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diz

@ diz @awful.systems

Posts
10
Comments
166
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?

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  • And 100% of them are just trying to suck up to the rich the hardest to get some cash thrown their way for posting. Their whole community has been built 100% around that from day 1.

  • GitHub Copilot puts ads into pull requests

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  • I wouldn't be too surprised if they really don't, they're just advertising the advertising lol.

    edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people's bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.

  • If AI coding is so good … where are the performance numbers?

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  • It makes every bad programmer into a 10x bad programmer (equivalent to 10 bad programmers).

  • Locked

    A Post-Mortem for Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths

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  • It's kind of ridiculous on its face. Yudkowsky was never some guy making money off writing code or any other "nerdy" activity (even though people doing that can be as sociopathic as anyone else). Pre-HPMoR part of his career is just "does sociopathy for a living". After, too, but like with a bit of branching out into book writing.

  • Your favorite science YouTubers are misleading you about AI — how to spot lies

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  • Interesting he mentions that Kyle Hill guy, the only reason I know about him is shilling on behalf of nuclear grifters (example of nuclear grift: Oklo: a startup with no reactor designs, publicly traded with peak market cap of $25 billion and an origin story in a ponzi scheme).

  • Vibe nuclear — let’s use AI shortcuts on reactor safety!

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  • I'm afraid they already had that exact idea when they named the startup "oklo".

  • Vibe nuclear — let’s use AI shortcuts on reactor safety!

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  • I think it's not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.

    I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won't create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.

    What's difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.

  • Vibe nuclear — let’s use AI shortcuts on reactor safety!

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  • Nuclear already makes 9% of world's electricity.

  • Moldbug has a sad (2), plans to flee USA

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  • I don't think getting rid of elections would work. Dictatorships do not rely on election rigging alone. That's just interventionist propaganda (barge in, set up elections, presto, democracy).

    Competent dictators don't act anything like Trump. Once in power they try to obtain support of as wide of a section of the population as possible. There's no freedom of speech in a dictatorship; the dictator is giving prepared speeches, designed to bolster his support, to unify the nation, etc, not just having fun gloating at half the nation's expense.

    If he actually tries to maintain power despite his relative unpopularity, the consequences will be utterly disastrous.

  • Cory Doctorow: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

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  • Shorting the market requires precise timing. Being early is just as bad as being wrong.

    Exactly. It is not enough to know that a company stock will go down. It is necessary to know that it will never go higher than a certain point above the current value (not even momentarily) before it goes down. If you have a fuckload of other people's money you can just keep double-or-nothing-ing it, that's what banks were doing to gamestop, except that this can sometimes cause the stock to go even higher (a short squeeze), which would make you (who doesn't actually have a fuckload of other people's money) lose all of your money.

    edit: also the other concerning possibility is that stock prices can go up simply due to the dollar going down.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Cory Doctorow: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

    pluralistic.net /2025/09/27/econopocalypse/

  • Microsoft Copilot AI tries faces instead of a pearly blob

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  • The only thing that is allowed to tell good art from slop is the AI which needs to consume good art and not slop.

  • Selfishness and Altruism

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  • This is what peak altruism looks like: being a lazy fuck with a cult, and incidentally happening to help hype up investments into the very unfriendly AI you're supposed to save the world from. All while being too lazy to learn anything about any actual AI technologies.

    In all seriousness, all of his stuff is just extreme narcissism. Altruism is good, therefore he's the most altruistic person in the world. Smart is good, therefore he's the mostest smartest person. Their whole cult can be derived entirely from such self serving axioms.

  • Peter Thiel Antichrist lecture: We asked guests what the hell it is

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  • Its spelled “masterdebating”.

  • 4Chan Unsong About NPCs

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  • Ironically, in a videogame someone like Musk would always be at most an NPC, and possibly not even that (just a set of old newspaper clippings / terminal entries in fallout / etc). Yudkowsky would be just a background story for explaining some fucked up cult.

    This is because they are, ultimately, uninteresting to simulate - their lives are well documented and devoid of any genuine challenge (they just get things by selection bias rather than any effort - simulating then is like simulating a lottery winner rather than a lottery). They exist to set up the scene for something interesting.

  • New Scientist reviews the Yudkowsky/Soares book. They don't recommend it.

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  • I think the question of "general intelligence" is kind of a red herring. Evolution for example creates extremely complex organisms and behaviors, all without any "general intelligence" working towards some overarching goal.

    The other issue with Yudkowsky is that he's an unimaginative fool whose only source of insights on the topic is science fiction, which he doesn't even understand. There is no fun in having Skynet start a nuclear war and then itself perish in the aftermath, as the power plants it depend on cease working.

    Humanity itself doesn't possess that kind of intelligence envisioned for "AGI". When it comes to science and technology, we are all powerful hivemind. When it comes to deciding what to do with said science and technology, we are no more intelligent than an amoeba, crawling along a gradient.

  • New Scientist reviews the Yudkowsky/Soares book. They don't recommend it.

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  • To argue by analogy, it’s not like getting an artificial feather exactly right was ever a bottleneck to developing air travel once we got the basics of aerodynamics down.

    I suspect that "artificial intelligence" may be a bit more like making an artificial bird that self replicates, with computers and AI as it exists now being somewhere in-between thrown rocks and gliders.

    We only ever "beat" biology by cheating via removing a core requirement of self replication. An airplane factory that has to scavenge for all the rare elements involved in making a turbine, would never fly. We had never actually beaten biology. Supersonic aircraft may be closer to a rock thrown off the cliff than to surpassing biology.

    That "cheat code" shouldn't be expected to apply to skynet or ASI or whatever, because skynet is presumably capable of self replication. Would be pretty odd if "ASI" would be the first thing that we actually beat biology on.

  • New Scientist reviews the Yudkowsky/Soares book. They don't recommend it.

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  • The thing about synapses etc argument is that the hype crowd argues that perhaps the AI could wind up doing something much more effective than what-ever-it-is-that-real-brains-do.

    If you look at capabilities, however, it is inarguable that "artificial neurons" seem intrinsically a lot less effective than real ones, if we consider small animals (like e.g. a jumping spider or a bee, or even a roundworm).

    It is a rather unusual situation. When it comes to things like e.g. converting chemical energy to mechanical energy, we did not have to fully understand and copy muscles to be able to build a steam engine that has higher mechanical power output than you could get out of an elephant. That was the case for arithmetic, too, and hence there was this expectation of imminent AI in the 1960s.

    I think it boils down to intelligence being a very specific thing evolved for a specific purpose, less like "moving underwater from point A to point B" (which submarine does pretty well) and more like "fish doing what fish do". The submarine represents very little progress towards fishiness.

  • Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)

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  • Hyping up AI is bad, so it’s alright to call someone a promptfondler for fondling prompt.

    I mostly see "clanker" in reference to products of particularly asinine promptfondling: spambot "agents" that post and even respond to comments, LLM-based scam calls, call center replacement, etc.

    These bots don't derive their wrongness from the wrongness of promptfondling, these things are part of why promptfondling is wrong.

    Doesn’t clanker come from some Star Wars thing where they use it like a racial slur against robots, who are basically sapient things with feelings within its fiction? Being based on “cracker” would be alright,

    I assume the writers wanted to portray the robots as unfairly oppressed, while simultaneously not trivializing actual oppression of actual people (the way "wireback" would have, or I dunno "cogger" or something).

    but the way I see it used is mostly white people LARPing a time and place when they could say the N-word with impunity.

    Well yeah that would indeed be racist.

    I’m seeing a lot of people basically going “I hate naggers, these naggers are ruining the neighborhood, go to the back of the bus nagger, let’s go lynch that nagger” and thinking that’s funny because haha it’s not the bad word technically.

    That just seems like an instance of good ol anti person racism / people trying to offend other people while not particularly giving a shit about the bots one way or the other.

  • Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)

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  • we should recognize the difference

    The what now? You don't think there's a lot of homophobia that follows "castigating someone for what they do" format, or you think its a lot less bad according to some siskinded definition of what makes slurs bad that somehow manages to completely ignore anything that actually makes slurs bad?

    I think that’s the difference between “promptfondler” and “clanker”. The latter is clearly inspired by bigoted slurs.

    Such as... "cracker"? Given how the law protects but doesn't bind AI, that seems oddly spot on.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Do leaders even believe that generative AI is useful?

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Meta was “allegedly” seeding porn to speed up their book downloads.

    arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/07/meta-pirated-and-seeded-porn-for-years-to-train-ai-lawsuit-says/
  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems
    content warning: botshit

    We did it. 2 people and many boats problem is a classic now.

    chatgpt.com /share/688037f1-90f4-8004-8e87-cb6c3fa19cb3
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems
    content warning: botshit

    AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now

    gemini.google.com /share/eeae3730726b
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Google's Gemini 2.5 pro is out of beta.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Musk ("xAI") now claims grok was hacked

    xcancel.com /xai/status/1923183620606619649
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Gemini seem to have "solved" my duck river crossing, lol.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings.

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems
    long

    Some tests of how much AI "understands" what it says (spoiler: very little)