Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
wild article about content scraping nonprofit common crawl
tl;dr they've been faking deleting data upon request (in ways that I find very funny) and their head is noxious even for a tech bro
also is it just me or does SV have a particular gift for perverting the nonprofit concept
sv does have for some time a peculiar understanding of this and also some other terms, like "consent", "ownership", "privacy", "safety",
Unstoppable IP enforcers meet unmovable slop generator?
Anyone knows who's (presumably) Tor from the "Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities" Youtube channel and what's up with his ideological commitments? Somebody recommended me this video on some Wikipedia grifter, I was enjoying it until suddenly (ca. 23:20 ) he name-drops Scott Alexander as “a writer whom I’m a big fan of”. I thought, should somebody tell him. Then I looked up and the guy has an entire video on subtypes of rationalists, so he knows, and chose to present as a fan anyway. Huh. However as far as a cursory glance goes the channel doesn't seem to bat for, you know, "human biodiversity". (I haven't watched the rat video because I don't want to ruin my week)
The rat video starts with him proclaiming that in rationalism he "found his people", that was the point where I bailed.
Big Yud posts another "banger"[1], and for once the target audience isn't impressed:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect#comments
I skimmed it. It's terrible. It's a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who's convinced he's actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.
Contains such Austean gems as this
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington -- measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation -- it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .
Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn't cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can't help himself.
[1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!
42 minute read
Maybe if you're a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in "Skewers", Washington, vs. "Forks", Washington, as made famous by Twilight.
Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud's stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!
My summary:
Part 1. A chess player, "Mr. Humman", plays a match against "Mr. Assi" and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, "Socratessa", or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are "Mr. Chimzee" and "Mr. Neumann".
Both "Humman" and "Socratessa" are strawmen. "Socratessa" is described as thus:
One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,
Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:
"Oh, my dear young lady," Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone
I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here's what I'll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it's completely transparent that Yud doesn't want you to like this guy. Yud's methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don't like this character, but not because of Yud's intent.
Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That's it. It's unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another.
The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud's whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.
The dumb strawman protagonist is called "Mr. Humman" and the ASI villain is called "Mr. Assi". I don't think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.
The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.
Let's not forget that the socratic strawwoman is named "Socratessa"
More wiki drama: Jimbo tries to both sides the gaza genocide
E: just for clarity. Jimbo is the canon nickname of founder Jimmy Wales.
And just to describe a little more of what has happened, as far as I can tell: Wales is reportedly being interviewed about Wikipedia (probably due to the grookiepedia stuff). He was asked in a "high profile media interview" (his words, see first link) about the Gaza genocide article, and said that it "fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention". Part of that attention is that they've locked the article, and Jimbo has joined the talk page. His argument probably boils down to this comment he left:
Let's start with this quote from WP:NPOV: "Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts. If different reliable sources make conflicting assertions about a matter, treat these assertions as opinions rather than facts, and do not present them as direct statements." Surely you aren't going to argue that the core assertion of the article is not seriously contested?
The "core assertion" is contained in the lede:
The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.
i.e. that there is a genocide happening at all.
Gizmodo article, in case this comment sucks in some way and you wanted to read a different report.
NotAwfulTech and AwfulTech converged with some ffmpeg drama on twitter over the past few days starting here and still ongoing. This is about an AI generated security report by Google's "Big Sleep" (with no corresponding Google authored fix, AI or otherwise). Hackernews discussed it here. Looking at ffmpeg's security page there have been around 24 bigsleep reports fixed.
ffmpeg pointed out a lot of stuff along the lines of:
All very reasonable points but with the reactions to their tweets you'd think they had proposed killing puppies or something.
A lot of people seem to forget this part of open source software licenses:
BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW
Or that venerable old C code will have memory safety issues for that matter.
It's weird that people are freaking out about some UAFs in a C library. This should really be dealt with in enterprise environments via sandboxing / filesystem containers / aslr / control flow integrity / non-executable memory enforcement / only compiling the codecs you need... and oh gee a lot of those improvements could be upstreamed!
For a moment there I was worried that ffmpeg had turned fash.
Anyway, amazing job ffmpeg, great responses. No notes
The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.
https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1598655873097912320
Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.
🙃🙃🙃
Watching another rationalist type on twitter become addicted to meth. You guys weren’t joking.
(no idea who - just going by the subtweets).
apologies for just linking to my own bsky post but I'm lazy: https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3m4qjnkeyls23
tl;dr I've gotten a bit suspicious that "AI users will be genocided" posts on reddit are a nazi op
not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.
It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?
So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.
It's been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they're just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.
frankly that's the most detailed I've seen it get. usually it's more like this
this is weird. My first thought is that it's just another vector of normalization for the idea that people who are afraid of and Post about genocide or other forms of discriminatory violence are not to be taken seriously. By putting a variety of insane victimhood appropriating subcultures into the internet milieu, it allows people to ignore what's happening (and what may be about to happen) in the real world, where groups of people actually are subject to fascistic violence.
Probably one part normalisation, one part AI supporters throwing tantrums when people don't treat them like the specialiest little geniuses they believe they are. These people have incredibly fragile egos, after all.
That is my thought as well. It's like the "you call everyone you disagree with a Nazi" argument from the 90s and 00s - discrediting attempts to call out fascist and genocidal ideas creates a lot of cover for those ideas to spread without being appropriately checked. It helps create a situation where serious and respectable people can keep arguing that things aren't that bad all the way until they get pushed onto a cattle car.
curious, that art style in that reply strongly matches the image I saw on this toot drifting by in my timeline earlier
I haven't touched image generators and idk how different their products are, if at all. but I think of this as the default AI "illustrated" style. very low on detail outside of the objects of focus, heavy line work, flat, rounded, muted colors
muted colors
A lot of it looks like it was pissed on.
jfc
Checked back on the smoldering dumpster fire that is Framework today.
Linux Community Ambassadors Tommi and Fraxinas have jumped ship, sneering the company's fash turn on the way out.
Boss at new job just told me we’re going all-in on AI and I need to take a core role in the project
They want to give LLMs access to our wildly insecure mass of SQL servers filled with numeric data
Security a non factor
😂🔫
Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason's book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss' sign-off in writing.
Heartbreaking: I work in the cesspool called the Indian tech industry
They will stonewall me and move forward regardless. I’m going to do what I can, raise a stink and polish my CV
Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?
Im very very happy on Fastmail. They are sensible people who offer mainly email (and calendar stuff) with no overpromises. Their servers are hosted in the USA tho, so that may affect your choice.
haven't seen them before, but a short tour around their infra/systems providers isn't particularly exciting - depending on both your threat model and what-you-want in a vendor
some parts/pages do provide some detail in encouraging depth, but I'd have to do a much more full review to give you a good answer
there's been a couple of "where email" threads over the last year, tuta's still one of the top options on that but you can check the threads if you want to see some of the other promising options
I am using posteo.de. They are good but I dislike that they have no option for using your own domain which makes switching provider really annoying. If I had to choose a provider again I would probably go with mailbox.org.