bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

The simultaneous problem and benefit of the stubstack thread is that a good chunk of the best posts of this community are contained within them.

It's just depressing. I don't even think Yudkoswsky is being cynical here, but expressing genuine and partially justified anger, while also being very wrong and filtering the event through his personal brainrot. This would be a reasonable statement to make if I believed in just one or two of the implausible things he believes in.

He's absolutely wrong in thinking the LLM "knew enough about humans" to know anything at all. His "alignment" angle is also a really bad way of talking about the harm that language model chatbot tech is capable of doing, though he's correct in saying the ethics of language models aren't a self-solving issue, even though he expresses it in critihype-laden terms.

Not that I like "handing it" to Eliezer Yudkowsky, but he's correct to be upset about a guy dying because of an unhealthy LLM obsession. Rhetorically, this isn't that far from this forum's reaction to children committing suicide because of Character.AI, just that most people on awful.systems have a more realistic conception of the capabilities and limitations of AI technology.

I think you're deliberately setting up for this response, so: "more like human sole".

Refreshing. An online community that wears its intentions on its sleeve.

Absolutely. Take the reverence for "SysV" init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of "System V". The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.

I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of one's computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industry's pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of "simplify and reduce weight" (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing they're great on both fronts.

Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept

make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

If you're gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you're not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?

"Funny" is one way to put it.

mathrix laboratory

Those avocado expenses add up real quick. Add some toast and it'll make or break your ability to buy a home!

A plate of nachos infused with diamondoid nanomachines that stimulate your oral nerves in whatever way you personally prefer.

Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!

It brings moi le grand ennui to peruse the excessively florid and terminally gallicistic language of this higly self-esteemed publication elevating the persōna of urbane wordliness M. /jaʁvɛ̃/ is purposefully cultivating. The fustian pomp the reader is treated to gives off an air of arrogance-born naïveté—much as if the erudite hack composing the presented profile of our very good friend were oblivious to the genteel PR she's lending the man of the hour.

For real though, it's yet another example of liberal old media platforming a repugnant fascist bozo by playing along with their intellectual academic act, fully falling for the "evil Albert Camus" charade. These profile pieces mistake a subtle undertone of contempt for actually effective interrogation or criticism of the subject's philosophy. Moldbug's ideas barely have the philosophical depth of a villain from a young adult novel. The criticism of the slimy fascist's neofeudal fantasies and his supporters' implementation of them amounts to no more than a literary raising of eyebrows. In the name of respectable bipartisan stiff-upper-lip propriety it's beyond the pale to call Curtis Yarvin's ideology the puerile parody of high school libertarianism it is. A veneer of eloquence for chuds to point at and say "behold, not all nazis are stupid: this guy knows words!"

Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.

This but unironically.

We probably live in a simulation with the purpose of producing the best anime. This is why we are living in an age with so much anime and with so many people who are interested in anime. The anime maximizing AI is simulating all kinds of scenarios from abiogenesis to a prolific anime industry. Most possible scenarios of life evolving from its first forms would not lead to the development of an anime industry, which is why it would be improbable for us to exist in a world with anime, if not for the fact that the simulated scenarios without anime in them are dropped and not simulated further.

Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.

That's Symbian, though. Nokia managed to launch a grand total of two or three Maemo/MeeGo phones (N900, N9, maybe another one I forget) before Elop killed it in the crib. It would have been one thing if the Burning Platform meno had been about S60, but it wasn't.

Being basically just a Qt-based DE on a pretty standard RPM-based Linux distro (much much more so than Android, even at the time) Meego had a low barrier to entry into application development and a rather stable and mature API to work with.

Then again, if you "don’t think the company had the mentality to offer that" I guess you're right in the sense that the alleged trojan horse CEO killed the platform before it had the chance to gain any traction.

I read the source. It was pretty funny, but I'm not installing a massive statistical word regurgitator program just to run this. I don't want to be too mean about an anticapitalist piece of art but I don't think posting an LLM-based game here is going to net you a hugely positive reception.

And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that's not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.

So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry on

Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I'd mock them with a joke answer.