TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's 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 save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!
But if we hadn't 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.
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're 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
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 we've 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.
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 who's 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 Darwin’s 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 can't find a goal...
But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.
There it is.
Edit: oh God it's 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 "information as the fifth state of matter" 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 "Writer, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamer". Another lists "Hyperspace and machine elves". One very honestly simply says "N/A"
The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, you've already paid for the domain, guys.
OK this membe list experience is just 👨🍳😗👌
- Psychonaut
- Practitioner of Yoga
- Quantum, Consciousness, Christian Theology, Creativity
Perfect. No notes.
Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!
Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.
lol
I don’t have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, let’s say, “alternative science” for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.
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: it’s a non-starter. Either it’s false and we’ve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit we’re in, or it’s true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The SH is catnip to "scientific types" who don't recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can't 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. It's basically elementary!
You're missing the most obvious implication, though. If it's all simulated or there's 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 I'm smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).
andrew tate's "university" 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:
├── Private Channels
│ ├── AI Automation Agency.7z
│ ├── Business Mastery.7z
│ ├── Content Creation + AI Campus.7z
│ ├── Copywriting.7z
│ ├── Crypto DeFi.7z
│ ├── Crypto Trading.7z
│ ├── Cryptocurrency Investing.7z
│ ├── Ecommerce.7z
│ ├── Health & Fitness.7z
│ ├── Hustler's Campus.7z
│ ├── Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z
│ └── The Real World.7z
├── Public Channels
│ ├── AI Automation Agency.7z
│ ├── Business Mastery.7z
│ ├── Content Creation + AI Campus.7z
│ ├── Copywriting.7z
│ ├── Crypto DeFi.7z
│ ├── Crypto Trading.7z
│ ├── Cryptocurrency Investing.7z
│ ├── Ecommerce.7z
│ ├── Fitness.7z
│ ├── Hustler's Campus.7z
│ ├── Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z
│ └── The Real World.7z
└── users.json.7z
yeah i studied defi and dropshipping at andrew tate's hustler university
statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
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, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)
My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real
He's using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment
I'd pipe up and go "uhhh hey prof, aren't you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?"
(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand it's not always viable to do)
HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".
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 doesn't 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, you've lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd 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. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d 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. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf
rat endgame being eugenics again?? no waaay
Did the human pet guy write this
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:
... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...
Does this proposition make sense? It's 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 I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
lol hahah.
Not that I'm 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 don't have to do any thinking beyond 1500×0.03×1 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.
Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, you’ve lost! I activate my trap card: 「Bayesian Reasoning」 to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw the「Domain Expert」 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.
how come every academic I have worked with has given me some variation of
they already have all of my data, I don't really care about my privacy
i'm in computer science 🙃
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 she's a Nazi who fills her projects with racist dogwhistles
fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t 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 that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here
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.
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, “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance” and “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior.” The expert declaration’s bibliography includes links to these papers, but they currently lead to an error screen.
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
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, and less directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and I'll DM an invite link!