David Gerard @ dgerard @awful.systems

the guy who got Elon and Grimes to hook up, destroying Twitter and proceedi

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Wired: The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians (archive)

Evan Ratliff has apparently been tracking the Ziz cult since 2022 and when it blew up into mainstream news, he was ready

crayon either way

Has the study itself shown up?

EDIT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13295

that gives me questions about China

that's tomorrow's Pivot

Chris Kluwe vs Gamergate is an example of the jocks as the good guys up against the nerds as the bad guys

IQ is a farce multiplier. Elon is a High IQ Individual which means he wreaks 1000x the havoc of a regular dumbass. IQ stands for Idiot Quickly

BBC summary of the story of Ziz

the user has been gently directed to the debate club

the Laserjet 4M from the 1990s, the incredible unstoppable tank of lasers

Superbabies is a backup plan; focus the energy of humanity’s collective genetic endowment into a single generation, and have THAT generation to solve problems like “figure out how to control digital superintelligence

The academic institutions in charge of exploring these ideas are deeply compromised by insane ideologies. And the big commercial entities are too timid to do anything truly novel; once they discovered they had a technology that could potentially make a few tens of billions treating single gene genetic disorders, no one wanted to take any risks; better to take the easy, guaranteed money and spend your life on a lucrative endeavor improving the lives of 0.5% of the population than go for a hail mary project that will result in journalists writing lots of articles calling you a eugenicist.

oh no, not a eugenicist!

apparently video is just huuuuge

this is also why pivot to AI is mostly 200-250 words, not 1200 or 2000 or 8000

per link, venture capital has been very reluctant to unambiguously realise the losses. a $1b book value is an (imaginary) asset you can hug and hold, a $114m loss is not.

just started a Ziz thread over on the Reddit sneerclub too

there were counterarguments that the authors anthropomorphised the LLMs inappropriately - which is a valid objection - and therefore these tests shouldn't have been run at all. The answer to that is that the companies are marketing this shit by anthropomorphising the hell out of it and literally claiming these spicy autocompletes are on the path to artificial super intelligence. So of course cognitive tests are gonna be appropriate.

see also: Yudowsky has never consumed fiction targeted above middle school

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@lritter/114001505488538547

master: welcome to my Smart Home

student: wow. how is the light controlled?

master: with this on-off switch

student: i don't see a motor to close the blinds

master: there is none

student: where is the server located?

master: it is not needed

student: excuse me but what is "Smart" about all of this?

master: everything.

in this moment, the student was enlightened

Vice signalling. https://awful.systems/post/3520479

it's getting a bit thin! Here's the Press Gazette page, which they keep up to date, of media outlets that have done AI deals, whether they're adding slop to their output or just taking bribes from OpenAI:

https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/news-publisher-ai-deals-lawsuits-openai-google/