Architeuthis

Architeuthis , 7 days ago

Great quote from the article on why prediction markets and scientific racism currently appear to be at one degree of separation:

Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”

Architeuthis , 9 days ago

Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety, perhaps we should find out how to build effective safety measures first.

You make his position sound way more measured and responsible than it is.

His 'effective safety measures' are something like A) solve ethics B) hardcode the result into every AI, I.e. garbage philosophy meets garbage sci-fi.

Architeuthis , 11 days ago

This has got to be some sort of sucker filter, like it's not that he particularly means it, it's that he is after the exact type of rube who is unfazed by naked contrarianism and the categorically preposterous so long as it's said with a straight face,.

Maybe there's something to the whole pick up artistry but for nailing VCs thing.

Architeuthis , 22 days ago

So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.

At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.

edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.

edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.

Architeuthis , 21 days ago

That you can jailbreak recall and run it on non compliant hardware seems to be the least concerning thing in that article, recommended reading.

Architeuthis , 21 days ago

Nightmare blunt rotation in the Rewind AI front page recommendations:

Recommended by Andreessen, Altman and Reddit founder

Also it appears to be different than Recall in that it's a third party app and not pushed as the default in every new OS installation.

Architeuthis , 28 days ago

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

Architeuthis , 1 month ago

Alexandros Marinos, whom I read as engaged-with-but-skeptical-of the “Rationalist” community, says:

Seeing as Marinos' whole beef with Siskind was about the latter's dismissal of invermectin as a potent anti-covid concoction, I would hesitate to cite him as an authority on research standards.

Article worth it just for mentioning Scotty hilariously attempting to whitewash phrenology for counter-culture clout, found in another account that seems to be deep in a covid conspiracy rabbit hole at the moment.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/755791fe-5cc5-4257-8a44-8747ba4df403.png

Architeuthis , 1 month ago

Also, since no one has mentioned it in the comments so far, it says he used to actually send money to fucking Quillete.

Architeuthis , 1 month ago

Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

Because if not

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/7695d330-b809-44c2-a227-e679fc77b430.png

for the record, im currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

Architeuthis , 1 month ago

The slatestar subreddit is doing its regular so what's up with all the racists constantly crawling out of the woodwork around here surprised pikachu thread, in response to Scotty doing Hanania Week in the substack.

Architeuthis , 1 month ago

They say at one point that by being flaky, aloof and indifferent while rich SBF may have accidentally discovered the rules of pickup artistry for VCs, which is not a bad take.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

Sound like Oxford increasingly did not want anything to do with them.

edit: Here's a 94 page "final report" that seems more geared towards a rationalist audience.

Wonder what this was about:

Why we failed
[...]
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities.
When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several
times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we
misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders
is important.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

American white supremacist, pedophilia apologist, alt-right pseudointellectual, grifter, transphobe, anti-feminist, ableist, eugenicist and fake contrarian Richard Hanania jumps on the siskind-is-basically-a-prophet bandwagon in order to (checks notes) shill designer mouth bacteria.

If I had a 1980s sitcom mom sitting next to me here, she might ask “If Scott Alexander told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that too?” To which I’d respond probably not, but I would spend some time considering the possibility that I had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the laws of gravity.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)

To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific 'fixes' to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is 'major' and 'used by many' to the explicit '{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guys' tone of the post, it's just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.

Here they are explaining their process

It's code reading and copy pasta.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

At least they get called on being a word salad merchant in that sub, the response in r/openai is basically rapturous.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

there are errors and you read them into the ai. Someone alerted that a build wasn't working.

Somebody set up us the bomb. Main screen turn on.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can't help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI's next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4.

I tried finding the non-layman's version of the reasoning for this assertion and it appears to be a very black box assessment, based on historical trends and some other similarly abstracted attempts at modelling dataset size vs model size.

This is EpochAI's whole thing apparently, not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. I was just hoping for some insight into dataset length vs architecture and maybe the gossip on what's going on with the next batch of LLMs, like how it eventually came out that gpt4.x is mostly several gpt3.xs in a trench coat.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

Surely an April Fools' thing?

Still, if it's just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/70a10ba6-fc0d-485f-85d4-7d2a993bd1b2.png

Architeuthis OP , 2 months ago

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers' recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don't DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don't start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to 'explain yourself' to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

Architeuthis , 2 months ago

Guy who was previously featured here for championing the merits of dropping the n-word when meeting new (white) people in order to judge them worthy had an extensive twitter rant about how scott alexander may be an actual prophet, while quote-twitting another similarly afflicted person.

If you bother, which I barely did, this is what you're in for:

Trace says Scott has given up his will to power. but it's not a giveaway, it's a trade: if you don't seek power you retain the ability to seek unpolluted truth. here's this tradeoff explained by Curtis Yarvin, another reluctant prophet, whom Scott has definitely read:

eyeroll.gif

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

The writer says there's some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.

She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it's just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.

Still, it doesn't mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it's possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.

And then there's also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he's now looking at options for enlarging his wife's vaginal canal and entrance as she's been having a rough time of it, and who I'm sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

But then you'll never find out what like a jellyfish surfacing at sea is in reference to.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

On a lighter note:

[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

given the traffic patterns of our threads

Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

An interesting read in general but the writers proclaiming themselves ethical hackers in the opening paragraph only to turn into wittle birthday boys as soon as it turned out their uh experiment caused major disruptions was mildly off putting.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Imo because the whole topic of superforecasters and prediction markets is both undercriticized and kaleidoskopically preposterous in a way that makes it feel like you shouldn't broach the topic unless you are prepared to commit to some diatribe length posting.

Which somebody should, it's a shame there is yet no one single place you can point to and say "here's why this thing is weird and grifty and pretend science while striclty promoted by the scientology of AI, and also there's crypto involved".

Architeuthis , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Mom: We have Eyes Wide Shut style orgies at home

Eyes Wide Shut orgies at home:

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Now I really wonder how much EA donation money went into making this.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

stonetoss

What a botched circumcision does to a mf

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Yeah, a lot of these TESCREAL exposés seem to lean on the perceived quirkiness while completely failing to convey how deeply unserious their purported scientific and philosophical footing is, like virgin tzatziki with impossible gyros unserious.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.

The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years

Fuck off.

The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”

The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.

Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Wasn't he supposed to be a romantic asexual at some point?

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Basically their only hope is that an AI under their control takes over the world.

They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.

Even though they aren't trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

In yet another part of the article:

She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.

Architeuthis , 3 months ago

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.