It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
Mesa-optimization
Why use the perfectly fine ‘inner optimizer’ mentioned in the references when you can just ask google translate to give you the clunkiest, most pedestrian and also wrong part of speech Greek term to use in place of ‘in’ instead?
Also natural selection is totally like gradient descent brah, even though evolutionary algorithms actually modeled after natural selection used to be their own subcategory of AI before the term just came to mean lying chatbot.
The kokotajlo/scoot thing apparently made it to the new york times.
So this is what that was about:
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump’s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
edit: also @gerikson is apparently a superforcaster
Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don’t know what they’re up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
The first prompt programming libraries start to develop, along with the first bureaucracies.
I went three layers deep in his references and his references’ references to find out what the hell prompt programming is supposed to be, ended up in a gwern footnote:
gwern wrote:
I like “prompt programming” as a description of writing GPT-3 prompts because ‘prompt’ (like ‘dynamic programming’) has almost purely positive connotations; it indicates that iteration is fast as the meta-learning avoids the need for training so you get feedback in seconds; it reminds us that GPT-3 is a “weird machine” which we have to have “mechanical sympathy” to understand effective use of (eg. how BPEs distort its understanding of text and how it is always trying to roleplay as random Internet people); implies that prompts are programs which need to be developed, tested, version-controlled, and which can be buggy & slow like any other programs, capable of great improvement (and of being hacked); that it’s an art you have to learn how to do and can do well or poorly; and cautions us against thoughtless essentializing of GPT-3 (any output is the joint outcome of the prompt, sampling processes, models, and human interpretation of said outputs).
They look like the evil twins of the Penny Arcade writers.
It is with great regret that I must inform you that all this comes with a three-hour podcast featuring Scoot in the flesh: 2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
That was a good one. Also, was he the first to break the coreweave situation? Not a bad journalistic get if that’s the case.
Imagine insecure smart people yes-anding each other into believing siskind and yud are profound thinkers.
Wish I’d found a non clunky way to work “cult incubator” into that.
It’s pick-me objectivism, only more overtly culty the closer you are to it irl. Imagine scientology if it was organized around AI doomerism and naive utilitarianism while posing as a get-smart-quick scheme.
It’s main function (besides getting the early adopters laid) is to provide court philosophers for the technofeudalist billionaire class, while grooming talented young techies into a wide variety of extremist thought both old and new, mostly by fostering contempt of established epistemological authority in the same way Qanons insist people do their own research, i.e. as a euphemism for only paying attention to ingroup approved influencers.
It seems to have both a sexual harassment and a suicide problem, with a lot of irresponsible scientific racism and drug abuse in the mix.
Intelligence2 didn’t seem half bad when Robert Anton Wilson was the one talking about it way back when, in retrospect all the libertarianism was a real time bomb.
SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:
Retrofuturistic Looking Ghost: SCROOOOOGE! I am the ghost of christmas extreme future! Why! Why did you not find a way to indicate to humans 400 generation from now where toxic waste was storrrrrrrred! Look how Tiny Tim’s cyborg descendant has to make costrly RNA repaaaaaaairs!
Byline: The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better.
Scrooge: I tried, but no, no, I just don’t give a shit.
hand-writing your original manuscript
The revenge of That One Teacher who always rode you for having terrible handwriting.
Why make a true crime movie when you can do a heavily editorialized ‘documentary’ for a fraction of the price.
who is this guy anyway, is he in openai/similar inner circle or is that just some random rationalist fanboy?
His grounds for notability are that he’s a dev who back in the day made a useful thing that went on to become incredibly widely used. Like if he’d named redis salvatoredis instead he might have been a household name among swengs.
Also burning only a billion more would be a steal given some of the numbers thrown around.
Not exactly, he thinks that the watermark is part of the copyrighted image and that removing it is such a transformative intervention that the result should be considered a new, non-copyrighted image.
It takes some extra IQ to act this dumb.
Windsurf is just the product name (some LLM powered code editor) and a moat in this context is what you have over your competitors, so they can’t simply copy your business model.
https://xcancel.com/aadillpickle/status/1900013237032411316
twitt text:
the leaked windsurf system prompt is wild next level prompting is the new moat
windsurf prompt text:
You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother’s cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.
Unrelated slightly amusing fact, sarcophagos is still the word for carnivorous in Greek, the amusing part being that the word for vegetarian is chortophagos and how weirdly close it is to being a slur since it literally means grass eater.
I am easily amused.