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
Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:
Emphasis on "trying" here - they're getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here's a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:
A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
"With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!"
Scandals like that of Builder.ai - which should have their own code word, IAJI (It’s Actually Just Indians) - become more and more common[...]
This is just a strictly worse version of David's AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.
It’s history; sometimes stuff just doesn’t happen. And precisely because saying so is less fun than the alternative, some of us have to.
Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don't just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn't choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.
like with the terrorist group isil, you should not give it to freddie de fucking boer.
I'm ignorant- give me the lore drop.
According to wikipedia he's a eugenics enjoyer. Another W for nominative determinism I guess.
Guh wtf
I feel ya, I got got by that Sam Kriss piece dunking on hpmor last week.
Good news everyone, we will be living with Big Yud until the literal end of time (see comments)
Anybody have the adresses of the lw people? I have some oil I want to sell them, has a very small chance of extending life.
If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on "prompt engineering":
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical ‘AI-accelerated employee’, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on “prompt engineering”. It’s somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for ‘prompt-engineers’. And if it doesn’t, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, I'd personally go further and say the people who can't perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - they're gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, they're gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing they're more productive, they're gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and they're gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any company's bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you're willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they're called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your "natural language" prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you're doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
A rundown of the health risks of alcohol usage, coupled with actual real proposals (a consumption tax), finishes with the conclusion that the individual reader (statistically well-off and well-socialized) should abstain from alcohol altogether.
No calls for campaigning for a national (US) alcohol tax. No calls to fund orgs fighting alcohol abuse. Just individual, statistically meaningless "action".
Oh well, AGI will solve it (or the robot god will be a raging alcoholic)
Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
I just enjoy dabbling
cheers m8, ill drink to that
OK now there's another comment
I think this is a good plea since it will be very difficult to coordinate a reduction of alcohol consumption at a societal level. Alcohol is a significant part of most societies and cultures, and it will be hard to remove. Change is easier on an individual level.
Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.
JFC these people imagine they can regulate how "AGI" is constructed, but faced with a problem that's been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)
Change is easier on an individual level.
No fucking shit?
I, for one, happen to live in one of these "Nordics" and alcohol is actually taxed quite heavily here. If we're looking at change on an individual level, it would actually be good for the society if more people were drinking alcohol, as long as the benefit of them contributing to society through tax euros outweighs the adverse health effects.
There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesn't directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a "sin tax" which makes the bad thing less affordable.
[Drunk, having a good time with friends]: I'll show you collecting state tithes for immoral substance consumption!
sin tax error
This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol.
Oh, you're not doing the thing that's supposedly the entire point of the website? Don't worry, no one else is either.
To be scrupulously fair it is a repost of another slubbslack[1]. Amusingly, both places have a comment with the gist of "well alcohol gets people laid so what's the problem". This of course is a reflection that most LWers cannot get a girl into bed without slipping her a roofie.
[1] is that even ok? I know the LW software has a "mirroring" functionality b/c a lot of content is originally on the member's SS, maybe you cna point it at any SS entry and get it onto LW.
Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency
"Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words."
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
There's something particularly galling about "everybody who knows how to access the money got fired". The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
Historians like to use "state capacity" as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
I didn't think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”
Starting this off with a new Blood in the Machine: The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now)