It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:

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    Retrofuturistic Looking Ghost: SCROOOOOGE! I am the ghost of christmas extreme future! Why! Why did you not find a way to indicate to humans 400 generation from now where toxic waste was storrrrrrrred! Look how Tiny Tim’s cyborg descendant has to make costrly RNA repaaaaaaairs!

    Byline: The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better.

    bonus

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    Scrooge: I tried, but no, no, I just don’t give a shit.




  • who is this guy anyway, is he in openai/similar inner circle or is that just some random rationalist fanboy?

    His grounds for notability are that he’s a dev who back in the day made a useful thing that went on to become incredibly widely used. Like if he’d named redis salvatoredis instead he might have been a household name among swengs.

    Also burning only a billion more would be a steal given some of the numbers thrown around.





  • Also, Yud’s kink is literally rape1, isn’t it? Role playing non-consensual situations is fine and all, but this is a subculture where reporting sexual harassment is considered a possible infohazard2, and surely the utilitarian calculus in on the side of letting rationalists who do important work on existential risks have a go at you, imagine how many multiplujillion far future virtual entities of minimum moral status that might save.

    Fuck a cult.

    1. He’s openly declared himself a sexual sadist and writes stuff like this, and also math pets.

    2. Occupational Infohazards

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    In this case, in Ziz’s previous interactions with central community leaders, these leaders encouraged Ziz to seriously consider that, for various reasons including Ziz’s willingness to reveal information (in particular about the statutory rapes alleged by miricult.com in possible worlds where they actually happened), she is likely to be “net negative” as a person impacting the future. An implication is that, if she does not seriously consider whether certain ideas that might have negative effects if spread (including reputational effects) are “infohazards”, Ziz is irresponsibly endangering the entire future, which contains truly gigantic numbers of potential people.






  • Could be an SSC type situation: you write an interminable pretend research post in a superficially serious manner on an obviously flawed premise and let the algorithm help it find its audience of mostly people who won’t read it but will be left with the impression that the premise is at least defensible.

    This will be made considerably easier once siskind puts it in his regular link roundup with a cheeky comment about how he doesn’t really truly endorse this sort of thing.






  • Huggingface cofounder pushes against LLM hype, really softly. Not especially worth reading except to wonder if high profile skepticism pieces indicate a vibe shift that can’t come soon enough. On the plus side it’s kind of short.

    The gist is that you can’t go from a text synthesizer to superintelligence, framed as how a straight-A student that’s really good at learning the curriculum at the teacher’s direction can’t really be extrapolated to an Einstein type think-outside-the-box genius.

    The world ‘hallucination’ never appears once in the text.



  • Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow’s enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.

    Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I’ve had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.

    Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I’ve been managing to read them all the way through.