blakestacey

blakestacey Mod , 3 days ago

Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.

blakestacey , 6 days ago

Technical terms can still be, technically speaking, dumb as fuck.

blakestacey Mod , 5 days ago

Bio people here are poorly informed. Just in general some of the presentations are factually incorrect

B-but rationalists are experts at covalent bonds

Also meeting people.... as a woman I have never felt as ignored and disrespected as I have in some instances the pa...

I'm sure the feedback becomes more positive in the cut-off part, no doubt about it

blakestacey OP , 7 days ago

I figured it was in the "server needs a good kick" genre of problems.

blakestacey Mod , 9 days ago

Carl T. Bergstrom, 13 February 2023:

Meta. OpenAI. Google.

Your AI chatbot is not hallucinating.

It's bullshitting.

It's bullshitting, because that's what you designed it to do. You designed it to generate seemingly authoritative text "with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence," i.e., to bullshit.

Me, 2 February 2023:

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be right, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is not to swim in it.

blakestacey Mod , 9 days ago

You are not worth responding to. Goodbye.

blakestacey Mod , 9 days ago

Making an analogy to something more familiar, or to anything that actually happens in real life, is too pedestrian for a true visionary.

(It's just a guess on my part, but given the extent to which conspiracy theorists are all marinating in a common miasma these days, I'd expect that a 9/11 twoofer would be more likely to deny relativity for being "Jewish physics".)

blakestacey Mod , 9 days ago

Quoth Yud:

There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see "a solar-powered self-replicating factory". I've never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It's not just the one fact.

It's almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after "these edibles ain't shit" is, I dunno, bad?

blakestacey , 13 days ago

It's a whackaloon claim that had been circulating for a while.

blakestacey OP , 12 days ago

Congratulations on missing the entire point of everything explained to you at considerable length and on coming back with a vintage not-pology.

The egress is that-a-way.

blakestacey OP , 22 days ago

Check out the big brain on Yud!

I think the pre-election prosecutions of Hillary and Trump were both bullshit. Is there anyone on Earth who holds that Hillary's email server and Trump's lawyer's payment's accounting were both Terribly Serious Crimes, and can document having held the former position earlier?

blakestacey OP , 19 days ago

Vitalik Buterin:

A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate "charge" (as in, "my laptop is charging") and the best I could come up with is "pinxe lo dikca" ("drink electricity")

So... if you think LLMs don't drink, that's your imagination, not mine.

My parents said that the car was "thirsty" if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists

That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:

Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people won't accept anything that doesn't eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.

Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in "The Bicentennial Man", not I, Robot. It's also presented textually as correct....

In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.

blakestacey OP , 19 days ago

Also Yud: I can't be a cult leader, because I dress funny.

blakestacey , 26 days ago

what are the requirements for consciousness

10 coffee

20 goto 10

blakestacey , 1 month ago

If natively fluent speakers of the English language use beg the question in the "wrong" way time and time again, finding the "incorrect" meaning a natural fit with their understanding of the verb to beg, then the "incorrect" meaning may well be the one we should roll with.

blakestacey , 1 month ago

The given link contains exactly zero evidence in favor of Orchestrated Objective Reduction — "something interesting observed in vitro using UV spectroscopy" is a far cry from anything having biological relevance, let alone significance for understanding consciousness. And it's not like Orch-OR deserves the lofty label of theory, anyway; it's an ill-defined, under-specified, ad hoc proposal to throw out quantum mechanics and replace it with something else.

The fact that programs built to do spicy autocomplete turn out to do spicy autocomplete has, as far as I can tell, zero implications for any theory of consciousness one way or the other.

blakestacey , 1 month ago

ChatGPT-4-o-face

blakestacey , 1 month ago

Hmm, a xitter link, I guess I'll take a moment to open that in a private tab in case it's passingly amusing...

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—

OK, you have my attention now.

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—

During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly.

It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims. However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry.

I don't think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people.

There is nothing wrong imo with sex parties and heavy LSD use in theory, but combined with the shadow of 100B+ interest groups, leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen. The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety.

Women are like canaries in the coal mine. They are often the first to realize that something has gone horribly wrong, and to smell the cultural carbon monoxide in the air. For many women, Silicon Valley can be like Westworld, where violence is pay-to-pay.

I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems. Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink.

I am not writing this on the behalf of any interest group. Historically, much of OpenAI-adjacent shenanigans has been blamed on groups with weaker PR teams, like Effective Altruism and rationalists. I actually feel bad for the latter two groups for taking so many undeserved hits. There are good and bad apples in every faction. There are so many brilliant, kind, amazing people at OpenAI, and there are so many brilliant, kind, and amazing people in Anthropic/EA/Google/[insert whatever group]. I’m agnostic. My one loyalty is to the respect and dignity of human life.

I'm not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI. I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned. It’s likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley. I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn’t.

I will not pretend that my time among these circles didn’t do damage. I wish that 55% of my brain was not devoted to strategizing about the survival of me and of my friends. I would like to devote my brain completely and totally to AI research— finding the first principles of visual circuits, and collecting maximally activating images of CLIP SAEs to send to my collaborators for publication.

blakestacey , 1 month ago

The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.

Oh, you do, do you?

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

Levy is rarely boring.

[citation needed]

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

I kind of wish that she and I could meet. I'd stare deep into her eyes, take her hand in mine, drop my voice into the register that Grandpa Stacey used in his decades of hosting radio, and intone, "Your brain is where insight goes to die."

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

The ceilings are so high, pre-war or something like that, and in the lobby there’s a mirror that makes me feel like we’re at Versailles.

"His voice is warm and husky, like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel ... or something."

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

weird flex but OK

... maybe not OK, at that

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”

"When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me," said the voice of a generation.

One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”

2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.

Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.

"Marvy. Fab. Far out," deadpanned Calvin's father.

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

Nah. A man who sucks his own dick? That takes effort and deserves respect.

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

Why did 3.6 million people watch this hour long video dunking on flat earthers? Because the topic of people believing crazy things is fun and interesting.

Dan Olson's In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.

It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.

From the comments:

This just went from 0 to 100 real quick.

Lord, the cry of pure anguish I gave out in response to that line...

Props to the Qanon guy's kid for standing up to him and saying "nobody's gonna help you" when he kidnapped them, that must have been terrifying

Occasionally rewatch this while dealing with the loss of my own parents to conspiracy lunacy. Even tried using this video to pull them back from the edge. Ended up precipitating cutting contact with them, something that has done wonders for my mental health. I have since realised they were deeper in than I thought, and were never going to listen to their child, and unlikely to listen to people they actually might have respected the opinions of.

The person I used to consider my father now believes that viruses aren't real and is getting deep into transphobia and Putin worship. He is likely to already be a holocaust denier. There is no bottom to the conspiracy theory abyss and few ever seem to find their way back from the depths.

Thank you for crushing that last bit of remaining hope I didn't even know I had.

It's honestly kind of chilling to see him effectively spending half an hour predicting the Jan 6th riot.

"Fun and interesting"?

blakestacey Mod , 1 month ago

oh lordy, there's a whole post

Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds? Obviously testosterone makes you horny and buff.

"Compared to me, 78% of the human male population are low-T betas" —Hbomberguy

blakestacey , 1 month ago

Mad research skills:

Are people in rich countries happier on average than people in poor countries? (According to GPT-4, the academic consensus is that it does, but I'm not sure it's representing it correctly.)

blakestacey , 1 month ago

A lesswrong attempts to explain physics using Information Theory!. This irritates me.

If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.

No, you can't, because you're still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you're saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you've made a screwdriver.

Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.

We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.

Forgetting where things are doesn't give you psychoflexitive powers!

And from the comments:

My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.

No. If you don't incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You'll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.

For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn't seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.

blakestacey , 2 months ago

His complaint seriously backfired here, because it makes working on a chalkboard sound epic. The act of rubbing one rock against another becomes ascendance into the highest realms of thought? That's fuckin' alchemy, bro.

blakestacey , 2 months ago

Huh. Too bad he and I will probably never meet; this sounds like an instance where my ability to be incredibly abrasive could be used for good. (Or at least for comedy.)

blakestacey , 2 months ago

Reject modernity (wrong number of fingers), embrace tradition (SPIRAL EYE-HOLES ARE WATCHING YOU)

blakestacey , 2 months ago

"And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings, and every one was a good dog before the Lord, Bront"

blakestacey , 2 months ago

Dare I say... womp womp?

blakestacey , 2 months ago

"It's garbage that generates giant rat dicks now, but I can't wait to hand my life over to it tomorrow!"

blakestacey , 2 months ago

So, if anyone is keeping score, the promise of Artificial Intelligence has descended from "the computers on Star Trek" to "spicy ticket-booking".

blakestacey , 2 months ago

The thermodynamic god is a kind of in-joke for e/acc; a reference to the laws of physics

But apparently asking a physicist whether these people are all full of shit is too much.

blakestacey , 2 months ago

Suddenly everything in my life looks less pathetic by comparison.

blakestacey , 2 months ago

You are a statistical inevitability.

Aw shucks, I bet you say that to all the girls

blakestacey , 2 months ago

I imagine it was an article about how "Sex workers are skeptical that crypto can answer all their financial problems".

blakestacey , 2 months ago

Don't forget how Arthur Chu wrote a response grounded in empathy, and Aaronson decided that Chu wants him dead. Really.

blakestacey , 2 months ago

"Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers" (The Onion, 1999)