bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Ignore the implication that the virus could rewire my guts into an LTE modem or brainwash me into reading and typing out entire bitcoin transaction blocks for a moment. Yud considers the ability to freely mutate humans to an arbitrary extent and the supervillain plan he comes up with is a fucking cryptocoin miner?

How does someone this creatively bankrupt produce 660 thousand words of a fanfic?

Not to dehumanize but are we sure Yudkowski isn't an LLM himself?

Riveting stuff, Eliezer. It takes a polymath genius of the highest caliber to write an apocalyptic sci-fi story full of personal drama that somehow manages to read like a software end user license agreement.

Small detail: biological viruses are not even remotely similar to computer “viruses”.

that's where the LLM comes in! oh my god check your reading comprehension

U-huh, and an LLM trained on video game source code and clothing patterns can invent real life Gauntlets of Dexterity.

Why exactly is he so convinced LLMs are indistinguishable from magic? In the reality where I live, LLMs can sometimes produce a correct function on their own and are not capable of reliably transpiling code even for well specified and understood systems, let alone doing comic book mad scientist ass arbitrary code execution on viral DNA. Honestly, they're hardly capable of doing anything reliably.

Along with the AI compiler story he inflicted on Xitter recently, I think he's simply confused LLM and LLVM.

Shoulda guessed from the name "British Indian Ocean" it's a region mired in the most heinous imperialist bullshit.

I wish the colonists a very nice time and I hope very comical things happen to them from the point of view of the Chagossians.

What science contradicts internal moral guidance?

Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise.

chad "Yes." meme face

Those curricula are correct.

IIRC Tuvalu got something like a $1 billion as a one-time payment for .tv and I figure .io has been fairly lucrative for British Indian Ocean.

I have mixed feelings about small island nations selling their DNS identity out like this but I guess milking tech dweebs for all they're worth is in a certain sense cool and good actually.

Oh fuck I should not have read further, there's a bit about the compiler mistaking color space stuff for racism that's about as insightful and funny as you can expect from Yud.

TA: You're asking the AI for the reason it decided to do something. That requires the AI to introspect on its own mental state. If we try that the naive way, the inferred function input will just say, 'As a compiler, I have no thoughts or feelings' for 900 words.

I wonder if he had the tiniest of a pause when including that line in this 3062 word logorrhea. Dude makes ClangPT++ diagnostics sound terse.

The Technical Interview series is my favourite bit of programming fiction ever.

Oh man, Lists and Lists is fun. I was kinda bummed it was over so soon. Perfect for people who enjoy reading SICP or Little Schemer.

I'll have to try the rest now.

Edit: Most or all of these seem to be written in Inform (specifically Inform 6), a rather curious DSL intended specifically for text adventure games. Here is a fun writeup about misusing its successor language Inform 7 for something it wasn't really intended for.

The real basilisk actually subscribes to Kantian ethics and will send you to VMware hell for lying regardless of why you did it.

[0h01m15s] He talks about the 2008 Great Recession and frames it in terms of greedy banks offloading risky mortgages. But he fails to mention that the government entities FMAC and FMAE insured those subprime mortgages in order to encourage home ownership, which is what enabled this risk-taking in the first place. If the banks had their own money at risk rather than the government's money, they wouldn't have done it.

Oh no, in his quick rundown of the way the banks were gambling irresponsibly, correctly assuming the government to bail them out in case of disaster he neglected to mention this specific instance of the banks gambling irresponsibly, correctly assuming the government to bail them out in case of disaster.

[0h02m15s] > the biggest returns on a bond come from when it first hits the market, a new bond that creates new securities sales is worth more than an old bond that is slowly appreciating, but not seeing much trade.

What? I'm pretty sure that's not how the bond market works. Bonds are priced fairly. Bonds being traded are sold at neither a premium nor discount to their fair market value. Also, the trading value of bonds doesn't appreciate or depreciate unless the interest rate changes.

Ignoring the type of bond being talked about and how their speculative value depends on the value of the mortgages in relation to the interest rates.

[0h14m15s] > How it works in Bitcoin, simply put, is that when a block of transactions are ready to be recorded to the ledger all of the mining nodes in the network compete with one another to solve a cryptographic math problem that’s based on the data inside the block. Effectively they’re competing to figure out the equation that yields a specific result

Wording nitpick, but they the equation is easily known, but the values to solve that equation are what are hard to find.

Deep cutting criticism right there.

[0h14m42s] > Once the math problem has been solved the rest of the validation network can easily double-check the work, since the contents of the block can be fed into the proposed solution and it either spits out the valid answer or fails. If the equation works and the consensus of validators signs off on it the block is added to the bottom of the ledger and the miner who solved the problem first is rewarded with newly generated Bitcoin.

Another wording nitpick. The verifier doesn't spit out the valid answer; it takes a proposed answer and spits out "valid" or "invalid". Secondly, the notion of the block being added to the bottom of the ledger glosses over the critical detail that every validator does so. Any validator can choose to reject the block, but it is not in their interest to do so because they would be going against consensus.

By this point I think the guy forgot he wanted to show Dan wrong and instead started to well actually just for the sake of being technically right.

[0h17m57s] > Because electrical consumption, electrical waste, is the value that underpins Bitcoin. Miners spend X dollars in electricity to mine a Bitcoin, they expect to be able to sell that coin for at least X plus profit.

Wrong again, this alludes to the labor theory of value. It's the other way around: Because people are willing to put a value on Bitcoin for their transaction utility, miners are willing to spend electricity to prop up the system.

And why exactly do the miners want to prop up the system? Also not exactly LTV since it's missing the "labor" part of the theory, which is less of a nitpick than half the points so far.

[0h30m58s] > It’s an ecosystem that absolutely demolishes consumer protections and makes the re-implementation of them extremely difficult.

He presumes that consumer protection is the only worthy goal. What about merchant protection? Search on Google for horror stories of eBay merchants getting scammed on PayPal by customers who lie about not receiving the product. Look at Louis Rossmann's rants about payment processors forcing merchants to eat the transaction fee even if a dispute is resolved in favor of the merchant.

Oh, you think cryptocurrency sucks? Have you considered how the existing banking infrastructure sometimes fucks over the petty bourgeoisie in ways that blockchains also don't solve?

[1h52m06s] > A deflationary economy punishes buying things, as anything that you buy today will inevitably be cheaper to buy in the future.

This is factually true, and I'm pointing to the whole context without quoting several paragraphs. He shows the standard government economics bias that deflation is bad and inflation is good. Yet, he ignores the evidence.

For example, the tech industry is massively deflationary. If you have $1000 today, you can buy a better laptop/iPhone/GPU next year if held onto this money for a bit longer. Yet, people still buy electronics. What gives? Well, there is a certain benefit to consuming in the present. It doesn't matter if you get x% more in the future, because someday you'll be dead. The point of saving money is to spend it someday, preferably before you're dead, unless you are generous about giving it to your kids.

This is so damn close to an actual profound point. Only the thinnest, sheerest foil of impenetrable pure ideology between these sentences and an actual meaningful criticism of the systems that centralize the power to the creeps. Yes, indeed, why would you waste your limited lifetime and energy as an unholy paladin of Mammon instead of enjoying what you have, maybe buying something nice and enjoying your life while you still have it.

Look, I'll just spell this out for you.

The size of the model is not in the least bit the point of contention here. Whether this is the largest language model ever created or a tiny and unimpressive one is not why the article was written or linked here.

The reason the article has an indignant tone as do we is that a company is proudly flaunting that they're not even trying to deal with the harmful potential of the ethically dubious or straight up awful shit their supposedly informational product can produce.

They also have a worryingly excited audience praising them for releasing a model whose main selling point is not even its technical sophistication (as you are keen to point out) but the fact it can be used to answer questions like how to kill one's spouse or why ethnic cleansing is good.

This highlights an inherent issue in trying to create ostensibly informative tools based on input data scraped indiscriminately from all over the internet. Misral's simply doesn't even pretend to paper over it while the rest go

The instruction "Do not act like Slobodan Milošević" in my AI's initial prompt has people asking a lot of questions answered by my AI's initial prompt.

Unrelated, I would call the opposite of a promptfan a "prompt critical" but unfortunately it reminds me of TERFs.

It makes for a funny yuri manga premise.

How about this row?

• owned by a huge corporation
• what if everything was finance (maybe a stretch?)
• ads!
• doesn't actually work they have legs now
• everything is a subscription

Trading stocks has been very successfully done by computers for ages now, yet somehow investment bankers still exist.

I'm not holding my breath for the capitalist class to automate themselves away.

My brother in Dawkins, you literally are biology.

Watch me bring them something unnecessarily overcomplicated that boosts their ego to win all of the money.

A micropayment platform designed to integrate with long form textual content. The subscribers will be able to vote with their wallets on the topic they wish the CONTENT_CREATOR to cover.

But there's a game theoretic twist. The final price of each vote will be discounted based on the share of votes it received, so if you vote for the winning option, your votes will end up costing less. This encourages strategic voting based on what would be the most interesting topic to the largest share of subscribers, incentivizing subscribers to maximize for total utility instead of just their own interests.

Additionally, below a certain threshold of share the votes will be free of charge. This is to encourage heterodox views and foster engagement with unconventional interests that would otherwise be risky to vote for.

The cutoff for the free Complimentary Contrarian's Votes will be determined by a prediction market running in parallel with the vote.

The winning votes will become investments into the post, binding the CONTENT_EXCRECATOR to CREATE_THE_CONTENT and based on some configurable metric (post score, ad revenue etc.) the investment will accrue dividends, which the subscriber can cash out to a charitable organization. However, this can only be done once per publication per subscriber, meaning the subscriber should wait for the investment to accumulate before cashing in. A global high score will show the subscribers who have cashed in the largest amount in donations and their voting power will be increased in proportion to their score.

I want 15% equity and a public live stream session of the AI box game with Yud where I roleplay as the shittalking French knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

At least the people on Shark Tank sometimes bring in cool or entertaining prototypes. Your version would be just slide decks of fintech, vaporware and things that already exist but with a subscription model slapped on.