Tasteful organic advertising time: the video Q+A that Amy and I did last month is now up for the public and not just our patrons. See and hear us in full rant!
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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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.
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lol, your own boom? or did you acquire/hire one for this?
(e: your video frame, david! maniac)
the setup is the loved one's, with the nice mic on an arm and all
Lex Fridman: "I'm going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts"
I'm doing a podcast episode on the Roman Empire.
It's a deep dive into military conquest, technology, politics, economics, religion... from its rise to its collapse (n the west & the east).
History really does put everything in perspective.
(xcancel)
Elon Musk in the replies:
Have you read Asimov’s Foundation books?
They pose an interesting question: if you knew a dark age was coming, what actions would you take to preserve knowledge and minimize the length of the dark age?
For humanity, a city on Mars. Terminus.
Isaac Asimov:
I'm a New Deal Democrat who believes in soaking the rich, even when I'm the rich.
(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)
Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about "actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn't predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it's all fucked!"
For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don't know that he actually read them.
It also has interplanetary coal trade. (predating the netflix cut of Rebel Moon by decades), which considering the tech levels of interplanetary trade, and the energy density of coal is quite silly, and def not to be taken literally. (This is a little bit important as it shows how much the space civilization(s) in the Foundation series are not really constrained by real life resource constraints, a thing which would be a problem if you were to take the series literally and were to say create a city on Mars intending to reboot civilization)
I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter’s use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Twice-on-a-Harsh-Moon.html
Everybody knows the real resource on the moon is whales.. I don't think I have read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress this century yet, so I should give it a reread.
I'd say it's essential Heinlein. Whether you believe Heinlein is essential is another matter :D
Due to the discourse around helldivers, warhammer and the movie I reread starships troopers, and it was interesting how much worse the experience was when I was older.
you'd almost think Foundation was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire In Spaaaace or something
this is why I've been thinking about quitting the internet
that didn't take long https://blog.kagi.com/announcing-assistant
my favourite thing about kagi is how when you click on the kagi logo on the kagi.com home page you get a 404
nice
can be activated by appending ? to the end of your searches
what a wonderfully clever interface that absolutely won't go wrong in any number of situations at least 5~10 of which I cannot think of right now
siiiiiiiiiigh
Have you ever thought to yourself "I wish I could read Yud's Logorrhea but in the form of a boring yet pretentious cartoon-- like a Rationalist Cinematic Universe!"?
Well boy oh boy do I have a link for you:
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1832452673867546802
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVN_5xsMDdg
TBH I thought the whole star blinking plot point was kind of neat when I was a teenager, but thought the story got a bit muddled by the end. Of course at the time I was trying to read it as a sci-fi story and not a P(doom) propaganda piece. My mistake.
thoughts, in order:
- wow that's an annoying narrator voice (but I guess you have to stay on brand?)
- "oh god, this shit again. but maybe I won't have to endure much of it?"
- (timecode: 00:21) checks video runbar "nope.", tab closed
I didn't want to watch the cartoon because I thought I could just skim the story faster, and that's how I read the "Hurr durr AI can derive general relativity in three frames, nothing personnel, kid" story in full for the first time. It sucks that people didn't nip Yud in the bud early enough by telling him he lacked sci-fi chops, though I suspect that wouldn't have slowed him down at all.
The story itself is an allegory^1^ about AI processing information fast^2^. Yud wasn't thinking of himself as a sci-fi writer when writing this; he probably thought he was the messiah delivering a sermon, which... is exactly how I've come to understand Yud anyway.
- the fact of which is explicitly spelt out in the middle third when it drops out of the narrative entirely to do so
- see hurr durr description in paragraph above
Oh yay my corporate job I've been at for close to a decade just decided that all employees need to be "verified" by an AI startup's phone app for reasons: https://www.veriff.com/ Ugh I'd rather have random drug tests.
Our combination of AI and in-house human verification teams ensures bad actors are kept at bay and genuine users experience minimal friction in their customer journey.
what's the point, then?
One or more of the following:
- they don’t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
- they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
- they have shit ai, but they’re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations
I don't see the point of this app/service. Why can't someone who is trusted at the company (like HR) just check ID manually? I understand it might be tough if everyone is fully remote but don't public notaries offer this kind of service?
Notaries? Pah! They're not even web scale. Now AI, now that's web scale.
we have worldcoin at home
Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?
Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.
They advertise a stunning 95% success rate! Since it has a 9 and a 5 in the number it's probably as good as five nines. No word on what the success rate is for transgender people or other minorities though.
As for the algorithm: they advertise "AI" and "reinforced learning", but that could mean anything from good old fashioned Computer Vision with some ML dust sprinkled on top, to feeding a diffusion model a pair of images and asking it if they're the same person. The company has been around since before the Chat-GPT hype wave.
Given thaty wife interviewed with a "digital AI assistant" company for the position of, effectively, the digital AI assistant well before the current bubble really took off, I would not be at all surprised if they kept a few wage-earners on staff to handle more inconclusive checks.
Próspera seeks to sue Honduras for 2/3 of its GDP because a new government told them to fuck off:
https://xcancel.com/GarrisonLovely/status/1831104024612896795
FP article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/24/honduras-zedes-us-prospera-world-bank-biden-castro/
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