TechTakes

Image should be clearly marked as AI generated and with explicit discussion as to how the image was created. Images should not be shared beyond the classroom

This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn't be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn't garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?

Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they've updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:

• "Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)

• Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don't exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)

Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a "band-aid" that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers' utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their """work""", the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.

ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia's age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA... yeah.

today I learnt that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you shoveling hot shit into your mouth. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles

To be fair to baseball girl, I've found "what's this thing I know but I forgot the name of" one of the best use cases for chatbots, because web search is too fucked to help you with it now. It sucks that it's the case, but it has sadly helped me like, a couple of times (and after I insulted and redirected the chatbot when it inevitably gave me a shit initial answer).

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.

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.

Stars are very likely extremely wasteful anyway and worth disassembling

ugh you guys suck

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.

Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.

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)

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.