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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It's not that weird when you understand the sharks he swims with. Race pseudoscientists routinely peddle the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than any other ethnic or racial group. Scoot Alexander and Big Yud have made this claim numerous times. Lasker pretending to be a Jew makes more sense once you realize this.

  • Oof, that Hollywood guest (Brian Koppelman) is a dunderhead. "These AI layoffs actually make sense because of complexity theory". "You gotta take Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously. He predicted everything perfectly."

    I looked up his background, and it turns out he's the guy behind the TV show "Billions". That immediately made him make sense to me. The show attempts to lionize billionaires and is ultimately undermined not just by its offensive premise but by the world's most block-headed and cringe-inducing dialog.

    Terrible choice of guest, Ed.

  • Sex pest billionaire Travis Kalanick says AI is great for more than just vibe coding. It's also great for vibe physics.

  • When you look at METR's web site and review the credentials of its staff, you find that almost none of them has any sort of academic research background. No doctorates as far as I can tell, and lots of rationalist junk affiliations.

  • I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.

  • HN commenters are slobbering all over the new Grok. Virtually every commenter bringing up Grok's recent full-tilt Nazism gets flagged into oblivion.

  • Not gonna lie, it's fun reading those reddit posts from vibe coders, squealing like stuck pigs because their heavily subsidized code extruder stopped working.

  • What I don't understand is how these people didn't think they would be caught, with potentially career-ending consequences? What is the series of steps that leads someone to do this, and how stupid do you need to be?

  • What makes this worse than the financial crisis of 2008 is that you can't live in a GPU once the crash happens.

  • Apparently the NYT hit-piece's author, Benjamin Ryan, is a subscriber to Jordan Lasker's (Cremieux's) substack.

  • I call bullshit on Daniel K. That backtracking is so obviously ex-post-facto cover-your-ass woopsie-doopsie. Expect more of it as we get closer to whatever new "median" he has suddenly claimed. It's going to be fun to watch.

  • I have no doubt that a chatbot would be just as effective at doing Liuson's job, if not moreso. Not because chatbots are good, but because Liuson is so bad at her job.

  • That thread is wild. Nate proposes techniques to get his kooky beliefs taken more seriously. Others point out that those very same techniques counterproductively pushed people to into the e/acc camp. Nate deletes those other people's comments. How rationalist of him!

  • People are often overly confident about their imperviousness to mental illness. In fact I think that --given the right cues -- we're all more vulnerable to mental illness than we'd like to think.

    Baldur Bjarnason wrote about this recently. He talked about how chatbots are incentivizing and encouraging a sort of "self-experimentation" that exposes us to psychological risks we aren't even aware of. Risks that no amount of willpower or intelligence will help you avoid. In fact, the more intelligent you are, the more likely you may be to fall into the traps laid in front of you, because your intelligence helps you rationalize your experiences.

  • SneerClub @awful.systems

    Grimes pens new TREACLES anthem: "I wanna be software, upload my mind"