TechTakes

just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah

this season's word is: kleptokakistocracy

Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google's latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10^25^ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.

your regular reminder that the guy with de facto ownership over the entire Rust ecosystem outside of the standard library and core is very proud about being in Peter Thiel’s pocket (and that post is in reference to this article)

e: on second thought I’m being unfair — he owns the conferences and the compiler spec process too

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some.... boutique... views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

• Lab-grown meat
• Modern architecture is rotten
• Population decline is an existential threat
• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it

On the third day of OpenAI my true ~~love~~ enemy gave to me ~~three french hens~~ Sora.

The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.

"12 days of OpenAI" lol. Such marketing.

Big eye roll to this part too:

We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.

Lots of developments in the UHC shooter case

• They (probably) caught him

• He's even hotter without his three identical jackets

• He's a Thielhead

Not very happy with how this day's going

https://xcancel.com/pepmangione

OK so we're getting into deep rat lore now? I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.

LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:

https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398

if I got something wrong, please don't tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. "it's spreading disinformation" I hope I am

the grok AI is now available to free twitter users, evidently not enough paying users were interested

it's somewhat more tedious than Gemini and that's saying something

That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.

I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around TPOT like we're all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.

For anyone else confused: that part of Twitter. It's techbro "phillosophists" like Peter Thiel.

Adam Christopher comments on a story in Publishers Weekly.

Says the CEO of HarperCollins on AI:

"One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author."

Please, just make it stop, somebody.

Robert Evans adds,

there's a pretty good short story idea in some publisher offering an AI facsimile of Harlan Ellison that then tortures its readers to death

Kevin Kruse observes,

I guess this means that HarperCollins is getting out of the business of publishing actual books by actual people, because no one worth a damn is ever going to sign a contract to publish with an outfit with this much fucking contempt for its authors.

A major train station in Vienna has just been defaced by "AI art".

Someone made a... thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the "bots" are hilarious: "ennui" for low-effort posts; I don't think that word means what they think it means. "Legion" for automatic spam posts. Cause that's not a dogwhistle or anything.

Saw something about "sentiment analysis" in text. While writers have discussed "death of the author" and philosophers and linguists have discussed what it even means to derive meaning from text, these fucking AI dorks are looking at text in a vacuum and concluding "this text expresses anger".

print("I'm angry!")

the above python script is angry, look at my baby skynet