Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
At work, Iāve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but thatās why itās called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will saveā¦ (drumroll)ā¦ Approximately nothing!
But if we hadnāt done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
Thereās got to be some kind of licensing clarity that can be actually legislated. This is just straight-up price gouging through obscurantism.
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say Theyāre Underage
Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.
automated grooming is just what progress is and you have to accept it. like the printing press
AI finally allowing grooming at scale is the kind of thing Iād expect to be the setup for a joke about Silicon Valley libertarians, not something thatās actually happening.
Just needs a guy who goes āif we donāt build the automated grooming machine, somebody else willā.
I heard the Chinese have a grooming machine thatā¦ actually I donāt think I want to finish that joke.
Ah yes the (Content warning, Jordan B peterson, and NSFW) Jordan B Peterson china tweet. And yes, it was real, donāt detox from drugs people!
Hi, guys. My name is Roy. And for the most evil invention in the world contest, I invented a child molesting robot. It is a robot designed to molest children.
You see, itās powered by solar rechargeable fuel cells and it costs pennies to manufacture. It can theoretically molest twice as many children as a human molester in, quite frankly, half the time.
At least The Rockās child molesting robot didnāt require dedicated nuclear power plants
Iāve seen people defend these weird things as being ācoping mechanisms.ā What kind of coping mechanism tells you to commit suicide (in like, at least two different cases I can think of off the top of my head) and tries to groom you.
now seeing EAs being deeply concerned about RFK running health during a H5N1 outbreak
dust specks vs leopards
The way many of the popular rat blogs started to endorse Harris in the last second before the US election felt a lot like an attempt at plausible deniability.
Sure weāve been laying the groundwork for this for decade, but we wanted someone from our cult of personality to undermine democracy and replace it with explicit billionaire rule, not someone with his own cult of personality.
If H5N1 does turn into a full-blown outbreak, part of me expects itāll rack up a heavier deathtoll than COVID.
Anyone here read āWorld War Zā? Thereās a section there about how the health authorities in basically all countries supress and deny the incipient zombie outbreak. I think about that a lot nowadays.
Anyway the COVID response, while ultimately better than the worst case scenario (Spanish Flu 2.0) has made me really unconvinced we will do anything about climate change. We had a clear danger of death for millions of people, and the news was dominated by skeptics. Maybe if it had targetted kids instead of the very old it would have been different.
Itās not just systemic media head-up-the-assery, thereās also the whole thing about oil companies and petrostates bankrolling climate denialism since the 70s.
When I run into āClimate change is a conspiracyā I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go āYeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?ā and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.
OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)
Someone whoās actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:
My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwinās theory suggests.
A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.
This feels like quackery but I canāt find a goalā¦
But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced ā as explored in my recent book.
There it is.
Edit: oh God itās worse than I thought
The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase āinformation as the fifth state of matterā in the scope description.
Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as āWriter, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamerā. Another lists āHyperspace and machine elvesā. One very honestly simply says āN/Aā
The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, youāve already paid for the domain, guys.
OK this membe list experience is just šØāš³šš
- Psychonaut
- Practitioner of Yoga
- Quantum, Consciousness, Christian Theology, Creativity
Perfect. No notes.
I havenāt seen qualifications this relevant and high-quality since āarchitects and engineers for 9/11 truth.ā
the terrible tryfecta
Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.
Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, weāll get there
Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.
I had a flash of a vision of tomorrow, it is Nano crypto AI
You see, nano is real now and boring
But things being real doesnāt stop the cranks. See quantum.
Quantum superpredicting machines are not real, and thatās what theyāre about. Nano- has lots of uninteresting bs like ultraefficient fluorescent things, but nanomachines are not and that was interesting to them (until they got bored)
Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!
I love the word cloud on the side. What is 6G doing there
6G nanometer-wave, gently caressing your mitochondria thanks to the power of antiferromagnets and BORIS:
Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think itās a lock for 2025
Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.
lol
General sneer against the SH: I choose to dismiss it entirely for the same reason that I dismiss solipsism or brain-in-a-vat-ism: itās a non-starter. Either itās false and weāve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit weāre in, or itās true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The SH is catnip to āscientific typesā who donāt recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it canāt be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. Itās basically elementary!
Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.
If you think about it, a slice of pizza is basically a computer that simulates a slice of pizza down the quark level.
Youāre missing the most obvious implication, though. If itās all simulated or thereās a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means Iām smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).
But this quickly runs into the ādonāt create your own unbreakable crypto systemā problem. There are people out there who are a lot smarter who quickly can point out the holes in these simulation arguments. (The smartest of whom go ānah, that is dumbā sadly Iām not that enlightened, as I have argued a few times here before how this is all amateur theology, and has nothing to do with STEM/computer science (E: my gripes are mostly with the āancestor simulationā theory however)).
The āsimulation hypothesisā is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.
Since the Middle ages weāve reduced Godās divine realm from the glorious kingdom of heaven to an office chair in front of a computer screen, rather than an office chair behind it.
I donāt have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, letās say, āalternative scienceā for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.
How sneerable is the entire āinfodynamicsā field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the āsecond law of infodynamicsā seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing thereās not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. Iām not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK Iām way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesnāt build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, theyāre making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which theyāre calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didnāt make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of āinformation statesā which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what itās supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the authorās quotes from the associated hype article Iām 100% sure itās rubbish. Itās also really funny that they didnāt manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so theyāve pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.
Hereās an interview where heās talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.
I canāt definitely predict this guyās career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.
Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.
I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.
āfeel free to ignore any science ānewsā thatās just a press release from the guy who made it up.ā
In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (by me) facilitates new and interesting research tools (by me) at the intersection between physics and information (according to me).
Gotta love āscienceā that is cited by no-one and cites the authorās previous work which was also cited by no one. Really the media should do better about not giving cranks an authoritative sounding platform, but that would lead to slightly fewer eyes on ads and we canāt have that now can we.
i mean, the Ray Charles one sounds fun. My 1st year maths lecturer demonstrated the importance of not dividing by zero by mathematically proving that if 1=0, then he was Brigitte Bardot. We did actually applaud.
If youāre in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Parginās If This Book Exists, Youāre in the Wrong Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You're_in_the_Wrong_Universe
It is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series
oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series ā I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like Iāve got a few books to pick up!
Someone (maybe you) recommended this book here awhile back. But itās the fourth book in a series so I had to read the other three first and so have only just now started it.
Youāre doing the
lordāssimulation-authorās work, my friend.
andrew tateās āuniversityā had a leak, exposing cca 800k usernames and 325k email addresses of people that failed to pay $50 monthly fee
entire thing available at DDoSectrets, just gonna drop tree of that torrent:
āāā Private Channels āĀ Ā āāā AI Automation Agency.7z āĀ Ā āāā Business Mastery.7z āĀ Ā āāā Content Creation + AI Campus.7z āĀ Ā āāā Copywriting.7z āĀ Ā āāā Crypto DeFi.7z āĀ Ā āāā Crypto Trading.7z āĀ Ā āāā Cryptocurrency Investing.7z āĀ Ā āāā Ecommerce.7z āĀ Ā āāā Health & Fitness.7z āĀ Ā āāā Hustler's Campus.7z āĀ Ā āāā Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z āĀ Ā āāā The Real World.7z āāā Public Channels āĀ Ā āāā AI Automation Agency.7z āĀ Ā āāā Business Mastery.7z āĀ Ā āāā Content Creation + AI Campus.7z āĀ Ā āāā Copywriting.7z āĀ Ā āāā Crypto DeFi.7z āĀ Ā āāā Crypto Trading.7z āĀ Ā āāā Cryptocurrency Investing.7z āĀ Ā āāā Ecommerce.7z āĀ Ā āāā Fitness.7z āĀ Ā āāā Hustler's Campus.7z āĀ Ā āāā Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z āĀ Ā āāā The Real World.7z āāā users.json.7z
yeah i studied defi and dropshipping at andrew tateās hustler university
statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
āYeah I thought about going into civil engineering but the department of hustling really spoke to me yāknow?ā
i have never felt imposter syndrome since
nikhil suresh, probably
Iām just curious how many hits you would get if you searched for ā4 hour work weekā, as iirc that is where all these people stole the idea from. (well, not totally, the idea they are stealing is selling others the idea of the 4 hour work week, but I hope you get what I mean, 4 hour work weeks all the way down).
See, isnāt the 4-hour work week one of those ājust make other people work 50+hours a week on your behalf and take the money theyāve earned for itā schemes? This looks much broader rather than being married to a specific sub-scam. Like, if crypto is down they can sell drop shipping. If drop shipping is cringe they can sell AI slop monetization. If Amazon tightens their standards and starts locking out AI stuff they can go back to crypto.
Itās in the same genre of trying to monetize being a conspicuous asshole, but it is one of the more complex evolutions, at least compared to the standard grift-luencer.
I think it is that book yes, it started a lot of these things, and a lot of these people (im generalizing here, but the Tates are imho part of a long line of manosphere people who all do this kind of stuff, selling others courses into dropshipping, courses into setting up passive income streams, courses into getting laid/mindset etc. And it seems like the only thing they manage to really sell is courses. I donāt think it is that complex an evolution more like the natural progression, of course they get into crypto and AI slop. I think the only real change of somebody like Tate vs the other weirdos who did this (somebody like Cernovic was also one of these people for example) is that Tate has a little bit of charisma for an important market segment (the under 18 year olds).
not many. 2 hits for ā4 hour workweekā and 35 for ā4 hour work weekā another 4 for ā4-hour workweekā and 5 for ā4-hour work weekā
Thanks!
alright itās 14gb of json files let me figure out how to grep it in reasonable way and iāll get there for now iāll say that the biggest one (size) in private channels is ācrypto tradingā (2 gb) then ācrypto investingā (1.6gb), while in public channels itās āthe real worldā (1.7 gb) and āecommerceā (0.87 gb)
obligatory IBCK.
thatās not even that, maybe with exception for tate &co. itās just shilling shitcoins and selling hopes like that one tiktok spammer mussy described by 404media
The word āderangedā is getting a workout lately, aināt it?
fwiw i attribute this to the stop doing x meme (that I believe skillissuer is referencing):
been thinking about making one for (memory) safe c++, but unfortunately I donāt know the topic deep enough to make the meme good
One of my favorite meme templates for all the text and images you can shove into it, but trying to explain why you have one saved on your desktop just makes you look like the Time Cube guy
yeah thatās what i was going for
magnificent!
Ugh. Tangentially related: a streamer I follow has been getting lots of people in her chat saying that one of the taters wants to hire her. Iāve started noticing comments like āI love white cultureā and weird fantasies about the roman empire. Historically sheās also been asked multiple times what her ethnicity is (she is white), specifically if she is scandanavian, which I am starting to view under some kind of white supremacist lens. Iāve told her to ignore anything mentioning the taters or ātop gā as one of them is known.
Honestly, Iām worried that she could get brigaded by these creeps, even if she shows no response whatsoever.
I mean, according to the charges Tate hiring young women usually meant some variety of sex trafficking and adult video that he took the money for. Tbh the whole space is sufficiently toxic that she ought to start dropping the banhammer judiciously, but IDK what situation is politically economically etc.
My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real
Heās using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment
Iād pipe up and go āuhhh hey prof, arenāt you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?ā
(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand itās not always viable to do)
It was there and gone fairly quickly and I wouldnāt say Iām a model student so I didnāt say anything. Iāve talked to him about Chat GPT before thoughā¦
āSo, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?ā
I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldnāt have room to complain? Not that Iād recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.
Weāre going to be answering two essay questions in an in-class test instead of writing a paper this year specifically to prevent chat gpt abuse. Which he laughed and joked about because he really believes chat gpt can produce good results !
Iām pretty sure you could download a decent markov chain generator onto a TI-89 and do basically the same thing with a more in-class appropriate tool, but speaking as someone with dogshit handwriting Iām so glad to have graduated before this was a concern. Godspeed, my friend.
gentlemen, this means war
-me imagining myself paying to sit through that
The mask comes off at LWN, as two editors (jake and corbet) dive in to frantically defend the honour of Justine fucking Tunney against multiple people pointing out sheās a Nazi who fills her projects with racist dogwhistles
fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I canāt imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:
- dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
- dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
- in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends
but for so many of these people, somehow thatās what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here
See, youāre assuming the goal of moderation is to maintain a healthy social space online. By definition this excludes fascists. Itās that old story about how to make sure your punk bar doesnāt turn into a nazi punk bar. But what if instead my goal is to keep the peace in my nazi punk bar so that the normies and casuals keep filtering in and out and making me enough money that I can stay in business? Then this strategy makes more sense.
Is Google lacing their free coffee??? How could a woman with at least one college degree believe that the government is even mechanically capable of dissolving into a throne for Eric Schmidt.
Post by Corbet the editor. āWe get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please letās leave it at that.ā
So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg
Seems like theyāve actually done this now. Thereās a preface note now.
This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its authorās political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developersā political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.
Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.
Side-note: I can actually believe that they didnāt know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.
Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone whoās just browsing around, but what do I know.
Well, at least they put down something. More than I expected.
And doing research on people? In this economy?
so is corbet the same kind of fucker thatāll complain āeverything is so political nowadaysā? it seems like they are
Centrists Donāt Fucking Be Like This challenge not achieved yet again
fwiw this link didnāt jump me to a specific reply (if you meant to highlight a particular one)
It didnāt scroll for me either but thereās a reply by this corbet person with a highlighted background which I assume is the one intended to be linked to
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 also, and I know this is way beside the point, update the design of your website, motherfuckers
I donāt run any websites, what are you coming at me for
Not the only trans NRXer to pull this Iām afraid. I could say things but I really canāt I think.
Man, how do you even find this stuff? :D
tripped over it just reading LWN and went āholy shitā
HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is āThe Best Charity Isnāt What You Thinkā.
This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesnāt crumble.
Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.
Dog, youāve lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isnāt indefensible, but the way itās framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious youād be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itās not just because theyād be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnāt be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoād be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itās not just because theyād be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnāt be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoād be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf
deleted by creator
rat endgame being eugenics again?? no waaay
Did the human pet guy write this
Ohhhh, so this is a forced-birther agenda item. Got it
I think the author is just honestly trying to equivocate freezing shrimps with torturing weirdly specifically disabled babies and senile adults medieval style. If you said youād pledge like 17$ to shrimp welfare for every terminated pregnancy Iām sure theyād be perfectly fine with it.
I happened upon a thread in the EA forums started by someone who was trying to argue EAs into taking a more forced-birth position and what it came down to was that it wouldnāt be as efficient as using the same resources to advocate for animal welfare, due to some perceived human/chicken embryo exchange rate.
Soā¦ we should be vegetarians?
No, just replace all your sense of morality with utilitarian shrimp algebra. If you end up vegetarian, so be it.
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like itās crucial to the overall argument:
ā¦ if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ā¦
Does this proposition make sense? Itās not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.
It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe Iām too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
lol hahah.
Not that Iām a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you donāt have to do any thinking beyond 1500Ć0.03Ć1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!
Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.
I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.
Hold it right there criminal scum!
spoiler
Image of two casually dressed guys pointing fingerguns at the camera, green beams are coming out of the fingerguns. The Vegan Police from the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The cops are played by Thomas Jane and Clifton Collins Jr, the latter is wearing sunglasses, while it is dark.
Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, youāve lost! I activate my trap card: ćBayesian Reasoningć to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw thećDomain Expertć card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!
Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.
Effective Altruism Declares War on the Entire State of Louisiana
how come every academic I have worked with has given me some variation of
they already have all of my data, I donāt really care about my privacy
iām in computer science š
the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause thatās by far whatās most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)
The thing is, Iām pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the data is effectively worthless out of the online advertising grift. Itās thoughtlessly collected junk sold as data for its own sake.
It works because no one working in advertising knows what a human beings is.
my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way ā see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that itās less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit weāre used to
but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what theyāre doing doesnāt work; thereās power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market
When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how thereās currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.
I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.
whatās wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesnāt have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all
people with nothing to hide are the worst people
most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, itās worse than that: theyāre doing a generative AI model that looks to me like itās tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robotsā¦ seagull meme, āwhat are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about whoās asking for this type of model?ā)
Pokemon Go To The War Crimes
Pokemon Go To The Hague
Quick, find the guys who were taping their phones to a ceiling fan and have them get to it!
Jokes aside Iām actually curious to see what happens when this one screws up. My money is on one of the Boston Dynamics dogs running in circles about 30 feet from the intended target without even establishing line of sight. Theyāll certainly have to test it somehow before it starts autonomously ordering drone strikes on innocent peopleās homes, right? Right?
a better-thought-out announcement is coming later today, but our WriteFreely instance at gibberish.awful.systems has reached a roughly production-ready state (and you can hack on its frontend by modifying the
templates
,pages
,static
, andless
directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and Iāll DM an invite link!Oh hey looks like another Chat-GPT assisted legal filing, this time in an expert declaration about the dangers of generative AI: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/stanford-professor-lying-and-technology-19937258.php
The two missing papers are titled, according to Hancock, āDeepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptanceā and āThe Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior.ā The expert declarationās bibliography includes links to these papers, but they currently lead to an error screen.
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
Dude discovers that one LLM model is not entirely shit at chess, spends time and tokens proving that other models are actually also not shit at chess.
The irony? Heās comparing it against Stockfish, a computer chess engine. Computers playing chess at a superhuman level is a solved problem. LLMs have now slightly approached that level.
For one, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct rarely suggests illegal moves,
Writeup https://dynomight.net/more-chess/
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42206817
LLMs sometimes struggle to give legal moves. In these experiments, I try 10 times and if thereās still no legal move, I just pick one at random.
uhh
Battlechess both could choose legal moves and also had cool animations. Battlechess wins again!
Particularly hilarious at how thoroughly theyāre missing the point. The fact that it suggests illegal moves at all means that no matter how good itās openings are the scaling laws and emergent behaviors havenāt magicked up an internal model of the game of Chess or even the state of the chess board itās working with. I feel like playing games is a particularly powerful example of this because the game rules provide a very clear structure to model and itās very obvious when that model doesnāt exist.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 the only analysis of computer chess anybody needs https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA
I remember when several months (a year ago?) when the news got out that gpt-3.5-turbo-papillion-grumpalumpgus could play chess around ~1600 elo. I was skeptical the apparent skill wasnāt just a hacked-on patch to stop folks from clowning on their models on xitter. Like if an LLM had just read the instructions of chess and started playing like a competent player, that would be genuinely impressive. But if what happened is they generated 10^12 synthetic games of chess played by stonk fish and used that to train the model- that aināt an emergent ability, thatās just brute forcing chess. The fact that larger, open-source models that perform better on other benchmarks, still flail at chess is just a glaring red flag that something funky was going on w/ gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct to drive home the āeMeRgEnCeā narrative. Iād bet decent odds if you played with modified rules, (knights move a one space longer L shape, you cannot move a pawn 2 moves after it last moved, etc), gpt-3.5 would fuckin suck.
Edit: the author asks āwhy skill go down thoā on later models. Like isnāt it obvious? At that moment of time, chess skills werenāt a priority so the trillions of synthetic games werenāt included in the training? Like this isnāt that big of a mysteryā¦? Itās not like other NN havenāt been trained to play chessā¦
Here are the results of these three models against Stockfishāa standard chess AIāon level 1, with a maximum of 0.01 seconds to make each move
Iām not a Chess person or familiar with Stockfish so take this with a grain of salt, but I found a few interesting things perusing the code / docs which I think makes useful context.
Skill Level
I assume ālevelā refers to Stockfishās Skill Level option.
If I mathed right, Stockfish roughly estimates Skill Level 1 to be around 1445 ELO (source). However it says āThis Elo rating has been calibrated at a time control of 60s+0.6sā so it may be significantly lower here.
Skill Level affects the search depth (appears to use depth of 1 at Skill Level 1). It also enables MultiPV 4 to compute the four best principle variations and randomly pick from them (more randomly at lower skill levels).
Move Time & Hardware
This is all independent of move time. This author used a move time of 10 milliseconds (for stockfish, no mention on how much time the LLMs got). ā¦ or at least they did if they accounted for the āMove Overheadā option defaulting to 10 milliseconds. If they left that at itās default then 10ms - 10ms = 0ms so š¤·āāļø.
There is also no information about the hardware or number of threads they ran this one, which I feel is important information.
Evaluation Function
After the game was over, I calculated the score after each turn in ācentipawnsā where a pawn is worth 100 points, and Ā±1500 indicates a win or loss.
Stockfishās FAQ mentions that they have gone beyond centipawns for evaluating positions, because itās strong enough that material advantage is much less relevant than it used to be. I assume it doesnāt really matter at level 1 with ~0 seconds to produce moves though.
Still since the author has Stockfish handy anyway, itād be interesting to use it in itās not handicapped form to evaluate who won.
Stack overflow now with the sponsored crypto blogspam Joining forces: How Web2 and Web3 developers can build together
I really love the byline here. āKindest view of one anotherā. Seething rage at the bullshittery these āweb3ā fuckheads keep producing certainly isnāt kind for sure.
Never thought Iād die fighting alongside a League of Legends fan.
Aye. That I could do.
You just know Netflixās inbox is getting flooded with the absolute worst shit League of Legends players can come up with right now
And having played more LoL than I care to admit in high school, thatās some truly vile shit. If only it actually made it through the filters to whoever actually made the relevant choices.