Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

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

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)

To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific 'fixes' to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is 'major' and 'used by many' to the explicit '{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guys' tone of the post, it's just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.

Here they are explaining their process

It's code reading and copy pasta.

Surely an April Fools' thing?

Still, if it's just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers' recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don't DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don't start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to 'explain yourself' to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

Guy who was previously featured here for championing the merits of dropping the n-word when meeting new (white) people in order to judge them worthy had an extensive twitter rant about how scott alexander may be an actual prophet, while quote-twitting another similarly afflicted person.

If you bother, which I barely did, this is what you're in for:

Trace says Scott has given up his will to power. but it's not a giveaway, it's a trade: if you don't seek power you retain the ability to seek unpolluted truth. here's this tradeoff explained by Curtis Yarvin, another reluctant prophet, whom Scott has definitely read:

Model City Mondays is thing in siskind's substack, and Prospera is featured constantly.

It's seasteading that's the strictly libertarian thing where you fuck off to the ends of the earth to do drugs and marry twelve-year-olds. Despite the considerable overlap charter cities seem more of a rat/stembrained thing were you decide you're going to be the one to do a polis from first principles but get it right this time.

conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics [...] overcivilized and effete Teutons

Kind of off topic, but this piece of wall to wall insanity reminded me how Steven Pinker tried to explain away southern US crime rates that didn't fit with his Violence Is Declining And In Fact Everything's Improving Inexorably (As Long As You Don't Rock The Boat) thesis by randomly blaming irish-catholic sheepherder genealogy.

given the traffic patterns of our threads

Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.

On a lighter note:

[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.

But then you'll never find out what like a jellyfish surfacing at sea is in reference to.

The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

The writer says there's some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.

She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it's just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.

Still, it doesn't mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it's possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.

And then there's also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he's now looking at options for enlarging his wife's vaginal canal and entrance as she's been having a rough time of it, and who I'm sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.

An interesting read in general but the writers proclaiming themselves ethical hackers in the opening paragraph only to turn into wittle birthday boys as soon as it turned out their uh experiment caused major disruptions was mildly off putting.

stonetoss

What a botched circumcision does to a mf

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

Now I really wonder how much EA donation money went into making this.

Mom: We have Eyes Wide Shut style orgies at home

Eyes Wide Shut orgies at home:

Imo because the whole topic of superforecasters and prediction markets is both undercriticized and kaleidoskopically preposterous in a way that makes it feel like you shouldn't broach the topic unless you are prepared to commit to some diatribe length posting.

Which somebody should, it's a shame there is yet no one single place you can point to and say "here's why this thing is weird and grifty and pretend science while striclty promoted by the scientology of AI, and also there's crypto involved".

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.

In yet another part of the article:

She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.

I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.