I appreciate that he specifies that the dumpster fire is, in fact, metaphorical.

He should’ve stuck with it

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.

For real. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the broad-strokes idea of “if you’re comfortable, it’s good to take on challenges and get outside of your comfort zone because that’s how you grow as a person,” but why can’t he just apply this energy to writing a terrible novel or learning to paint watercolors or something, like a normal person? Why does the fact his life is comfortable mean he has to become a Nazi? :/

it made so few changes to the source material it’s plagiarizing that a bunch of folks were able to find the original video clips

Wait, for real? I missed this, do you have a source? I want to hear more about this lol

Hey guys, great feature!

At least it can do this though:

deleted by creator

yeah, I definitely think machine learning has obvious use cases to benefit the common good (youtube auto captions being Actually Pretty Decent Now is one that comes to mind easily) but I’m much less certain about most of the stuff being presently marketed as “AI”

Exchange presented without comment:

My prediction: the advance of tech by AI will far surpasse what it consume in energy.

To look at the energy consumption of current model is extremely short sighted. If AI create a new material, a new solar cell, advance fusion reactor is all of humanity that jump forward.

Furthermore new generation of AI accelerators and new algorithms will improve efficiency by order of magnitute, it’s still early days.

For every good thing, come up with a bad.

The material created will be a better poison/virus. The algorithm to keep the fusion tokamak from going boom will be at best 99% correct. The new solar cell? More exotic materials required than the current.

Blind optimism is a vice we cannot afford.

The post you’re responding to doesn’t argue from blind optimism, it argued a reasonably-expected gain in net beneficial effects.

When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder “what pace, exactly?” Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say “well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field” at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.

Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn’t really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago – I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it’s been almost a year since “will smith eating spaghetti,” so…

I’m confused how this is even supposed to demonstrating “metacognition” or whatever? It’s not discussing its own thought process or demonstrating awareness of its own internal state, it just said “this sentence might have been added to see if I was paying attention.” Am I missing something here? Is it just that it said “I… paying attention”?

This is a thing humans already do sometimes in real life and discuss – when I was in middle school, I’d sometimes put the word “banana” randomly into the middle of my essays to see if the teacher noticed – so pardon me if I assume the LLM is doing this by the same means it does literally everything else, i.e. mimicking a human phrasing about a situation that occurred, rather than suddenly developing radical new capabilities that it has never demonstrated before even in situations where those would be useful.

I’m so sorry to inform you…

(10,959 words… I don’t think I hate myself enough to read this one all the way through.)

Everything about Zack is sad.

I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he’s actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world – you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it’s this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that’s no way to live.

I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]

Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.”

It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

The problem is… well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn’t involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people’s arguments too??

I feel like it was all over from the moment they made it talk in first person. No one had any illusions that Inferkit or NovelAI were general intelligences, because it was obvious that they were just language models autocompleting a sentence you typed in.

Six fingers on the right hand

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one’s gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that’s for darn sure.

I’m just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for… some reason) I’m not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?

Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren’t really doing it over “speech taboos”, are they…)? Is he asking people “so how do you feel about the word ‘n…’?” Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.

Actually, I’m not sure how they deal with cis gays. I think it would depend on who you ask? I think this specific variant of the theory would consider cis gays a type of intersex as well, but not ‘as much as’ trans people. Not 100% sure though.

I knew all my abyss-gazing would pay off eventually…

I think this person is kind of playing semantic games and being a bit fast and loose with the definition of ‘intersex.’ The logic would be something like, if it turns out that a particular AMAB person has a female gender identity due to an issue with some physical process of sexual development (maybe their brain didn’t masculinize properly due to something like prenatal hormone exposure, or because they have a minor androgen insensitivity, or something?) then you could argue that their being trans is, in a sense, an intersex condition, just one that is mild enough not to affect their physical body.*

I think the implication being made here is “straight trans women are trans because of this kind of developmental brain thing, but non-straight trans women are trans because they’re men with a fetish. But Big Trans wants you to believe that all trans people are trans the first way (the “intersex” way), because that’s what ‘trans women are women’ means, and I’m the brave person who dares speak truth to power by saying they aren’t intersex.” So, it has… very little to do with the actual definition of “intersex” as we here in the real world use it.

I believe this idea became part of the insane Blanchard ad-hoc theory lore via J. Michael Bailey, who wrote that book where he was like “straight trans women are all naturally fem and hot, but non straight trans women are all ugly masculine weirdos who don’t pass.” I think people in the, uh, Blanchard fandom, kind of took that idea and ran with it to an insane degree and built a whole pile of assumptions on top of it which definitely do not hold up to scrutiny, even if you set aside the fact they’re based on some random dude’s anecdote about which trans women he found most fuckable.

*I don’t think I would personally defend this claim, but it is something I’ve heard argued, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily factually wrong so much as it is kind of a pointless semantic argument. But I’m pretty sure this is what the original poster means.