dgerard

joined 2 years ago
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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 47 minutes ago* (last edited 46 minutes ago)

I did two Intelligence Squared debates in the UK. The best bit was I got paid. The second best was the people running it were actually very nice and quite competent. Recommend to all.

As for content, the first one featured the guy behind Liberland, so lol

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 52 minutes ago

Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I've ever heard about him

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

so I previously predicted the AI bubble would pop on Trump's watch and crash the stock market. Never did I envision Trump doing it to himself, in a manner so stupid I'm not sure anyone anticipated it.

I'm wondering what this does to the AI bubble. I think the bubble is led by trillions of dollars desperate for lottery-sized returns. There's so much family, pension and sovereign wealth money that can't get returns on sane investments that they're left only with insane ones.

This is not about tech at all. If they thought they could do a tech bubble with ELIZA chatbots, we'd have number power plants being restarted to power hyperscale data centres running billions of copies of ELIZA.

What would it take for this crash to affect the AI bubble materially?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago

By the same fuckin people! A perfect Pivot to AI

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

multiverse hype

???

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

"Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You'll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords."

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (15 children)

a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?

[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why

i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists

i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow

i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers

at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant

fuck. it's rationalist season

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

he was the most prominent voice saying "hey wait this is shit"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

112 pages jfc

 

Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this point I'm piling up the absurdities again.

The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been "wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they're evil."

How would you first approach explaining this shit past "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong"?

[also posted in sneer classic]

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DZZuCi95o - video

my delivery was near perfect on this video, i'm very pleased

 

yeah i'm sure Matt Levine, qntm and Wildbow are gonna be champing at the bit to attend wordy racist fest

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

tip from a discord:

I've been doing some micro tasking to train LLM's the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it's all dried up, no tasks available. I can't help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.

 

In a gesture blending art, technology and homage to innovation, the city of Lugano, Switzerland, has unveiled a striking statue celebrating the anonymity of the mysterious creator of Buttcoin.

The grand reveal took place at the third annual Plan Nocoin Forum, with the sleekly designed figure aiming to capture Buttcoin’s enigmatic legacy.

At the unveiling, the Mayor of Lugano, Kill Hamster, lauded the statue as a symbol of the city’s bold embrace of fiat progress, underscoring Lugano’s rise as a premier hub for actual money.

The sculpture honours the far-reaching impact of Buttcoin on the global financial landscape.

The artist, Buttcoin Thread, says “the sculpture shows the Butt from all possible angles, and vibrates with such energy that it can barely stay fixed in this plane of existence.”

By paying tribute to Buttcoin, Lugano not only honours the past but also paves the way for future generations to pursue breakthroughs in actual money you can spend on things.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

it would be nice if people ever read the history of their favourite thing

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

one for the arse-end of this week's stubsack

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