TechTakes

If the growth is superexponential, we make it so that each successive doubling takes 10% less time.

(From AI 2027, as quoted by titotal.)

This is an incredibly silly sentence and is certainly enough to determine the output of the entire model on its own. It necessarily implies that the predicted value becomes infinite in a finite amount of time, disregarding almost all other features of how it is calculated.

To elaborate, suppose we take as our "base model" any function f which has the property that lim_{t → ∞} f(t) = ∞. Now I define the concept of "super-f" function by saying that each subsequent block of "virtual time" as seen by f, takes 10% less "real time" than the last. This will give us a function like g(t) = f(-log(1 - t)), obtained by inverting the exponential rate of convergence of a geometric series. Then g has a vertical asymptote to infinity regardless of what the function f is, simply because we have compressed an infinite amount of "virtual time" into a finite amount of "real time".

titotal?!?!? I heard they were dead! (jk. why did they stop hanging here, I forget...)

Don't make tap the sign:

Don't feed the bears!

Amazing. Can't wait for the doomers to claim that somehow this has enough intent to classify as murder. I wonder if they'll end up on one of the weirdly large number of "bad things that happen to people in the national parks" podcasts.

Darwin Award-as-a-service

looking forward to mastodon awful dot systems

Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.

I think if someone writes a long rant about how germany wasn't at fault for WW2 in a COC for one of their projects, its kinda relevant.

"we set out to make the torment nexus, but all we accomplished is making the stupid faucet and now we can't turn it off and it's flooding the house." - Every AI company, probably.

dark forest internet here we go!!!

Pre GPT data is going to be like the steel they fish up from before there were nuclear tests.

E: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/why-one-man-is-archiving-human-made-content-from-before-the-ai-explosion/ ow look, my obvious prediction was obvious.

his other references seem to be more garden variety neo-nazi type

Also apparently pro LGBT neo-nazis, which I refuse to believe are not a parody. See this cursed screenshot:

One of the pedo crew to boot apparently.

They have a badge now, JFC

Me, a Nashvillian: I would like one bonaroo please

God: sorry I'm fresh out of bonaroo, have some weird nazis instead

I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there's a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we're going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they're actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.

I don't like to speculate, but it seems tptacek is not happy about it for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291623

network state

Great, a new stupid thing to know about. How likely is it that a bunch of people that believe they are citizens of an online state will become yet another player in the Stochastic Terrorism as a Service industry?