good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can't stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships
the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites -- AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men
An AI girlfriend that isn't going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?
I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.
And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is "real".
If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.
ChatGPT-4-o-face
It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too
https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o
this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[...]
Yeah it's totes more efficient, it's not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers
I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.
Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?
if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.
fml i thought these were the smarter techies
For those wondering about the LessOnline event, here's the actual plan
"Whiteboards, whiteboards everywhere, yet not a thought to think!"
"cozy/spaciousness"
The Danes do not have a term for this, but if they did, it might be* hyggelig dimensioner*. A good name for an oversized couch at Ikea. Also, the Danes would not include "whiteboards everywhere" as part of cozy, warm, intellectual conversation, but hey.
You need the whiteboards to schedule the orgies.
My man spent 10 paragraphs failing to describe the intended vibe of the event he's organizing. This is what happens when you only read tweets and substacks, you completely lose the ability to describe the immaterial.
a dance concert led by the Fooming Shoggoths, with many songs that didn't make it onto their April 1st album
dunno about you, but that absolutely informs me about the event in fullness
They are a satire of themselves. You really can read only that and perfectly imagine how insufferable the event is.
Fooming Shoggoths
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation
No, nope, nononono, nope right off, no, nope.
If the moon gets mad at us that's why
this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:
I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.
It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.
[…]
But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.
[…]
From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn't seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.
you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.
this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:
Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.
In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.
I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.
and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington
And the name of that George Washington? Albert Einstein!
there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (...)
Ofc it's not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of "let's move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks" then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!
You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?
Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse 'the woke' of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things 'ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligent') it is annoying)
this mcdonough dude's a trip
referencing how much he loves this blog post from another guy just kicked out for sealioning
oh Shea’s Zulip posts are a fucking trip too. it’s yet another straight up tantrum from the same kind of folks who think you shouldn’t get banned if you tell every moderator to go fuck themselves, personally, during a phone call
they absolutely are
loved this LWN subthread where another of these guys makes vague accusations, replies look at his actual posts and say yeah you should have been kicked out
and this one where yet another poster laments needless politicisation and the immediate responses are "oh it's you" and receipts
Yeah milesrout made a fool of themselves on lobste.rs and got banned.
The guys should just have been banned for writing posts that take hours to read that the mods then have to read and respond to.
And actually just a bit further, there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech, so the one who is delusional is you
ahahaha you know this whole “I don’t see any problems in the Nix community other than these woke fuckers starting drama” shit would be so much more effective if the folks saying that could stop themselves from following it up with the most obviously fash shit I’ve ever seen
also it’s kind of amazing how fast that second poster got recognized and called out. a whole bunch of way too high profile fash and neoreactionary tech weirdos tried to make nix their hill to die on (and were probably encouraged by the lack of tech media coverage of what’s going on, allowing them room to control the conversation), but they’re pretty consistently getting told to shut the fuck up by people who’ve had the audacity to read their previous posts and know exactly who they’re dealing with.
this is the kind of response that makes me optimistic that we can achieve less toxic open source communities as a new norm, one day. Lix seems to be doing it right; Aux unfortunately seems to be absolute chaos, but its heart is in the right place.
e: and of course, the new Nix governance structures getting this kind of negative, effortful response from the worst parts of the community is making me optimistic it’s going to work, in a way that the announcement and Zulip frankly haven’t yet. an outspokenly antifascist nixpkgs combined with Lix would give the fash parts of the nix community effectively nowhere left to go, especially if Nix or Aux does the remainder of the work left to make Lix the evaluator NixOS’s tooling calls into.
there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech
There are no rws in tech because there are no rws in tech, qed
i wonder how long before the antiwoke fork
finally, an operating system worthy of all your favorite urbit services
lol this mcdonough guy's great
@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren't interested in that.
yes it's a cynical power grab by the woke mob
and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other's company
the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time
[taps the sign]
"Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."