TechTakes

A lemmy-specific coiner today: https://awful.systems/post/2417754

The dilema of charging the users and a solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse

First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:

This guy is speaking like he is in Genesis 1

I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.

You guess alright? You mean that you have no idea what you're saying.

if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world

What will this solve? If 2 people respond to each other's comments, the instance with the most valuable coin will win. What does that have to do with who caused the interaction?

I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it's a pretty decent source of sneers. This month's contains: "The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin". In classic Moldbug fashion, it's Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I'll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

26:23 --

Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that's simple and easy to use that's not a small amount of of work

Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

30:17 -- a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You're the cream of the crop.

~2:00:00 -- here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as "oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy" and responding by saying "nuh uh, urbit is decentralized." Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

The robots clearly want us dead -- "Delivery Robot Knocked Over Pedestrian, Company Offered ‘Promo Codes’ to Apologize" (404 media) (archive)

And here rationalists warned that AI misalignment would be hidden from us until the "diamonoid bacteria".

Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)

Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, it’s a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.

This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.

Also, “this sure looks like a religion to me” can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. I’m quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.

Sure, "religion" is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the "Religion or not" checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.

Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.

Citation very much needed, bub.

[1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/

[2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.

Timnit Gebru on Twitter:

We received feedback from a grant application that included "While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,"

https://xcancel.com/timnitGebru/status/1836492467287507243

Via Timnit Gebru's mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000." Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes

Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.