gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

Lies, damn lies, racist statisticians, but P-VALUES ARE THE TRUTH I TELL YOU

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

Free SFnal short story idea, came to me literally in a dream:

Dude is living his best life, beatiful house, beatiful wife, gets a job doing computer stuff "improving the world". But his big fancy work computer is wasting a lot of space so he reformats it/installs Nix, and suddenly everythings gone, all grey wireframe, no way out. Turns out he was given root to his own simulation and there's no backup.

Feels I should have read this somehwere but haven't read short SF in ages so...

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

Don't confuse the Conference Castle with the (Non)Consent Castle!

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I am sorry you have this family member.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Looks like LW/Lightcone managed to convince enough people to give then $2M, which will totally not be used to settle sexual assault lawsuits in the future.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm not reading that shit but for the masochists out there who like to read HN licking VC boots, here ya go

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682305

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.

i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 18 points 6 days ago

Yeah thought the same, "can't make it much worse"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago (5 children)

LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia's highest IQ youth

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onyiPaxnmiDdHn7SR/no-one-has-the-ball-on-1500-russian-olympiad-winners-who-ve

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

Yeah it's been decades since I read Rhodes' history about the atom bomb, so I missed the years a bit. My point is that even if we couldn't explain exactly what was happening there was something physically there, and we knew enough about it that Oppenheimer and co. could convince the US Army to build Oak Ridge and many other facilities at massive expense.

We can't say the same about "AI".

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, my starting position would be that it was obvious to any competent physicist at the time (although there weren't that many) that the potential energy release from nuclear fission was a real thing - the "only" thing to do to weaponise it or use it for peaceful ends was engineering.

The analogy to "runaway X-risk AGI" is there's a similar straight line from ELIZA to Acausal Robot God, all that's required is a bit of elbow grease and good ole fashioned American ingenuity. But my point is that apart from Yud and a few others, no serious person believes this.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

noodling on a blog post - does anyone with more experience of LW/EA than me know if "AI safety" people are referencing the invention of nuclear weapons as a template for regulating/forbidding "AGI"?

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“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.

 

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/

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/meta@awful.systems
 

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’.

 

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?

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