Thanks, I hate it.

Especially because Trump’s legal teams have historically been more than incompetent enough to produce this kind of work on their own.

It is a long-established truth that it’s significantly easier to con someone who thinks they’re smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter they’re attached to. Like, they’ve been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.

Dan Shipper, who has been testing Operator for a few days, found that it often cannot access websites because they have blocked OpenAI from crawling it.

Wait so ghoulishly scraping the entire internet without regard for the performance impact on the sites you’re scraping and getting blocked from anyone with the good sense to do so has downsides?!?

Is there any rundown on this backstory for people who missed it happening live over the last few years that doesn’t get sidetracked into theological disputes with the murder cult?

Yeah. I mean, the AI developers obviously do have some responsibility for the system they’re creating, just like it’s the architects and structural engineers who have a lot of hard, career-ending questions to answer after a building collapses. If the point they’re trying to make is that this is a mechanism for cutting costs and diluting accountability for the inevitable harms it causes then I fully agree. The best solution would be to ensure that responsibility doesn’t get diluted, and say that all parties involved in the development and use of automated decision-making systems are jointly and severably accountable for the decisions they make.

It falls into a broader type of tech hype based in the idea that if it would be good for something to work a certain way then if we can make it work at all it will obviously work in that optimal way. Like, it would be cool if we could get exponential growth in our rockets somehow (Maybe they reproduce? Do the rockets fuck, Elon?) so therefore assuming we can get rockets at all we can definitely make them scale like that.

Call it the Milliways argument. Because if you’ve already done five thousand impossible things before breakfast, why not cap it off with lunch at the restaurant at the end of the universe?

That’s why we need to combine them! AI on the block chain can burn an unprecedented amount of electricity to impress VCs and get ever more funding! The line is going to go so up that all other lines will look down by comparison!

Once again the sophisticated method for undermining the AI system is exactly the thing you would do if you didn’t know it was there. At best this reduces costs relative to paying a human being to look at cameras. More reasonably I don’t know how to compare the relative error rates but I suspect it isn’t nearly as favorable as the hype men would try to tell us.

My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you’ll see references to “not wanting to start the vitamin C debate” in forums.

I’m pretty sure it’s not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.

Probably both tbh. It really is like SBF round 1, but because it’s drugs instead of financial crimes they didn’t need to hire Margot Robbie to explain why it’s illegal and destructive to everyone from her bath.

You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly “hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!”

And a Quarian who went to business school

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

Hat tip to this reply showcasing a beautiful example of image gen. Very éthiccal(athiccal?) technology.

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

The continued polytopia mentions just keep reminding me of this take from Dave Karpf. Like, he’s not talking about incredibly deep games here (no offense to the people who love them) and in the context of him trying to take on the reigns of Presidentissimo or whatever all the arguing and doubting about his gamer cred is obscuring the arguments over how weird this is to try and focus on. Like, if he was trying to claim he was a Go all-star or something that would be one thing. Even Chess has tradition behind it, even if it’s actual utility for learning more general strategic thinking is more questionable. But Polytopia and Diablo? Really? If we did start apportioning political power to whoever can execute a basic strategy while clicking as fast as possible I think we’d all be bowing down to God-Emperor Flash or something.

Anyways, even if we put my unearned strategy gaming elitism aside this is such a dumb argument to be having in the first place and I don’t know that I can forgive Elon for making it part of the problem.

My gut says that liquidity in this context means “making sure that there are tokens available to purchase for initial buyers” or in other words listing them on the market instead of distributing them at initial purchase price.

Pretty sure there’s gonna be a contract somewhere that defines raw intelligence as “the amount of money you make for OpenAI.”

I’m sure I’m not the first to note it, but there is a kind of irony in Scott and the gang using such a clear example of a motte-and-bailey argument (got to find a better phrase for that. Maybe some pithy reference to Patton at Calais to maintain the history theme? Inflatable Tank Defense?) in regards to IQ. When talking among friends they treat IQ tests like they are a strong correlate with innate intelligence, no caveats. As such IQ test scores are a reason to ignore environmental factors and not bother investing in equity-minded interventions. But when someone makes the obviously racist conclusion too visible, the argument shifts to be about how actually the correlations between IQ and environmental factors are obvious and really this supports anti racism. It’s a straightforward form of decontextualization that relies on completely ignoring the entire history and contemporary arguments around IQ to defends a single data point. Of course once everyone agrees with that data point they can go right back to the wildly racist nonsense that they were doing in the first place.