So wait, if you recategorize all the hardest parts as “preparing the site” then the project speeds up significantly?

I mean they absolutely do, but nature and economics have their say. Like, you can make money selling homeopathy, because people who falsely believe in homeopathy are a market segment, but you can’t otherwise make money doing homeopathy because it doesn’t work. Similarly you can speculate on anything and come out ahead with the right combination of luck, publicity, and timing, but taking advantage of short-term volatility or noise in the market isn’t the same as actually doing something effective, and the farther away from truth you push the market the more damage it’s going to cause snapping back to reality.

We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.

What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?

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.

What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?

And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria” or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.

As someone who isn’t totally uninterested in animal welfare the shrimp argument always makes me generally grumpy. Like, I’ll grant that it’s better to use a stunner than to not and that it’s probably a good use of $15, but the whole problem with EAs is that they have significantly more than $15 at their disposal. Like, if you just do the naive multiplication you’ll end up missing out on two things. On the one side opportunities that require a lot more than $15 to have a positive impact that are going otherwise underserved. On the other, more important side, their emphasis on economic efficiency leaves them blind to the completely avoidable harms that are inflicted in the accumulation of that much money. That’s how grifters like SBF work their way in, and why the whole enterprise seems to be earning a reputation as a way to make tech billionaires feel better about themselves rather than actually making the world a better place.

At this point I’m gonna dig a big hole in my yard and stick a sign next to it that says “AI datacenter” with a down arrow. I figure I can get a way better prospectus than anyone currently on the market.

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.

So wait, are they saying it mistargeted or that after selecting a “valid” target it failed at the guidance itself? Because the latter would be a legitimately impressive fuckup given that both sides in that war have been using automated terminal guidance systems for a while now to get around EW defenses.

I imagine that it’s the same thing that programmers have been dealing with. Basically everyone I’ve talked to has acknowledged that code reviews are important parts of the software development process, but nobody has ever said they like them. Now here comes the glorious LLM future where in order to maximize productivity you get to do nothing but code reviews forever, only worse because the answer to “what were they thinking when they wrote this” is always “lmao fuk u”. Even ignoring what kind of consequence that kind of change would have on the actual progress of the field of mathematics, it also just makes being a mathematician into a different kind of day-to-day job, and one that most people who are currently in the field would likely find far less satisfying. And unlike the programmers they’re not even paid some absurd amount of money for it [citation needed].

I think the problem, from a layman’s perspective, is that it wasn’t until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.

And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says ‘we know how they work.’ We don’t, actually.

Okay, but we really actually do. There’s nothing magic about the kind of statistical brute force that these things operate on. The training stage breaks down and identifies patterns in the source data, and the operational model uses those patterns to “predict” what a person would say next. The patterns that these things identify are incredibly complex and can’t be easily traced or understood in practical terms, but fundamentally these are still stochastic parrots.

Especially if you want to go into the Christian context, no church is going to ascribe the ineffable miracle of life to a multiplication of matrices, no matter how many dimensions they have in the math.

My God, it’s like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There’s a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it’s capped at “shit”.

Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions

One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.

It builds character, I assume.

I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.

It feels like there’s something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.

As Sartre wrote, existence precedes input.

I can’t answer that. I keep laughing maniacally when I try to think about either one.