Architeuthis

joined 2 years ago
[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No idea if it was intentional given how long a series' production cycle can be before it ends up on tv/streaming, but it's hard not to see Vince Gilligan's Pluribus as a weird extended impact-of-chatbots metaphor.

It's also somewhat tedious and seems to be working under the assumption that cool cinematography is a sufficient substitute for character development.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hasn't it lately become increasingly possible that the files of famous financier and MIRI donor J. Epstein will be finally released to public cognizance?

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.

Only good things can come of this.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

But if hypothetically you ask me whether I know about any couples currently doing this ill-advised thing, where it has not yet blown up, then I do not confirm or deny; it would not be my job to run their lives. This is true even if all they'd face is a lot of community frowning about BDSM common wisdom, rather than legal consequences. It is very hard to get me to butt into two people's lives, if they are both telling me to get out and mind my own business; maybe even to the point of it being an error on my part, because if I was erring there, I sure do know which side I would be erring on.

This reads a lot like an ixnay on the exualassaultsay admonition towards the broader rationalist community.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 1 month ago

I always thought it was cool that (there is a case to be made that) HPL created Azathoth, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space, as a mythological reimagining of a black hole. Stuff like The Dreams in the Witch-house shows he was up to date on a bunch of cutting edge for the time physics stuff, at least as far as terminology is concerned, massive nerd that he was.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

time travelling evil robot

Fun fact: In the original telling the robot is supposed to be the good guy, the eternal torment dungeon is just part of its optimal strategy to beat out actually evil robot overlords from existing first.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

'Genetic engineering to merge with machines' is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I don't think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.

Simplest explanation I guess is he's just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and that's about as deep as it goes.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideas” are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. “Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.”

Fun article.

Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending “merge” between humans and machines – which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging “an electrode into the brain”.

Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that's even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

users trade off decision quality against effort reduction

They should put that on the species' gravestone.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.

Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

I feel the devs should just ask the chatbot themselves before submitting if they feel it helps, automating the procedure invites a slippery slope in an environment were doing it the wrong way is being pushed extremely strongly and executives' careers are made on 'I was the one who led AI adoption in company x (but left before any long term issues became apparent)'

Plus the fact that it's always weirdos like the hating AI is xenophobia person who are willing to go to bat for AI doesn't inspire much confidence.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Everything about this screams vaporware.

 

edited to add tl;dr: Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play. This is understandably very worrisome, since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.

Also notable because I don't think it's very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post, including the claim that the whole thing is just HBD denialists spreading FUD:

People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.

 

... while at the same time not really worth worrying about so we should be concentrating on unnamed alleged mid term risks.

EY tweets are probably the lowest effort sneerclub content possible but the birdsite threw this to my face this morning so it's only fair you suffer too. Transcript follows:

Andrew Ng wrote:

In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack.

Many of the hypothetical forms of harm, like AI "taking over", are based on highly questionable hypotheses about what technology that does not currently exist might do.

Every field should examine both future and current problems. But is there any other engineering discipline where this much attention is on hypothetical problems rather than actual problems?

EY replied:

I think when the near-term harm is massive numbers of young men and women dropping out of the human dating market, and the mid-term harm is the utter extermination of humanity, it makes sense to focus on policies motivated by preventing mid-term harm, if there's even a trade-off.

 

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

 

original is here, but you aren't missing any context, that's the twit.

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespear... but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse that that. When Shakespear wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate -- probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.

edited to add this seems to be an excerpt from the fawning book the big short/moneyball guy wrote about him that was recently released.

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