!
Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.
Not that I'm a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you don't have to do any thinking beyond 1500×0.03×1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!
Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.
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Effective Altruism Declares War on the Entire State of Louisiana
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:
... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...
Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.
It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
lol hahah.