akshually, the tokens are perfectly fungible, my stickernana is totally indistinguishable from the million other stickernanas out there. Not that it matters for the purpose of useless speculative trades.

I don’t think that comment is unreasonable. LLMs can summarize large-ish amounts of information (as long as it fits in the context window) in a human-readable form, and while it’s still prone to getting things wrong and I’d rather a human do it all day, it does do it “better than any other technology” that I know of. We can argue about “unique” but strictly speaking it will almost certainly generate an image that didn’t exist before. I’d also rather a human make the image for quality’s sake, but being fast, cheap, and copyright-free is a useful enough combo in certain situations.

It doesn’t really bring up the main issues with AI, but I think that’s acceptable in the context, which is “How is AI different from crypto in the context of r/Buttcoin”, and in that context “crypto is completely useless” and “AI has minimal uses which may or may not be worthwhile depending on how you evaluate the benefits and negatives” are meaningfully different.

Ah yes, AGI companies, the things that definitely exist

Eating live fire ants is flawed. But what’s the alternative?

I mean yeah, not exactly new news. Although I have to make a correction:

Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.

Manifold is the name of the prediction market. Manifold the company also runs Manifund, which distributes money to various EA efforts.

Also, “Manifest has no specific views on eugenics or race & IQ” does not give me confidence in Manifest’s views on eugenics or race & IQ.

Rather amusing prediction that despite the obscene amount of resources being spent on AI compute already, it’s apparently reasonable to expect to spend 1,000,000x that in the “near future”.

Unrelatedly, I need to quickly sneer at another quote:

like in 1995 when the internet was born

1995? How was the Internet born in 1995? Eternal September already started two years ago at that point.

What’s the elevator pitch now?

With conferencing, again, this is one app. If you look at your calendar, it is not only to join your video meeting but also a lot of other things. You read emails, send a chat message, make a phone call, have a whiteboard session, schedule something with external third parties. What we are doing now, it’s really looking at your entire schedule, how to leverage Zoom Workplace to help you out. Essentially, you can leave Zoom Workplace, and Zoom Workplace can help you get most of your work done, right? That’s our pitch.

That might be one of the worst pitches I’ve ever heard. Does that actually mean anything to anyone?

I also think that AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to have non-disparagement agreements. Not because of x-risk or anything, but because a) I think all companies shouldn’t be allowed to have non-disparagement agreements, and b) it would create a bunch of entertaining content for this instance.

As a rough rule of thumb, if it’s running locally on a CPU with acceptable performance, the environmental impact is going to be minimal, or at least within socially acceptable bounds.

Fish in a Birdcage just released Rule #34 (it is indeed about sex) and Rule #35, Rule #4 (also titled Fish in a Birdcage) is his most famous and Rule #13 is also very good.

Let me rephrase that: “Coinbase and Bloom Tech illustrate the dangers of starting a startup lying in a regulated industry.”

Coinbase hasn’t exactly lied, to my knowledge, grouping them with his stupid startup is pretty disingenuous, but he started it.

I’m familiar enough with country codes that I do know what ZA means, but in the context I didn’t realize that it was referring to a country, I thought it was just an abbreviation I wasn’t familiar with. In retrospect that probably should have stood out to me more.

I didn’t intend to make any comment on morality. US law seems relevant given that it’s near-impossible to find one of these nonsense AI startups that isn’t either in the US or targeting US customers. Indeed, this one looks to be based in Los Angeles.

That strikes me as probably illegal, at least in the US (although I can’t find a better source, if someone can find where the EEOC says that it’d be appreciated.)

Why would I want my interview experience to be “more gamified”?

The maintainer handled this particular issue well, but was quite rude in a very reasonable request to have a package removed.

I don’t think I want to know about “Exponential Ai”

Is everyone running their own open source project?

Essentially, I suppose. I put most of my personal projects on GitHub because a) I believe in the open-source philosophy generally and b) sometimes they are helpful to others! For example, because I put SmilApple on GitHub, someone was able to adapt it to make this. And besides, it’s a great way to distribute programs that you want other people to use, like my current project Chokistream, or when I made a fan-translation of a game. None of these are “serious” projects like a new framework or something, and all of them have very limited audiences, but if I’m coding them, I might as well publish them where someone else might be able to benefit from them. I also don’t feel like they’re important for my career, but they’re important for their own sake and I would care if I lost them.