I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.

This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.

However:

The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we’re all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.

Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.

Seriously, could someone gift this dude a subscription to spicyautocompletegirlfriends.ai so he can finally cum?

One thing that’s crazy: it’s not just skeptics, virtually EVERYONE in AI has a terrible track record - and all in the same OPPOSITE direction from usual! In every other industry, due to the Planning Fallacy etc, people predict things will take 2 years, but they actually take 10 years. In AI, people predict 10 years, then it happens in 2!

ai_quotes_from_1965.txt

Microsoft announced that 2024 will be the era of the AI PC, and unveiled that upcoming Windows PCs would ship with a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard.

Tell me they’re desperate because not many people use that shit without telling me they’re desperate because not many people use that shit.

Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems?

Yes. They literally think that. I mean, why else would they assume a spicy text extruder with a built-in thesaurus is so smart?

Oh shit, I remember the Musk namedrop in Discovery. Didn’t they name him alongside historical scientists and inventors? I seldom feel actual cringe but that was actually embarrassing.

There’s a giant overlap between Christian fundamentalism and the whole singularity shtick, and Yud’s whole show is really the technological version of Christian futurist eschatology (i.e. the belief that the Book of Revelations etc. are literal depictions of the future).

Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross call it Rapture of the Nerds.

I bet that guy watches anime on 2x speed and skips parts without dialog to feel more “productive”.

Proof that pasta doesn’t exist:

• An atom isn’t pasta.
• Adding an atom to something that isn’t pasta doesn’t make it pasta.
• Therefore nothing is pasta.

Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and “just asking questions”. As if I didn’t hate this clown enough.

(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They’re praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They’re so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament’s far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There’s no leeway. They’re literal card-carrying national socialists.)

I’m reading Feynman’s lectures on electromagnetism right now, and GPT-4o can answer questions and help me with the math. I doubt that even a smart high school would be able to do it.

Ten bucks this guy hasn’t double-checked anything his chatbot told him but accepted it as truth because it used big words in grammatically coherent ways.

They managed to make this even more stupid than the open letter from last year which had Yud among the signatories. At least that one was consistent in its message while this one somehow manages to shoehorn an Altman milquetoast well-akshually in that AI is, like, totes useful and stuff until it’s gonna murder us all.

Who are the even pandering to here?

“You know, we just had a little baby, and I keep asking myself… how old is he even gonna get?”

Tegmark, you absolute fucking wanker. If you actually believe your eschatological x-risk nonsense and still produced a child despite being convinced that he’s going to be paperclipped in a few years, you’re a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit. And if you don’t believe it and just lie for the PR, knowingly leading people into depression and anxiety, you’re also a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit.

Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, […]

Holy shit, these chucklefucks are so full of themselves. To them, art and expression and invention are really just menial tasks which ought to be automated away, aren’t they? They claim to be so smart but constantly demonstrate they’re too stupid to understand that literature is more than big words on a page, and that all their LLMs need to do to replace artists is to make their autocomplete soup pretentious enough that they can say: This is deep, bro.

I can’t wait for the first AI-brained litbro trying to sell some LLM’s hallucinations as the Finnegans Wake of our age.

So apparently Mozilla has decided to jump on the bandwagon and add a roided Clippy to Firefox.

I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, the way they present it, accessibility does seem to be one of the very few non-shitty uses of LLMs I can think of, plus it’s not cloud-based. On the other hand, it’s still throwing resources onto a problem that can and should be solved elsewhere.

At least they acknowledge the resource issue and claim that their small model is more environmentally friendly and carbon-efficient, but I can’t verify this and remain skeptical by default until someone can independently confirm it.

There’s a MacOS app around that does pretty much the same thing called Rewind AI, but it’s a stupid subscription service as usual and for some inexplicable reason some people actually want this.

While half of the reactions were “this is a the top of apps I wouldn’t install on my machine ever”, the other half was celebrating it in the name of our lord and savior productivity, going as far as saying this is a nice way to remember passwords …

Well damn, I used to lurk on old sneer club, but I gotta admit I missed that particular rabbit hole so far.

The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement

This is just gonna be eugenics, isn’t it?

Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”

What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.

One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.

Yeah, what about giving them love or a warm relationship, or, you know, time?

And then they wonder why those generations have shitty relationships with their parents when they seriously believe that what they need is a big fucking car, as if that’s the variable that was missing in all of this.

Excuse me while I go and hug my daughter. I need to de-rationalize myself after reading this.

I like recommending slightly obscure stuff to give it a bit more exposure.

Crushes Bones, especially their song Nightshade Drips is a real banger.

Alternative rock band from California, but one of the main people behind the project is the creator or a super obscure but really cool and well-made ARG called House of Aberdeen from a few years back that has since been deleted. I don’t like most ARGs but I really enjoyed that one and was sad when it was all deleted, and then I found out she’s making music now.

Completely different, but the album Haunted by Poe, sister of author Mark Danielewski, is cool. It’s meant as an accompanying piece to his novel House of Leaves, which I recently read again.

Songwhip kinda does that, but you need to start with a song or artist or album name, it can’t convert specific Spotify URLs. And it doesn’t link MusicBrainz for some reason.

Also it’s closed-source so I have no real idea what happens behind the scenes.