TechTakes

Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.

Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304

'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929

This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217

[1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header

many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.

some are not quite so harrowing

Strange man posts strange thing.

Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-bitcoin-halving-really-is-different-this-time/ar-BB1kb6o5

The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.

Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.

They're turning ~~Bitcoins~~ satoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?

Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?

James: You can just 'feel' the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You're literally going to ask it to 'solve cold fusion' and walk away for 6 months.

...

Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?

Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.

CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/

the website links to a "concept paper" which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don't add up to much at all

https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105858/https://www.giggleacademy.com/Giggle%20Academy%20v0.4%2020240221.pdf

such as these under "gamification";

Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.

Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.

or under "completely online"

There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.

Use AI & automation

Scalable

The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there's at least some money there (?)

anyway, dodgy af

Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.

for some reason this is still hilarious

CW: Palestine-Israel.

Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.

One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.

So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.

To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.

*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.

extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:

anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?

he became an extremely ardent BSV advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius

anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side

https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735

https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430

(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)

i would characterise ryan as not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack