YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Not an EA franchise, but in retrospect it was probably a bad sign that Assassin's Creed started going deep on "maybe the Templar shadow government that rules everyone in secret is actually not that bad?" or "no, actually some of the ancient aliens who enslaved all humanity were good and it was just the one cartoon villain that was bad."

Like, I think there's some thematic depth to looking at how in order to combat the evil shadow cult government the Assassins "had to" become a "good" shadow cult government, but as the man once said you do not, in fact, have to give it to them.

It is a city that looked at Gritty with deep skepticism until they realized how much everyone else hated him, at which point he was elected mayor for life I think? Iconic.

Others were alarmed and advocated internally against scaling large language models. But these were not AGI safety researchers, but critical AI researchers, like Dr. Timnit Gebru.

Here we see rationalists approaching dangerously close to self-awareness and recognizing their whole concept of "AI safety" as marketing copy.

I don't think it's a resource exhaustion attack as much as a combination of legitimate paranoia (the consequence of a worldview where only billionaires are capable of actual agency) and attempt to impose that on reality by reverse-astroturfing any opposition by tying it to other billionaire AI bros.

The blatant covering for the confabulated zip code is some peak boosterism. It knows what an address looks like and that some kind of postal code has to go there, and while it was pretty close I would still expect that to get returned to sender. Pretty close isn't good enough.

Once again proving that Naruto is somehow the core of the modern psyche. I don't believe it.

For context this is similar to the rate for evangelicals. About 50% of Republicans think Israel is either on the right track or should go farther, compared to 25% of Democrats.

I don't think anyone here would be the sort to do that. I think we have at least an implicit kind of "prime directive" against engaging at all and also our mods have done what feels like a good job keeping us free of rabid Nazis and their sympathizers. Like, I'm not going to claim it's impossible and I fully believe that someone somewhere sent him some truly vile shit as a result of this whole affair, but I would be legitimately shocked if it was any of our regulars.

I don't know how much this actually adds. Scott is still actively refusing to differentiate between people on the internet being mean to him and US-backed Israeli military forces murdering civilians through starvation. Indifference to the latter is justified through the former.

Also for all that he and others talk about "Israel’s current war of survival against the Iranian-led terror axis" it shouldn't be understated just how badly Iran was mauled in the recent bombing, to say nothing of the decapitation of Hezbollah. Israel and their US allies have demonstrated time and again that even where these groups that seek their elimination exist the notion of them actually having the ability to do so is absolutely absurd.

I can't help but feel like no matter how well-intentioned the actual recommendations (i.e. listen to your people when they tell you the AI is shit) this headline is going to be used to justify canning anyone who isn't sufficiently on board with wherever the C-suite wants to go. Even the generous (read: accurate) example of the historical luddites could be used to tar people as saboteurs and enemies of progress, which would give a callous executive license to do the things they want to do anyways to try and increase profits.

This bubble can't pop soon enough, before anyone is truly reliant on the base LLMs operated directly by OpenAI and other bottomless money pits.

The DEWR “continues to investigate these claims and has sought urgent advice from Deloitte on these matters”.

Pain. I am experiencing pain. Physical, mental, and spiritual pain. Oof. Ow. My soul.

This is a very good story to boost because it's one of the most straightforward replacements for a human worker. Like, there's no fig leaf of "creating tools to enable software developers to-" on it. That means that it's failures directly undercut the story of how these systems become at all profitable, which is the kind of thing that's going to actually hurt the bubble.

For all that user error can be a real thing it also gets used as a thought-terminating cliche by engineer types. This is a tendency that industry absolutely exploits to justify not only AI grifts but badly designed products.

There's a shocking level of scope insensitivity on display. Like, on one hand I think there's something healthy in recognizing that some people are going to be assholes to you for their own reasons and that you can't "fix" them. Like, I'm perfectly happy to live and let live with some of the people in my family or former friends for a variety of personal reasons, and like Scott here I found that my mental health and life outcomes improved significantly when I decided to accept this.

But I don't even know how to explain that there's a difference between saying "I don't talk to people from high school anymore" and "we should depopulate and resettle an urban area the size of Detroit." Like, this is fundamentally not something that should need to be explained.

Apparently I'm a fighting-type because I was not prepared for all this psychic damage.

Also, I'm not sure what the fucking takeaway here is supposed to be. Like... Getting over your own unhealthy fixations about relationships and sexuality is important for actually improving your relationships with people who might want to have sex with you.

...yet.

What the actual fuck?

I guess we know at least part of where the "nobody can say" ambiguity came from in Eliezer's reality tunnel.

Like, even if you somehow accept that his wildly offensive framing is somehow actually analogous to the Palestinian genocide, it is at best "not intuitive" that throwing even more corpses on the fucking pile is going to somehow be the right thing to do. I thought these people were hard "shut up and multiply" utilitarians

I mean, it's a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don't-ask-about-the-racism vibes I'm not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don't know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.

So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I'm going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual "imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least" school of design. They've confirmed that they're not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that's all good. That's not what I want to talk about.

No, what's grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative "antiwoke" backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn't a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can't think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.

Thanks for the clarification. I had definitely assumed that he meant some kind of God-AI-level attack that revolved around live editing the data or state in RAM or something.