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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)YO
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  • I also think that some of the long-termism criticisms are not so easily severable from the questions he does address about epistemology and listening to the local people receiving aid. The long-termist nutjobs aren't an aberration of EA-type utilitarianism. They are it's logical conclusion. Even if this chapter ends with common sense prevailing over sci-fi nonsense it's worth noting that this kind of absurdity can't arise if you define effectiveness as listening to people and helping them get what they need rather than creating your own metrics that may or may not correlate outside of the most extreme cases.

  • I suspect that the backdoor attempt to prevent state regulation on literally anything that the federal government spends any money on by extending the Volker rule well past the point of credulity wasn't an unintended consequence of this strategy.

  • A quick Google turned up bluebook citations from all the services that these people should have used to get through high school and undergrad. There may have been some copyright drama in the past but I would expect the court to be far more forgiving of a formatting error from a dumb tool than the outright fabrication that GenAI engages in.

  • See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn't get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don't have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be "more blue" and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it's unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.

  • I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you're writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what's happening, and if you don't you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they're doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.

  • I argue that we shouldn't be tolerant of sloppy factual claims, let alone lies and disinformation, but we also need to keep perspective: it's worth opposing fascists even if they don't pollute that much, and it's worth protecting labor even if the externalities of doing so are fairly negligible. That is, I'll warrant, a somewhat subtle and nuanced position, but hey. This is my blog, so I get to have opinions that take more than a sentence or two to express!

    Apparently we live in a world where "lying and Nazis are both bad, and Nazi liars are the worst" is a nuanced and subtle position. Sneers directed at society rather than the writer, but it was just a big oof moment.

  • I love this. Especially the ending, talking about the titanic struggle to make AI competent enough to outsmart the people who think it's going to be omniscient. Glad to see I've got another writer to chase down that I had somehow missed previously.