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
[original poster] For which parts do you feel cringe?
[concerned commenter] Replied in PM.
Here's mine.
[original poster] I worked on this VR "game" where you fly through a 4D fractal
(Carlitos follows link)
PROJECT INFORMATION Date: 4th Semester (2017) Time limit: 4 weeks Team size: 3 People Engine: Unity 3D
so cultish that even the LW comments worry it's cultish - don't worry about my feet bleeding
Back when I used reddit, r/badmathematics would feature weirdos that posted REAMS of shit just like that guy's whiteboard pictures. There, we called them cranks.
LWers read that post and said “you might be bipolar!” I read that post and said “I’m going to search your post history and find you ‘acquiring’ ADHD meds, aren’t I?”
Guess what I absolutely found?
(To be fair when I looked, from his symptom description it looks like he does have ADHD, but he also talks about mucking with his ritalin dose, taking OTC stimulants, & biohacking, in conversation with people who clearly don’t have ADHD but take the meds.)
Please hire me for AI safety, I create active work place hazards around me and therefore small children and animals are not safe around me, but I really work hard (unless it is cleaning up).
Wonder if he is single.
This post also reminds me of the story I heard about a brilliant but weird math professor who had a tendency to touch walls when he walked around in the building. Eventually, in supreme cargo cult behavior, students also started to touch walls in an unconscious hope this would improve their math skills. Anyway this guys hopes and dreams to be hired would be shattered if he ever hears the people hiring him are a fan of Taleb.
Good that the communities first reaction is saying this is a mh red flag. (It is also a workplace red flag)
This is the point, exactly. It’s not even that it’s self harm, which even the community recognizes. If that it creates active workplace hazards. Even in a completely remote environment, I wouldn’t want to be a software developer with this guy, because if he came up with a perfect algorithm that broke the build, he would keep moving forward, because the point was the algorithm, and not the fact that prod went down.
None of the commenters seem to think keeping a safe work environment is part of work.
EA overdue to all be wiped out from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole "research" output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as "real work", and in terms of presentation "vibes".
I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)
reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.
me: y tho?
reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!
me: y tho?
reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!
me: sorry, y tho?
reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!
me: begins weeping
reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???
While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest. What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.___**___**
the voice for OpenAI’s Sky got taken offline because they tried to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for it (she voiced the AI in Her) after she repeatedly told them no (via this mastodon post which links the original NPR article):
HN incorrecting themselves on celebrity personality rights
now you might think this is an issue of settled case law, but the computer brain boys are confident in their version of how things work
Man I miss n-gate
what happened, the guy got bored and left? I miss it too :(
we're n-gate but nicer
now you might think this is an issue of settled case law, but the computer brain boys are confident in their version of how things work
Are we talking about blockchain crimes again?
yes, that's right
The lumina saga continues. https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about
TL;DR: Lumina guy sent Trevor a mean letter and Trevor has reworded some things to protect against libel. He still stands by the original blog post.
The orange site has some fairly milquetoast opinions.
Dude, if the product wasn't safe, I wouldn't be using it myself, giving it to my girlfriend, and giving it to my friends.
Love to give off snakeoil salesman vibes in a weird faux friendly legal threat.
Tedium and logorrhea in the substack comments, as intended. I wonder how often people on LW use "ink spilled" and "column inches" to describe themselves.
lol @ this austin chen guy, who seems to be an investor in Lumina, as well as a user of the project going like "dude just get on the phone with him, I'm sure he totally won't corner you with threats and such, he's a great guy I swear bro!"
Surprise Aella reference in those HN comments! (well, surprise that one commenter noted "the Bay Area's most overrated escort", and a replier directly inferred it was her)
Now I wonder if there's an app rating Bay Area escorts...
It's a well recognized rule that every time Lumina comes up, someone has to mention that Aella is connected to the project. Then, someone must make a joke about Lumina adding anti-toothbrushing to her anti-showering arsenal. HN hasn't caught up to the last bit yet.
Finally the realization that academia is just an industry producing artifacts (published papers) and not anything as abstract as "science" and "knowledge" gets the tool it deserves
Github - data-to-paper: AI-driven scientific research
I'm sure this will be fine and not cause any issues whatsoever.
I mentioned this in the last weekly thread, but check out the 5th citation in their example paper (the one that says nothing in particular about type 2 diabetes)
T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.
I left a HN comment that they got the names wrong for Hermina Jakupović, Germán D Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, and Tuomas O Kilpeläinen. They thanked me for my "thorough" review (read: I glanced over it for giggles at like 2 AM).
A friend saw this on LinkedIn.
haha yeah that happened last year sometime
the best shred I've seen is ripping it by "AI = 0" in full math proof
here's the original:
haha and apparently there was also a 0-equivalence version for crypto (which I just found by trying to find the aboveposted):
It's nice to know we have looped back to the point in history where we casually consider which people should have agency over their reproductive rights. Oh wait, no it's not nice at all, but somehow still totally acceptable and commonplace.
I don't know anything about evolution or genetics, and I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't either. Why would everyone become disabled because more disabled people survive and pass on their genes to their kids? We don't stone gingers to death and yet we are not all having red-headed kids.
The repeated use of the word "weak" (as opposed to "sick" or "disabled") seems revealing.
I can't say for sure that he thinks of genetics as bloodlines, and is concerned about its purity, but I can have my suspicions.
Also someone bringing up "population collapse" which is a recent(?) right-wing/techbro trope. Everything about everyone expressing worries about "sub replacement birth rates" screams "we must prevent people with wombs from making their own decisions about whether to have kids".
extremely weird shit across the board from that user. account claims to be "18M" and running "manjaro and mint", and then has a shell on sdf.org? along with the posts, "Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way" just from that thread (and a number of other choice entries elsewhere in their history)
like come the fuck on, can it be more sus
How is having an SDF account weird? Because it's for olds? Or they're hardcore BSDers?
just fishy in aggregate. I wouldn't say so much "because for olds" as "it's far more likely for old(er)s to want something like that". combine that with the wide array of other posts the account has engaged with, and the bio just wholly looks like bullshit to me
I agree that it's fishy in this instance, but dig around in the "smol web" subculture (gemini protocol, etc) and you'll find plenty of youngs who live in shells... cf. tilde.town
Oh yeah, I know about those :) it was more specifically about this exact instance indeed
I mean I did fuck around on some public VAX hosted things and such in the early 00s, so it's not impossible for this to be a true thing, but yeah. just smells off
You should watch the movie Idiocraty.
Grim stuff in that thread.
Sorry, im a habitual contrarian about this movie (good for that poster that they commit to not do an idiocracy and use tools that helps people, for example searching for the name of a movie), but reminder that that movie is basically utopian as it takes place 500 years in the future, and the American way of life is still going strong, and the problem of the food crisis is basically solved in a week.
I think that the movie is just a shallow criticism of Bush-era conservativism and 90s "trash TV" (that was already in decline by this time). Interrogating the implications of its scifi premise feels like not meeting the movie where it's at, which is an optimism (alien to me) that the USA is fundamentally sound and only needs a nominally reasonable Joe American to keep the levers of powers away from Those Guys.
It is. It isn't that deep I know, just wanted to point out a small thing which the people who hyperfocus on the semi-eugenics argument seem to always miss in the 'cbt (link SFW, some links on that page are not however) is funny' movie.