Dude discovers that one LLM model is not entirely shit at chess, spends time and tokens proving that other models are actually also not shit at chess.
The irony? He's comparing it against Stockfish, a computer chess engine. Computers playing chess at a superhuman level is a solved problem. LLMs have now slightly approached that level.
For one, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct rarely suggests illegal moves,
Writeup https://dynomight.net/more-chess/
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42206817
Anyone here read "World War Z"? There's a section there about how the health authorities in basically all countries supress and deny the incipient zombie outbreak. I think about that a lot nowadays.
Anyway the COVID response, while ultimately better than the worst case scenario (Spanish Flu 2.0) has made me really unconvinced we will do anything about climate change. We had a clear danger of death for millions of people, and the news was dominated by skeptics. Maybe if it had targetted kids instead of the very old it would have been different.
HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".
The SH is catnip to "scientific types" who don't recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can't be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. It's basically elementary!
Shorter HN: wasting gigawatts of power to increase VC valuations - fine. Discarding 80k pounds of butter because of missing allergen information is the worst thing to happen since the burning of the library of Alexandria
Some techbro proposes "HumaneRank" as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least "it's better than Communism":
Running for office is just a stunt for these people. More unearned publicity.
Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. "Fun" fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you're sent to a camp?
Trump won dontcha know now it's time for C I V I L I T Y
Kill and dethrone God.
I will never forget the dude who argued online that the sealion is the real victim here (a victim of the “disgruntled female”)
I think we can all agree now that US Rationalists are basically all ex-Christians who are looking for the same thing but with the serial numbers filed off.
Yeah that's the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they'll start using it. There's all sorts of rationalizations going on - it's portable, it's performant, it's what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are "socialism" - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what "polygynous" means, and I "love" this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It's technichally correct in some parts of the world.
Posting not for the content but for the stunningly inept AI slop illustrations:
https://datastream.substack.com/p/mistakes-from-my-failed-startup-in
JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.
Oh wait, that's just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o
It's more like everyone is hungry for content and the POTUS election is a big generator of it.
Not really that surprising. Computer programmers are textbook petite bourgeoisie.
Edit I don't keep track of C and C-likes, but apparently D has been forked, and it seems that Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too
https://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2024_01_01.html
The "money" the AI companies have are basically just promises from backers. If they cannot deliver their promises (which boil down to basically knowledge industries replacing around 20% of their workforce with LLMs) then that imaginary money dries up. Remember, there are real bills in the form of power and cooling and hardware that have to be paid all the time just to keep running in place.
A lawsuit that convinces the public and investors that LLMs are a dead end will kill most LLM companies.
Person who exercises her free association rights at conferences incites ire in Jameson Lopp
Razzlekhan, who conspired to launder tens of thousands of bitcoin, told attendees she was searching for work as a crypto consultant.
Butters do a 180 regarding statism as Daddy Trump promises to use filthy Fed FIAT to buy and hodl BTC
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. “And if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” t...
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” the founder of Bards and Sages said.
> “It 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,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t 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 “decisively” to avert an “extinction-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 Musk’s 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.
cannot login using mobile Firefox
Anyone else have this problem? It’s 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 “login” 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 Firefox’s password store, or iOS’.
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 there’s an interest to have a small alternative?
If not, what’s 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 I’m forgetting..."
In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote
> For the OG effective altruists, it’s 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.