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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
New piece from Dhole Moments: Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI
If you've heard of him before, its likely from that attempt to derail an NFT project with porn back in 2021.
ETA: Baldur Bjarnason has also commented on it:
This is honestly a pretty sensible take on this all. That it comes from somebody with a "fursona" shouldn't surprise anybody who has been paying attention.
Leopard nibbles at venture founders' faces in a new way - OpenAI researcher can't get green card
(will they reconsider their wholehearted support for trump tho? also no)
Apparently MIT is teaching a vibe coding class:
How will this year’s class differ from last year’s? There will be some major changes this year:
- Units down from 18 to 15, to reflect reduced load
- Grading that emphasizes mastery over volume
- More emphasis on design creativity (and less on ethics)
- Not just permission but encouragement to use LLMs
- A framework for exploiting LLMs in code generation
From the class guide:
We ask that students do not use laptops or phones in class. Research suggests that students who do so unwittingly spend much of the time surfing the internet leading to worse educational outcomes, and that taking notes by hand is much more effective. You may use laptops during class exercises, and you may also use a tablet to take notes.
lol
A tangent: the tablet.
Why is the tablet ok for taking notes? Is it banned from the wifi? Does it lack a browser? Or are todays students unaware that most sites can be visited without an app?
because if they try to ban accessibility they will get in trouble
A Reddit uses Grok to solve Baseball
I think this sub might be satirical and that this post is under that umbrella, investigating!
E: post is tagged as humor
Whoops, thanks for the heads up! They got me good
Core Strategy: We define the probability of victory, PvictoryP_{\text{victory}}Pvictory, as: Pvictory=( C B A^2+ℏ∂ΨP∂t)×(Nc⋅c2)P_{\text{victory}} = \left( C B A^2 + \hbar \frac{\partial \Psi_P}{\partial t} \right) \times (Nc \cdot c^2)Pvictory=(CBA2+ℏ∂t∂ΨP)×(Nc⋅c2). (Someone told me this is "LateX"? I think you need to copy it to ChatGPT to see the equation.)
Yeah it’s time to delete LaTeX. We’re done. We don’t deserve it anymore
Update on my comment from yesterday: it seems I fell for satire (?). (I don't know the people involved, so no idea, but it seems plausible.)
Satire-brackets-questionmark is a whole industry now, isn't it?
Looks like elon and the others fell for it tbh, not so much you. (Note his screenshot showed he liked and retweeted it).
Zuck, who definitely knows how human friendships work, thinks AI can be your friend: https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3lo4foide3s2g (someone probably already posted this interview here before but I wasn't paying attention so if so here it is again)
In completely unrelated news: dealing with voices in your head can be hard, but with AI you can deal with voices outside of your head too! https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
(No judgement. Having had a mental breakdown a long long time ago, I can't imagine what it would have been like to also have had access to a sycophantic chat-bot at the same time.)
i retain a pretty dismal view of AI for just about any use case, but had some distant friends / people i follow on social media say they used it as a rubber duck for troubleshooting a problem they had, or a place to just dump emotions into. i figured this, at the very minimum, could and should be harmless. i guess i wasn't cynical enough
I found this quote interesting (emphasis mine):
He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.” “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesn't have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.
More big “we had to fund, enable, and sane wash fascism b.c. the leftist wanted trans people to be alive” energy from the EA crowd. We really overplayed our hand with the extremist positions of Kamala fuckin Harris fellas, they had no choice but to vote for the nazis.
(repost since from that awkward time on Sunday before the new weekly thread)
I hate this position so much, claiming that it's because "the left" wanted "too much". That's not only morally bankrupt, it's factually wrong too. And also ignorant of historical examples. It's lazy and rotten thinking all the way through.
There's so much to hate with this, but for some reason what really irks me is the "overplayed their hand" b.c. she was a poker player so she has to view all human interaction through the lens of gAmE tHeOrY instead of, you know, believing people should have human rights.
Like you just know in a parallel universe she's yapping about how the "West has fallen b.c. leftist pushed their pawns to far" or "I have to vote for elon for president b.c. the left's clerics exhausted all their healing mana"
25+ years... i.e. Bush II instituted a new Golden Age but it was betrayed by (checks notes) radical Marxists??
At least set the start of "Western society solidity" at 1989...
I keep forgetting so many people online are very, very young.
Big chance this person is <25 and this is just the reactionary yearning for a better past that never was. Also interesting how they always blame the 'Left', and not just somebody like Reagan who had actual power, actually caused a measurable shift etc. (Not saying it was great before him, I wasnt there in time and place) But nope popular culture controls the world. Thanks cartoon Obama.
I checked out their profile. the person is (one of?) the host(s?) of this trash
Ah yes one of those great ideas to change the world by changing nothing podcasts.
That couple have been in the white house to brief the president on their one thing ig
I knew the exact couple you were talking about before I read any additional comments. They seem to show up in the news like clockwork... do they have a publicist or PR agent looking for newspapers in need of garbage filler puff pieces? If anything, going to the white house is a step up from there normal pattern of self promotion.
they're Thiel creatures. This is why (a) they're in all the papers all the fucking time (b) no other pronatalist couple is
They're Internet Native/Terminally Online, so they can SEO their own appearances, plus now they are fully plugged-in to the right-wing hype machine so they're probably turning down appearances instead of chasing them.
they have billionaire bank rollers. since the reality of our media system is that you hear a lot about whatever billionaires want you to hear about, they are covered
I could have sworn they were siblings
Yeah. They are like midbosses of this side of the internet.
I'm annoyed they still have relevancy somehow.
What
I tried being too vague to avoid giving the pronatalist couple more clout, and I guess the bit bombed.
Also: I fact checked myself and it turns out I committed the grave sin of posting old news.
"Gross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk more" is gonna be a hard sell but rest assured, his pals in tech will make sure their ad selection supports it.
shinzo abe but not assassinated yet
I don't know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japan's birthrate (just like Hackernews is)?
Without going into too much detail (because I am not well read on this and am likely to be wrong about a lot of it), one of the many issues that Abe addressed during his leadership was Japan's declining birthrate. There's a bit of a conspiracy amongst many people who consume Japanese popular culture (at a deep-ish level) that Abe pushed pronatalist themes in pop culture, as well as tropes like NEETs/hikikomori escaping their isolation from society and entering romantic relationships. This has become a huge meme, where any time a romantic development happens in a manga or anime, many people are quick to say things along the lines of "Abe would be proud".
E: From the knowyourmeme page on Abe:
Japan has seen a declining birthrate and population in recent years, which has been blamed on young people in Japan being uninterested in having sex. However, due to sexual content in many anime, including shows like Darling in the Franxx whose plots seem to encourage procreation, people have joked that Abe is using anime to encourage Japanese young people to have sex and start families. These are particularly popular on Tumblr. For example, Tumblr user justintaco posted a photoshopped image of Abe superimposed on a screenshot of Darling in the Franxx, gaining over 36,000 notes (shown below, left). User freyjaofthenorth made a similar post about the anime Conception, gaining over 2,900 notes (shown below, right). There is also a mock Tumblr for Shinzo Abe devoted to this joke.
Without going into too much detail (because I am not well read on this and am likely to be wrong about a lot of it), one of the many issues that Abe addressed during his leadership was Japan’s declining birthrate.
Presumably, he didn't address it by dealing with how Japanese work life makes starting a family damn-nigh impossible.
rightwing 'pro child' policy in practice always seems to consist of oppressing women and gesturing vaguely when asked how this fixed anything
He was right wing, after all, not to mention a cultist. His heart didn’t have the capacity for such a compassionate solution, and that’s before it was collapsed by that homemade hand-cannon.