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blakestacey

@blakestacey@awful.systems

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hot off the presses: automatic wrong information without even going to the wrong-information deliveries store (theconversation.com)

there are some remarkable instances of bad behaviour in there already, but imagine being the sort of product team that thinks users being gaslit by a chatbot that they couldn’t even consent to choose to use is totes something to deliver without any modification or remark

blakestacey,
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According to a Meta help page, Meta AI will respond to a post in a group if someone explicitly tags it or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.”

God forbid it ever take longer than an hour for an actual human with actual knowledge to type a reply.

blakestacey,
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Electromagnetism is a standard subject covered in a bajillion books, so the training set is probably full of repeated explanations of the basic examples. That sounds like an excellent recipe for “AI” bilge-water that is just coherent enough for a student to miss where it goes wrong.

blakestacey,
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That was a long before it was a meme.

blakestacey,
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Scott Aaronson says that Aschenbrenner displays “unusual clarity, concreteness, and seriousness”.

That’s it, that’s the joke

blakestacey,
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OOM-pa lOOM-pa dOOM-pa dee doo / I’ve got a waste of carbon for you

blakestacey,
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Spoken like a man who jerks it to tradwife Midjourney pics. Can’t get it up unless the fingers look wrong, can you?

blakestacey,
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“Computational complexity does not work that way!” is one of those TESCREAL-zone topics that I wish I had better reading recommendations for.

blakestacey,
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Check out the big brain on Yud!

I think the pre-election prosecutions of Hillary and Trump were both bullshit. Is there anyone on Earth who holds that Hillary’s email server and Trump’s lawyer’s payment’s accounting were both Terribly Serious Crimes, and can document having held the former position earlier?

blakestacey, (edited )
@blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.

I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying “Hi! I’m Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!”

Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.

When half his college students gasped, he said “THAT’S where all this AI hype comes from. We’re not good at programming consciousness. But we’re GREAT at imagining non-conscious things are people.”

blakestacey, (edited )
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Vitalik Buterin:

A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate “charge” (as in, “my laptop is charging”) and the best I could come up with is “pinxe lo dikca” (“drink electricity”)

So… if you think LLMs don’t drink, that’s your imagination, not mine.

My parents said that the car was “thirsty” if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists

That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:

Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people won’t accept anything that doesn’t eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.

Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in “The Bicentennial Man”, not I, Robot. It’s also presented textually as correct…

In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.

blakestacey,
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blakestacey,
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From the Philosophy Tube comment section:

Video is way too long. But I did go to chatGPT to ask extensively about this Judith Butler character.

blakestacey,
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what are the requirements for consciousness

10 coffee

20 goto 10

blakestacey,
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I tried doing what I occasionally do and browsing LessWrong for something to point and laugh at, but opening it in a Firefox private window, I can only scroll down a little way before the page breaks. The bottom post appears and disappears, and it scrolls no further.

blakestacey,
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The video title “A Pragmatist’s Take on Small Talk” would be much better if it were William James giving advice on navigating the social niceties. Step 1: this hat.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/17025442-29b1-4e4b-bbeb-f32b3058477c.jpeg

blakestacey,
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… as one does?

blakestacey,
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I have to wonder though if the fact Google is generating this text themselves rather than just showing text from other sources means they might actually have to face some consequences in cases where the information they provide ends up hurting people.

Darn good question. Of course, since Congress is thirsty to destroy Section 230 in the delusional belief that this will make Google and Facebook behave without hurting small websites that lack massive legal departments (cough fedi instances)…

blakestacey, (edited )
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All it takes is one frivolous legal threat to shut down a small website by putting them on the hook for legal costs they can’t afford. Facebook gets away with awful shit not because of the law, but because they are stupidly rich. Change the law, and they will still be stupidly rich. Indeed, the “sunset Section 230” path will make it open season for Facebook’s lobbyists to pay for the replacement law that they want. I do not see that leading anywhere good.

blakestacey,
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To date, the largest working nuclear reactor constructed entirely of cheese is the 160 MWe Unit 1 reactor of the French nuclear plant École nationale de technologie supérieure (ENTS).

“That’s it! Gromit, we’ll make the reactor out of cheese!

blakestacey,
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Fresh chicken blood is excellent for removing rust and graffiti from a CyberTruck!

Meme coin apes: RFK Jr has your back (x.com)

I’m very aware of what the average retail investor has been saying about the need for greater transparency in our markets, stronger regulatory oversight and tougher penalties for market manipulation and criminal behavior. My administration will support the Ape retail rebellion and enact aggressive Wall Street reforms....

18+ Vaccinations in Book Form?

A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen...

blakestacey, (edited )
@blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

I thought about assembling a kind of anti-Sequence reading list about quantum mechanics, a view from outside the cult shit that the Sequences try to drown you in, with their bad history, caricatured philosophy and mathematics that ranges from turgid to incorrect. The trouble is that a better understanding is not written all in one place, and even the good papers don’t necessarily convey the everything Yud taught you is wrong emotional hook. The literature does not lead to cracking many smiles, though I did appreciate Adrian Kent’s eel remark in this book review.

Some papers that have a bit more zing than average:

And, if you really want to dive into the waters and open your eyes below the surface:

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