TechTakes
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Poor rich guy, forced by the leftmost party available to support the party that is now constructing concentration camps.
Ed's got another banger: https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/
What's extra fun is that HN found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456
There's at least one (if not two if you handle the HN response separately) good threads that could be made from this. Don't have the time personally at the moment.
I will say that I'm shocked to see some reasonable shit in the HN comments, people saying the post is too long or not an acceptable tone are getting told off rather respectably with some good explanations (effectively: this was written this way intentionally you dolt). Broken clock and all that, I guess.
An interesting takedown of "superforecasting" from Ben Recht, a 3 part series on his substack where he accuses so called super forecasters of abusing scoring rewards over actually being precogs. First (and least technical) part linked below...
https://www.argmin.net/p/in-defense-of-defensive-forecasting
"The term Defensive Forecasting was coined by Vladimir Vovk, Akimichi Takemura, and Glenn Shafer in a brilliant 2005 paper, crystallizing a general view of decision making that dates back to Abraham Wald. Wald envisions decision making as a game. The two players are the decision maker and Nature, who are in a heated duel. The decision maker wants to choose actions that yield good outcomes no matter what the adversarial Nature chooses to do. Forecasting is a simplified version of this game, where the decisions made have no particular impact and the goal is simply to guess which move Nature will play. Importantly, the forecaster’s goal is not to never be wrong, but instead to be less wrong than everyone else.*
*Yes, I see what I did there."
Tired: the universe was created by a deity
Wired: the universe was created by physical forces
Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and I'm communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the
"biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence" is it though?
“biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence” is it though?
I'm gonna give my quick-and-dirty opinion on this, don't expect a lengthy defence.
Short answer, no. Long answer: no, intelligence cannot be created by blindly imitating it with mere silicon
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0025.html
found this while stalking @self@awful.systems's mastodon, the people working on ActivityPub want to shoehorn Ai into it somehow.
Have any of the big companies released a real definition of what they mean by AGI? Because I think the meme potential of these leaked documents is being slept on.
The definition of AGI being achieved agreed on between Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023 is just: when OpenAI makes a product that raises $100B.
Seems like a fun way to shut down all the low quality philsophical wankery. Oh, AGI? You just mean $100B profit, right? That's what your lord and savior Altman means.
Maybe even something like a cloud to butt browser extension? AGI -> $100B in OpenAI profits
"What $100B in OpenAI Profits Means for the Future of Humanity"
I'm sure someone can come up with something better, but I think there's some potential here.
So, you know Ross Scott, the Stop Killing Games guy?
About 2 years ago he actually interviewed Yudkowsky.
The context being that Ross discussed his article on one of his monthly streams, and expressed skepticism that there was any threat at all from AI.
Yudkowsky got wind of his skepticism, and reached out to Ross to do a discussion with him about the topic. He also requested that Ross not do any research on him.
And here it is...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxsAuxswOvM
I can't say I actually recommend watching it, because Yudkowsky spends the first 40 minutes of the discussion refusing to answer the question "So what is GPT-4, anyway?" (It's not exactly that question, but it's pretty close).
I don't know what they discussed afterwards because I stopped watching it after that, but, well, it's a thing that exists.
The comments are fun. Here's the pinned comment, authored by the video's author:
I'm not the best at thinking on the fly, so here are two key points I tried to make that got a little lost in the discussion:
1. I think our entire disagreement rests on Eliezer seeing increasingly refined AI conclusively making the jump to actual intelligence, whereas I do not see that. I only see software that mimics many observable characteristics of intelligence and gets better at it the more it's refined.
2. My main point of the stuff about real v. fake + biological v. machine evolution was only to say that just because a process shares some characteristics with another one, other emergent properties aren't necessarily shared also. In many cases, they aren't. This strikes me as the case for human intelligence v. machine learning.
MY CONCLUSION
By the end, I honestly couldn't tell if he was making a faith-based argument that increasingly refined AI will lead to true intelligence, despite being unsubstantiated OR if he did substantiate it and I was just too dumb to connect the dots. Maybe some of you can figure it out!
Here's my favourite:
"Ooh Ross making an interview!"
5 minutes in
"Ooh Ross is making an interview Neil Breen of AI".
Neil Breen of AI
ahahahaha oh shit
I think we mocked this one back when it came out on /r/sneerclub, but I can't find the thread. In general, I recall Yudkowsky went on a mini-podcast tour a few years back. I think the general trend was that he didn't interview that well, even by lesswrong's own standards. He tended to simultaneously assume too much background familiarity with his writing such that anyone not already familiar with it would be lost and fail to add anything actually new for anyone already familiar with his writing. And lots of circular arguments and repetitious discussion with the hosts. I guess that's the downside of hanging around within your own echo chamber blog for decades instead of engaging with wider academia.
Yudkowsky got wind of his skepticism, and reached out to Ross to do a discussion with him about the topic. He also requested that Ross not do any research on him.
I pinky promise I’m an expert! no you’re not allowed to check my credentials, the fuck?
Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?
You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of "decomputing" that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.
Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believer^tm^ email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:
You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.
Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.
Ed Zitron's planning a follow-up to "The Subprime AI Crisis":
(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)
EDIT: Swapped the image for one that's easier-to-read
Alright that's it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing (note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don't open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)
https://bsky.app/profile/pixeldoesthings.bsky.social/post/3lswcbtkwec2t
Youtube channel We're In Hell has an exploration of the history of computers in war. As usual for this channel, it's not a fun watch, but it does show the absurdity of war and AI fairly well.
Micro-sneer, inspired by this article on Swedish public service broadcasting
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/anna-bjorklund-folk-uppfattar-barn-som-valdigt-jobbiga
The background is that the center-RIGHT gov of Sweden is gonna put up an investigation ("utredning") into why people aren't getting (the RIGHT kind of) kids. Nothing new there, simply the same culture war fretting already percolating in the anglosphere.
Finland already has an investigation ongoing, and the spokesperson there raises the point that one societal change that's happened in the last 25 years is... social media.
Wouldn't it be delicious if it could be proved that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok are the reasons people don't get into relationships and have kids? Eat that, Elon!