YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

Shout out to the 4-handed man in the background holding either a camera or a cat.

Investors as a general class are usually pretty terrible at staying in their lane and not listening when actual subject matter experts disagree with the guy with a good story. I think the only reason they have any reputation otherwise (compared to e.g. physicists' disease) is survivorship bias.

One of these days we'll get the quantum bogosort working.

They definitely use actual numbers to try and push their agenda. It's a classic case of constructing a category. Like how we're the highest paying company in the industry of high technology, textile workers, teenagers, and dead people. Look at how much good EA-backed interventions like malaria nets are doing! Clearly this means EA-backed programs to make sure Sam Altman develops a computer god before his evil twin Alt Sam-man is also such a good use of resources that you're basically a murderer if you don't give.

Lemme just grab my programming screwdriver.

Skipping ahead a bit:

On the twelfth day of Christmas the techbros gave to me:

• 12 data centers
• 11 metaverses
• 10 whiny nazis
• 9 strictly worse trains
• 8 hallucinations
• 7 AI racists
• 6 busted unions
• 5 EN EFF TEEEEES
• 4 cyber cults
• 3 sex pests
• 2 crypto scams

And a bunch of bullshit backed by VCs.

This has been one of the best things I've read all year and I'm only as far as section 2.

It really is the same kind of issue faced by the original luddites around factory automation. There the intelligence being artificially replaced was that of experienced weavers, spinners, and other assorted craftspeople instead of programmers, insurance adjusters, clerical staff, and other assorted white-collar professionals but in a social and political sense AI is just a rebranding of automation for the modern economy, and one that more effectively obscures the actual human labor being supplanted. That's a particular bonus for the current bubble because in being vague about what specific labor can be automated they can avoid the kinds of comparisons that make it incredibly obvious that the AI systems aren't actually up to the task. The shift from cottage industry to factories massively increased the sheer volume of goods that could be created, transported, and utilized. (And set the stage for two world wars and the modern age of consumerism which sounds really bad so let me be clear: I like my shiny toys.) The current shift from humans making things to generative AI is trying to replicate that but because of the nature of goods and services we're now talking about it's pretty clear that there simply isn't a comparison. A bolt of cloth is a bolt of cloth, but a book-length statistical prediction just isn't useful or valuable in the same way that an actual book is.

One fascinating aspect of the Trump and Musk stories is that the capitalists are less sociopathically driven by money than previously assumed and this is actually much worse!

I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn't that they aren't effective enough at choosing causes; they're supporting exactly what they want to, whether it's saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.

I'm pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they're owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren't part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 billion wouldn't be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don't think there's any way that this doesn't put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones's allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

Edit to fix some numbers. What's $1,498.5 billion between friends?

I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days. But I agree that this doesn't seem like the kind of performance they're talking about wouldn't somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.

Wait does "uwu" have a specific referent? I assumed it was just a vibe like dark academia or *-core or Tumblr.

It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature don't show any call outs of obvious BS, though I don't have any real academic science experience, much less in the specific field of quantum computing.

Then again, this may not be too far beyond the predicted boundaries of what quantum computers are capable of and while the assumption that computation is happening in alternate dimensions seems like it would require quantum physicists to agree on a lot more about interpretation than they currently do the actual performance is probably triggering some false positives in my BS detector.

I swear, kids today have no respect for the dedication and craft that go into a proper disinformation campaign. Back in my day half this metadata wasn't nearly as easy to access without viewing page source and we still put in the effort to try and confuse the four guys who knew where to look.

We will say absolutely nothing about what kind of changes we mean, and the reporting of these comments won't even speculate, much less ask. But you should definitely buy our stock now in anticipation.

What does Jerry at Android Trends think Pichai's job is if not making number go up? Trying to act like there's any substance here is laughable.

Alternate punchline: not nearly as much as he would have a few years ago, but still significantly more than is healthy for anyone. You'll still get stalker vibes but he won't care enough to remember your birthday.

It turns out if you can just make the machine know what the truth is and say that you don't get hallucinations. Unfortunately the truth isn't emergent from pure language models and expressing Truth through language alone has been something challenging the human race since Krog try to teach Torg how make stick but pointy.

Welcome! The situation these people find themselves in is dire, since they're both literally and emotionally as far as possible from the people making decisions about their labor. The modern economy doesn't function without exploitation, and generative AI is the latest innovation in expanding that exploitation and pushing it farther away from the people who benefit and who make the decisions that require it. It does to modern knowledge workers what automation and outsourcing did to manufacturing, and the distance is sufficient that I don't expect to see even the kind of lukewarm pushback that sweatshops got in the 90s actually manifest for them.

Fuckers like Thiel make me want to start stuffing guys who take too much interest in speculative fiction into lockers again, just to be safe. And I was that kid, right down to the STEM focus and disrespect for the liberal arts.