love how instead of celebrating the process of justice - where purloined goods are returned to their owners - coiners are fretting that releasing these coins now is an attack on the BTC price, because it's so thinly traded that people trying to realize gains are gonna tank the price.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can't rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit it's been ages since I've read this books so I've been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
On an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.
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Yah Skaffen is the best drone, obvsly.
Thx for the reference to Soldier F, didnāt know about his case.
Obvsly you've read the novel more than I have considering your nick... I might have to give it another go.
OTOH I'd rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
Hey! I blog!
Seldom more than a couple paras tho.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It's the one HN likes best too. It's probably the only one I've not re-read. Maybe it's how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he's coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
Couldn't find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:
does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?
I see echoes of it when idiots discuss ChatGPT being AGI - āitās at the level of the average (dumb) human, so itās AGIā. Implicit is that the average human isnāt just not intelligent, but unaware of reality in a way that makes them like NPCs in computer games.
ā-
Edit hereās an example, no source because I donāt want to start a dogpile.
If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is, then I donāt think that argument against ChatGPTās sentience is gonna be particularly persuasive either.
If you say āChatGPT doesnāt actually thinkā and later on, āand some humans donāt eitherā - that weakens the strength of the first assertion by a lot, imo.
I mean, if ChatGPT is only sentient to the degree that the least sentient (conscious) human is, then weāre still talking about AGI.
Is law considered part of the humanities because lawyers have been fucking things up in society since at least the French revolution.
Cloudflare making the bet there's money in offering AI-scraping protection:
Dude needs to take a page from the Republicans - if you can't influence society via culture, just capture the judicial branch.
He's been writing about copyright etc at Techdirt since basically forever.
That's because it doesn't use AI...
Duh, my bad. I thought it was something like varifocals too.
Photochromic lenses were a nerd staple when I was a teenager. Dunno if/how popular they are now.
A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is āWho is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,ā or āwhat are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.ā
Questions asked by the terminally deranged.
I guess the point is the dude wonāt have lasik.
Another one
https://mastodon.social/@bruces/112690475011154532
edit seems to be a whole bunch of similar ones.
I don't have any proof for this statement but I believe the LLM-minders keep track of whatever stupid shit bubbles up on the internets making fun of their babies and hardcode "solutions" to them in a game of whack-a-mole.
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
After Arkham Intelligence announced a $150,000 bounty for anyone who could prove the identity of the person behind a Donald Trump memecoin called $DJT, blockchain sleuth zachxbt quickly rose to the occasion. He submitted evidence that Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who spent years in federal priso...
This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.
In an attempt to secure the libertarian vote, Trump promises to pardon Dread Pirate Roberts (while calling for the death penalty for other drug dealers)
Trump: Donald Trump promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online illegal drug marketplace Silk Road, in a raucous speech before the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday night. āAnd if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,ā t...
āThe problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,ā the founder of Bards and Sages said.
> āIt is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,ā she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, sheās observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models canāt imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.
AI grifters con the US gov that AGI poses "existential risk"
The U.S. government must move ādecisivelyā to avert an āextinction-level threat" to humanity from AI, says a government-commissioned report
The grifters in question:
> Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]
Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris
Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/
The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/
"The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I." - hackernews discussion
HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????
Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.
Elon Muskās greatest legacy will be as a provider of inane law school exam hypotheticals.
Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.
Some interesting tidbits in this ElReg story about "AI Dean Phillips"
Biden's challenger model shot down despite super PAC support
Apologies for the link to The Register...
Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.
Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.
Quoth ElReg:
> Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.
> The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."
So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.
[SOLVED] cannot login using mobile Firefox
Anyone else have this problem? Itās been bothering me for a while and is the last thing keeping me using mobile Chrome.
On the login page , after entering username and password, the āloginā button does nothing. It might slightly change color but I am not directed to the site logged in, nor do I get an error.
platform: iOS
The username and password are entered automatically via either Firefoxās password store, or iOSā.
Looking for: random raytracing program
Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?
The official awful.systems Advent of Code 2023 thread
Rules: no spoilers.
The other rules are made up as we go along.
Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.
Any interest in an Advent of Code thread?
The wider community is still on Reddit, I wonder if thereās an interest to have a small alternative?
If not, whatās a good Lemmy instance for these things?
ScottA is annoyed EA has a bad name now
"All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things Iām forgetting..."
In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote
> For the OG effective altruists, itās imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.
Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!
The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence
> I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.
What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?
We don't even have Universal Basic Income yet but libertarians are already arguing it's too large
[this is probably off-topic for this forum, but I found it on HN so...]
Edit "enjoy" the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233810
Blinded by the light: ignoring useless regulation, NFT conf organizers use sterilizing UV lighting instead of blacklights. All my apes in ER.
Title is ... editorialized.
"The best way to profit from AI"
Tiny island country could rake in 10% of its GDP in domain sales this year.
Title quote stolen from JZW: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/10/the-best-way-to-profit-from-ai/
Yet again, the best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell shovels.
That didn't take long: cryptobro realizes that blockchains is what LLMs crave.
On Decentralized Cryptographically Secure Neural Agents
> After several months of reflection, Iāve come to only one conclusion: a cryptographically secure, decentralized ledger is the only solution to making AI safer.
Quelle surprise
> There also needs to be an incentive to contribute training data. People should be rewarded when they choose to contribute their data (DeSo is doing this) and even more so for labeling their data.
Get pennies for enabling the systems that will put you out of work. Sounds like a great deal!
> All of this may sound a little ridiculous but itās not. In fact, the work has already begun by the former CTO of OpenSea.
I dunno, that does make it sound ridiculous.