Architeuthis @awful.systems It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”
I'll quote her since it's by far the only worthwhile part of the article:
When real pictures have details, the details have logic to them. I think of Ancient Gate being in the genre "superficially detailed, but all the details are bad and incoherent". The red and blue paint and blank stone feel like they're supposed to evoke worn-ness, but it's not clear what style this is supposed to be a worn-down version of. One gets the feeling that if all the paint were present it would look like a pile of shipping containers, if shipping containers were only made in two colors.
It has ornaments, sort of, but they don't look like anything, or even a worn-down version of anything. There are matchy disks in the left, center, and right, except they're different sizes, different colors, and have neither "detail which parses as anything" nor stark smoothness. It has stuff that's vaguely evocative of Egyptian paintings if you didn't look carefully at all. The left column has a sort of door with a massive top-of-doorway-thingy over it. Why? Who knows? The right column doesn't, and you'd expect it to. Instead, the right column has 2.5 arches embossed into it that just kind of halfheartedly trail off.
I'm not even sure how to describe the issues with the part a little above the door. It kind of sets a rhythm but then it gets distracted and breaks it. Are these semi-top protruding squares supposed to be red or blue? Ehh, whatever. Does the top border protrude the whole way? Ehh, mostly. Human artists have a secret technique, which is that if they don't know what all the details should be they get vague. And you can tell it's vague and you're not drawn to go "hmm, this looks interesting, oh wait it's terrible".
I think part of the problem with AI art is that it produces stuff non-artists think look good but which on close inspection looks terrible, and so it ends up turning search results that used to be good into sifting through terrible stuff. Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it's so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake. (Maybe they do so because they were used to almost never eating food? This isn't a perfect analogy.) Furthermore, imagine people calling this the future of food and saying chefs are obsolete. You'd probably be like "wow, I'm happy that you have easy access to food you enjoy, and it is convenient for me to use sometimes, but this is kind of driving me crazy". I feel like this is relevant to artist derangement over AI art, though of course a lot of it is economic anxiety and I'm a hobbyist who doesn't feel like a temporarily embarrassed professional and thus can't relate.
according to someone who goes by Ilzo on the socials.
image in question: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQ3wnEZWAAA_mY8?format=jpg
When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how there's currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.
I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.
It might be just the all but placeholder characters that give it a b-movie vibe. I'd say it's a book that's both dumber and smarter that people give it credit for, but even the half-baked stuff gets you thinking. Especially the self-model stuff, and how problematic it can be to even discuss the concept in depth in languages that have the concept of a subject so deeply baked in.
I thought that at worst one could bounce off to the actual relevant literature like Thomas Metzinger's pioneering, seminal and terribly written thesis, or Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.
Blindsight being referenced to justify LLM hype is news to me.
That's just googling with several wildly pointless extra steps of also googling.
That's a good way to put it. Another thing that was really en vogue at one point and might have been considered hard-ish scifi when it made it into Rifters was all the deep water telepathy via quantum brain tubules stuff, which now would only be taken seriously by wellness influencers.
not a fan of trump for example
In one the Eriophora stories (I think it's officially the sunflower circle) I think there's a throwaway mention about the Kochs having been lynched along with other billionaires on the early days of a mass mobilization to save what's savable in the face of environmental disaster (and also rapidly push to the stars because a Kardashev-2 civilization may have emerged in the vicinity so an escape route could become necessary in the next few millenia and this scifi story needs a premise).
Explaining in detail is kind of a huge end-of-book spoiler, but "All communication is manipulative" leaves out a lot of context and personally I wouldn't consider how it's handled a mark against Blindsight.
Sentience is overrated
Not sentience, self awareness, and not in a parτicularly prescriptive way.
Blindsight is pretty rough and probably Watt's worst book that I've read but it's original, ambitious and mostly worth it as an introduction to thinking about selfhood in a certain way, even if this type of scifi isn't one's cup of tea.
It's a book that makes more sense after the fact, i.e. after reading the appendix on phenomenal self-model hypothesis. Which is no excuse -- cardboard characters that are that way because the author is struggling to make a point about how intelligence being at odds with self awareness would lead to individuals with nonexistent self-reflection that more or less coast as an extension of their (ultrafuturistic) functionality, are still cardboard characters that you have to spend a whole book with.
I remember he handwaves a lot of stuff regarding intelligence, like at some point straight up writing that what you are reading isn't really what's being said, it's just the jargonaut pov character dumbing it way down for you, which is to say he doesn't try that hard for hyperintelligence show-don't-tell. Echopraxia is better in that regard.
It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.
Not really, there are some common ideas mostly because tesrealism already is scifi tropes awkwardly cobbled together, but usually what tescreals think is awesome is presented in a cautionary light or as straight up dystopian.
Like, there's some really bleak transhumanism in this book, and the view that human cognition is already starting to become alien in the one hour into the future setting is kind of anti-longtermist, at least in the sense that the utilitarian calculus turns way messed up.
And also I bet there's nothing in The Sequences about Captain Space Dracula.
No, just replace all your sense of morality with utilitarian shrimp algebra. If you end up vegetarian, so be it.
Hopefully the established capitalists will protect us from the fascists' worst excesses hasn't been much of a winning bet historically.
It's not just systemic media head-up-the-assery, there's also the whole thing about oil companies and petrostates bankrolling climate denialism since the 70s.
The way many of the popular rat blogs started to endorse Harris in the last second before the US election felt a lot like an attempt at plausible deniability.
This reference stirred up some neurons that really hadn't moved in a while, thanks.
I think the author is just honestly trying to equivocate freezing shrimps with torturing weirdly specifically disabled babies and senile adults medieval style. If you said you'd pledge like 17$ to shrimp welfare for every terminated pregnancy I'm sure they'd be perfectly fine with it.
I happened upon a thread in the EA forums started by someone who was trying to argue EAs into taking a more forced-birth position and what it came down to was that it wouldn't be as efficient as using the same resources to advocate for animal welfare, due to some perceived human/chicken embryo exchange rate.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesn't crumble.
Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.
Dog, you've lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.
No shot is over two seconds, because AI video can’t keep it together longer than that. Animals and snowmen visibly warp their proportions even over that short time. The trucks’ wheels don’t actually move. You’ll see more wrong with the ad the more you look.
Not to mention the weird AI lighting that makes everything look fake and unnatural even in the ad's dreamlike context, and also that it's the most generic and uninspired shit imaginable.
His overall point appears to be that a city fully optimized for self-driving cars would be a hellscape at ground level, even allowing for fewer accidents, so no real reason to belabor that point, which is mostly made in service to pointing out how dumb it is when your solution to reducing accident rates is "buy a new car" instead of anything systemic. like improving mass transit.
Apropos of nothing, I wonder when Uncle Trump's Presidential Pardon Auction House officially opens for business.
If you've convinced yourself that you'll mostly be fighting the AIs of a rival always-chaotic-evil alien species or their outgroup equivalent, you probably think they are.
Otherwise I hope shooting first and asking questions later will probably continue to be frowned upon in polite society even if it's automated agents doing the shooting.
New article from reflective altruism guy starring Scott Alexander and the Biodiversity Brigade
This post discusses the influence of human biodiversity theory on Astral Codex Ten and other work by Scott Alexander.
Would've been way better if the author didn't feel the need to occasionally hand it to siskind for what amounts to keeping the mask on, even while he notes several instances where scotty openly discusses how maintaining a respectable facade is integral to his agenda of infecting polite society with neoreactionary fuckery.
It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
>AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding
> Getting full value out of AI workplace assistants is turning out to require a heavy lift from enterprises. ‘It has been more work than anticipated,’ says one CIO.
aka we are currently in the process of realizing we are paying for the privilege of being the first to test an incomplete product.
>Mandell said if she asks a question related to 2024 data, the AI tool might deliver an answer based on 2023 data. At Cargill, an AI tool failed to correctly answer a straightforward question about who is on the company’s executive team, the agricultural giant said. At Eli Lilly, a tool gave incorrect answers to questions about expense policies, said Diogo Rau, the pharmaceutical firm’s chief information and digital officer.
I mean, imagine all the non-obvious stuff it must be getting wrong at the same time.
> He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record,” with no contradictory or duplicate information.
Please stop feeding the thing too much information, you're making it confused.
> Some of the challenges with Copilot are related to the complicated art of prompting, Spataro said. Users might not understand how much context they actually need to give Copilot to get the right answer, he said, but he added that Copilot itself could also get better at asking for more context when it needs it.
Yeah, exactly like all the tech demos showed -- wait a minute!
> [Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said] “If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was,” he said. “You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.”
Nevermind that that's exactly how we've been marketing it.
Oh well, I guess you'll just have to wait for chatgpt-6.66 that will surely fix everything, while voiced by charlize theron's non-union equivalent.
Generating (often non-con) porn is the new crypto mining
And now I feel like I need to take a shower. Ugh.
An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards
> "some workloads may generate images, text or video of a mature nature", and that any adult content generated is wiped from a users system as soon as the workload is completed.
> However, one of Salad's clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.
Investigation link: https://www.404media.co/inside-the-ai-porn-marketplace-where-everything-and-everyone-is-for-sale/
SBF's effective altruism and rationalism considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing
Sam Bankman-Fried maintains that his crimes were victimless and resulted in zero losses, and therefore warrant only six years of imprisonment. Prosecutors argue that 40–50 years are justified.
For thursday's sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there's this gem:
> 4. Bankman-Fried's effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough "expected value". They point to Caroline Ellison's testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would "be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good". They also point to Bankman-Fried's "own 'calculations'" described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. "Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again," they write.
Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.
Bonus: SBF's lawyers' list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:
> They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that "he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement."
Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next
rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.
This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).
Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.
Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.
I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.
There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.
quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments
pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD
pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.
rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.
edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.
Hi, I'm Scott Alexander and I will now explain why every disease is in fact just poor genetics by using play-doh statistics to sorta refute a super specific point about schizophrenia heritability.
edited to add tl;dr: Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play. This is understandably very worrisome, since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.
Also notable because I don't think it's very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post, including the claim that the whole thing is just HBD denialists spreading FUD:
> People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.
Reply guy EY attempts incredibly convoluted offer to meet him half-way by implying AI body pillows are a vanguard threat that will lead to human extinction...
... while at the same time not really worth worrying about so we should be concentrating on unnamed alleged mid term risks.
EY tweets are probably the lowest effort sneerclub content possible but the birdsite threw this to my face this morning so it's only fair you suffer too. Transcript follows:
Andrew Ng wrote: >In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack. > >Many of the hypothetical forms of harm, like AI "taking over", are based on highly questionable hypotheses about what technology that does not currently exist might do. > >Every field should examine both future and current problems. But is there any other engineering discipline where this much attention is on hypothetical problems rather than actual problems?
EY replied: >I think when the near-term harm is massive numbers of young men and women dropping out of the human dating market, and the mid-term harm is the utter extermination of humanity, it makes sense to focus on policies motivated by preventing mid-term harm, if there's even a trade-off.
Turns out Altman is a lab-leak covid truther, calls virus 'synthetic' according to Spectator piece on AI risk.
> Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
Rationalist literary criticism by SBF, found on the birdsite
original is here, but you aren't missing any context, that's the twit.
> I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespear... but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse that that. When Shakespear wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate -- probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.
edited to add this seems to be an excerpt from the fawning book the big short/moneyball guy wrote about him that was recently released.
Quality sneer found on the birdsite
Transcription:
Thinking about that guy who wants a global suprasovereign execution squad with authority to disable the math of encryption and bunker buster my gaming computer if they detect it has too many transistors because BonziBuddy might get smart enough to order custom RNA viruses online.