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!

the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming

…

there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write

thanks magibook!

PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.

ah yes, a good ole

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.

Another example which doesn't make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It's just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.

the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real

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

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).

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

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

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?

i thought it was a part of prevention of future engineer disease cases

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.