I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.

other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.

TFG: Everything I don’t like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me

Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.

In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).

Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?

I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.

i also like how they skipped the part where it was 10k (or whatever) instances running in parallel

Can we just revoke these peoples’ internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with “Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily” as a peer.

The IMF is basically always saying get ready to fuck the poors with a rusty chainsaw.

That’s like their whole thing, their raisin dough etcetera as they say.

Looks like AI can be everyone’s reason for everything. The rich can use it to get richer and make the poors poorer.

releasing something like a room-temperature superconductor could be beneficial

[…]

Other tech breakthroughs - an amazing video game

Okay.

“If only the fuckable stupor computer would cure cancer so that people would stop calling us sloperators”

If the world was really different I guess it would be.

I think a major influence was “Wisdom of the Crowds” which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There’s an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml

Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hanson’s blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.

Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.

CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie

Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?

He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.

RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.

On the topic, found another chart comparison thing

My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said “good luck, mate”.

It’s so bad.

risk being left behind

Im also simply not sure how much of a risk that is, people keep saying that but I’m not sure being conservative on new tech has lead to much business closures the past 20 years.

I think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].

Holy shit, I also got into crocheting last week. I have, however, managed to entirely avoid any hobby drama so far, but of fucking course this one is also being thrown into the fucking AI meatgrinder, ugh money people are so smart, man

Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.

At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.

@mirrorwitch

Also, why apply new technology to core product lines and communication with customers, and not back office number crunching crap.

I haven’t really kept up, but it looks like Character’s business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I’m assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)

My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison’s belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.

How you look at “my company pays $14 for every $ from the user” and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.

@lagrangeinterpolator :thisisfine: :trashfire: @BlueMonday1984

My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.

🤌🤌🤌 Chef’s fucking kiss

@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 “… sharp enough to cut with” is brilliant, I want to steal it!

This is great :D https://morewrong.lol/?post=im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage

@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 Firefox throws me TLS errors over that link.

The comments have some real gems too.

Fair. I’ve reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customers’ remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.

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@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 The comments are amazing

MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin

Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn

Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.

1. 9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.

2. Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.

3. Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.

4. Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.

5. Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.

6. Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.

7. Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.

8. I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.

rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton

It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.

I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory

Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way

I too have seen the documentary “Maximum Overdrive”

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