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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024
  • In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”

    And yet reading that should give us at least some pause

    The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.

  • "Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth."
  • I worked at one of the biggest AI companies and their internal AI question/answer was dogshit for anything that could be answered by someone with a single fold in their brain. Maybe your co has a much better one, but like most others, I'm gonna go with the smooth brain hypothesis here.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • He shares a lot of speaking patterns with obvious cranks. I've spent some time listening to people who think they've figured out quantum gravity and the way they make little digressions sounds exactly like Yarvin does in this video. It's not rigorous, but if I didn't know who Yarvin was before watching this video I'm pretty sure I would have thought "crank" and quickly clicked away.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it's a pretty decent source of sneers. This month's contains: "The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin". In classic Moldbug fashion, it's Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I'll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

    26:23 --

    Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that's simple and easy to use that's not a small amount of of work

    Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

    30:17 -- a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You're the cream of the crop.

    ~2:00:00 -- here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as "oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy" and responding by saying "nuh uh, urbit is decentralized." Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

  • The Honduran charter city is going exactly as well as you expected
    theintercept.com Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court

    After the Honduran president repealed a law granting unfettered authority to outside investors, the crypto groups took the dispute to World Bank arbitration court.

    Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court

    https://archive.ph/RSQ9T

    TL;DR: new regime in honduras is hostile to our dearest libertarian crypto bros, asserts sovereignty and tells them where to stick it.

    > A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation.

    Background:

    > A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

    [ image of cryptobros making the face Wil E Coyote makes after running off a cliff ]

    > The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

    > [Castro] has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul.

    > Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh.

    Predictably, the international community is going "LOL"

    You may be asking, who's winning in all of this?

    > In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up.

    21
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SI
    sinedpick @awful.systems
    Posts 1
    Comments 174