I feel like this is a really common experience with both HPMoR and HP itself, and explains a large part of the positive reputation they enjoy(ed).

Based on your reproduction it looks like the biggest reason to doubt the original results is that they all have the hands right and hair that seems like it vaguely fits a human scalp.

Yud seems to have the same conception of insanity that Lovecraft did, where you learn too much and end up gibbering in a heap on the floor and needing to be fed through a tube in an asylum or whatever. Even beyond the absurdity of pretending that your authorial intent has some kind of ability to manifest reality as long as you don’t let yourself be the subject (this is what no postmodernism does to a person), the actual fear of “going mad” seems fundamentally disconnected from any real sense of failing to handle the stress of being famously certain that the end times are indeed upon us. I guess prophets of doom aren’t really known for being stable or immune to narcissistic flights of fancy.

Patrick Boyle on YouTube has a breakdown of the breakdown of the Microstrategy flywheel scheme. Decent financial analysis of this nonsense combined with some of the driest humor on the internet.

It’s also the sort of thing that you wouldn’t actually think to ask for until it became quite hard to sort out. Creating this kind of list over time as good resources are found is much more practical and not the kind of thing would likely be automated.

You’d think that they’d eventually run out of ways to say “fuck you, got mine” but here we are I guess. I’m going to guess that they’re not subject to the same kinds of environmental regulations or whatever that an actual power plant would be because it’s not connected to the grid?

It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don’t understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don’t entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn’t make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It’s a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.

Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn’t punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.

Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.

Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.

Hat tip to the person who wants to try and include DMT and other hallucinogens and psychedelics. How many of these experiences are gonna be tagged “Machine Elves” by the time anyone starts asking wtf we’re doing here?

…I will freely admit to not knowing the norms of courtroom conduct, but isn’t having preestablished penalties for specific infractions central to the whole concept of law itself.

We are three paragraphs and one subheading down before we hit an Ayn Rand quote. This clearly bodes well.

A couple paragraphs later we’re ignoring both the obvious philosophical discussion about creativity and the more immediate argument about why this technology is being forced on us so aggressively. As much as I’d love to rant about this I got distracted by the next bit talking about how micro expressions will let LLMs decode emotions and whatever. I’d love to know this guy’s thoughts on that AI-powered phrenologist features a couple weeks ago.

Hang on I’ve been trying to create a whole house for this joke and I could have just used the bathroom?

What’s more plausible, that I made a bad assumption in my fermi estimation or that all the world’s governments have been undertaking the most wildly successful coverup for nearly a century with no leaks or failures? Clearly the latter.

Factor Fexcectorn sounds like a Roman centurion who tried to improve the army’s logistics by hitching multiple wagons together in sequence.

So I’m not double checking their work because that’s more of a time and energy investment than I’m prepared for here. I also do not have the perspective of someone who has actually had to make the relevant top-level decisions. But caveats aside I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here:

• It’s actually heartening to see that even the LW comments open by bringing up how optimistic this analysis is about the capabilities of LLM-based systems. “Our chatbot fucked up” has some significant fiscal downsides that need to be accounted for.

• The initial comparison of direct API costs is interesting because the work of setting up and running this hypothetical replacement system is not trivial and cannot reasonably be outsourced to whoever has the lowest cost of labor due. I would assume that the additional requirements of setting up and running your own foundation model similarly eats through most of the benefits of vertical integration, even before we get into how radically (and therefore disastrously) that would expand the capabilities of most companies. Most organizations that aren’t already tech companies couldn’t do it, and those that could will likely not see the advertised returns.

• I’m not sure how much of the AI bubble we’re in is driven even by an expectation of actual financial returns at this point. To what extent are we looking at an investor and managerial class that is excited to put “AI” somewhere on their reports because that’s the current Cutting Edge of Disruptive Digital Transformation into New Paradigms of Technology and Innovation and whatever else all these business idiots think they’re supposed to do all day.

I’m actually going to ignore the question of what happens to the displaced workers here because the idea that this job is something that earns a decent living wage is still just as dead if it’s replaced by AI or outsourced to whoever has the fewest worker protections. That said, I will pour one out for my frontline IT comrades in South Africa and beyond. Whenever this question is asked the answer is bad for us.

Finally had a chance to listen, continuing to enjoy it greatly and commenting here in liu of having patreon money.

I feel like some of what you talk about with Powell’s libertarian economics contrasting with his racist cultural chauvinism seems to tie in with our good friends in silicon valley and the way their libertarianism seems to have moved so swiftly into technofascism and getting on board with The Guy. Being openly racist appears to have been almost like the missing piece that ties it into an internally consistent political project.

This bounced off of the earlier stub about LLM recipes to create a new cooking show: Chef Jippity. The contestants are all sous chefs at a new restaurant, with the head of the kitchen being some dumbass who blindly follows the instructions of an LLM. Can you work around the robot to create edible food or will Chef Jippity run this whole thing into the ground and lose everyone their jobs? Find out Thursday on Food Network!

Twitter adds default country tags. Immediately finds a whole bunch of foreign bots agitating about US politics. Promptly ignores that in order to be racist.

I’m going to laugh if they try to spin it as “we’re not being racist, we just wanted to get as much institutional clout as possible and avoided prominently featuringanyone from other institutions!”