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2 yr. ago
  • Do the Zizians fit in the "rationalist/EA/risk community"? Gosh and golly gee.

    Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the "narcissism of small differences" than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.

  • From the comments:

    Sounds like it could be the plot of a mystery novel akin to JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series.

    The author is very much that type of guy:

    Florida Man. Individualist. Free minds and free markets. Distrustful of ideologies, whether left or right.

  • I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from "GeekWire" written by "an investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Services" who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete "achieved strong reasoning capabilities" is ... appropriately small.

  • I've previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWire's Jon Turow) "...like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,"

    That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.

  • Wait, the splinter group from the cult whose leader wants to bomb datacenters might be violent?

  • I mean, "downvotes are proof that the commies are out to get me" is an occasion not just to touch grass, but to faceplant into an open field of wildflowers.

  • yeah, DeepSeek LLMs are probably still an environmental disaster for the same reason most supposedly more efficient blockchains are — perverse financial incentives across the entire industry.

    1. the waste generation will expand to fill the available data centers
    2. oops all data centers are full, we need to build more data centers
  • Perhaps the most successful "sequel to chess" is actually the genre of chess problems, i.e., the puzzles about how Black can achieve mate in 3 (or whatever) from a contrived starting position that couldn't be seen in ordinary ("real") gameplay.

    There are also various ways of randomizing the starting positions in order to make the memorized knowledge of opening strategies irrelevant.

    Oh, and Bughouse.

  • Pouring one out for the local-news reporters who have to figure out what the fuck "timeless decision theory" could possibly mean.

  • The big claim is that R1 was trained on far less computing power than OpenAI’s models at a fraction of the cost.

    And people believe this ... why? I mean, shouldn't the default assumption about anything anyone in AI says is that it's a lie?

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one du

  • Altman: Mr. President, we must not allow a bullshit gap!

    Musk: I have a plan... Mein Führer, I can walk!

  • I would appreciate this too, frankly. The rabbit hole is deep, and full of wankers.

  • Jim Propp once wrote,

    I asked ChatGPT, the modern apotheosis of unjustified self-confidence, to prove that .999… is less than 1. Its reply began “Here is a proof that .999… is less than 1.” It then proceeded to show (using familiar arguments) that .999… is equal to 1, before majestically concluding “But our goal was to show that .999… is less than 1. Hence the proof is complete.” This reply, as an example of brazen mathematical non sequitur, can scarcely be improved upon.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insist

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insist

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Facebook "Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal"

    Kate Knibbs reports in Wired magazine:

    Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models. [...] In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” [...] These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussion

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Elsevier: Proudly charging you money so its AI can make your articles worse

    Retraction Watch reports:

    All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

    The resignation statement reads in part,

    In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.

    (Via [Pharyngula](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    The Professor Assigns Their Own Book — But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle Step

    The UCLA news office boasts, "Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities Division to use UCLA-developed AI system".

    The logic the professor gives completely baffles me:

    "Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically."

    I'm trying to parse that. Really and truly I am. But it just sounds like this: "Normally, I would [do work]. But now, I can actually [do the same work]."

    I mean, was this person somehow teaching comparative literature in a way that didn't involve reading the primary sources and, I'unno, comparing them?

    The sales talk in the news release is really going all in selling that undercoa

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insist

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 2024

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insist

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024

    Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insist

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    Off-Topic: Music Recommendation Thread

    So, here I am, listening to the Cosmos soundtrack and strangely not stoned. And I realize that it's been a while since we've had a random music recommendation thread. What's the musical haps in your worlds, friends?

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024

    Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

    Like, there was one dude a while back who insi

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Honest Government Ad | AI

    Bumping this up from the comments.

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024

    Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
    Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024

    Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

    Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

    If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

    The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
    Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Neil Gaiman on spicy autocomplete

    www.tumblr.com Neil Gaiman

    I apologize if you’ve been asked this question before I’m sure you have, but how do you feel about AI in writing? One of my teachers was “writing” stories using ChatGPT then was bragging about how go…

    Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

    For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

    With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Tesla's troubled Cybertruck appears to have hit yet another speed bump. Over the weekend, dozens of waiting customers reported that their impending deliveries had been canceled due to "an unexpected delay regarding the preparation of your vehicle."

    Tesla has not announced an official stop sale or recall, and as of now, the reason for the suspended deliveries is unknown. But it's possible the electric pickup truck has a problem with its accelerator. [...] Yesterday, a Cybertruck owner on TikTok posted a video showing how the metal cover of his accelerator pedal allegedly worked itself partially loose and became jammed underneath part of the dash. The driver was able to stop the car with the brakes and put it in park. At the beginning of the month, another Cybertruck owner claimed to have crashed into a light pole due to an unintended acceleration problem.

    Meanwhile, layoffs

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history.

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    [Eupalinos of Megara appears out of a time portal from ancient Ionia] Wow, you guys must be really good at digging tunnels by now, right?

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    New York taxpayers are paying for spicy autocomplete to tell landlords they can discriminate

    In October, New York City announced a plan to harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve the business of government. The announcement included a surprising centerpiece: an AI-powered chatbot that would provide New Yorkers with information on starting and operating a business in the city.

    The problem, however, is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law.

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    Chris Langan and the "Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe"? Oh boy!

    a lesswrong: 47-minute read extolling the ambition and insights of Christopher Langan's "CTMU"

    a science blogger back in the day: not so impressed

    [I]t’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”

    Langan, incidentally, is a 9/11 truther, a believer in the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and much more besides.