TechTakes

so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK to Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.

I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)

Got a jumpscare watching this.

New elon allegedly spawned 5 months ago via MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair

CW: Original source is the new york post, which I thought was an appropriate rag for this kind of news. Feel free to link a non NYP source.

https://archive.md/SY8LX

looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:

Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.

Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls 'Three Observations' that I feel too tired to sneer properly but I'm sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.

Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the "observation" that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so it's officially diminishing returns from now on.

Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it's used more, i.e. they'll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.

Third observation is that

The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

which is hilarious.

The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didn't read too closely.

Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let's take a look inside:

Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let's take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:

... ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I'm sure at least your numerical results are stro-

Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C'mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.

The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon's AI safety toad.

*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife's roommate's roommate's roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan's roommate, which explains why he's living rent free in my head

The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™

from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america

In other news, all hell's broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h

The "AI company" in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.

Thinking I should make this into a full post.

An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea that’s very adaptable…

https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710

Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.