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the grok AI is now available to free twitter users, evidently not enough paying users were interested
it's somewhat more tedious than Gemini and that's saying something
Really wise decision to open up the system that costs a lot of money per question to the world. Esp when it brings in none. Wonder if there are people working on the low orbital cannon equivalent of trying to mess with twitters finances
just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah
this season's word is: kleptokakistocracy
Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google's latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10^25^ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
"Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously" is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for "problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer", BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they'd need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you'd never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.
To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:
The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.
Tangentially, I know about nothing of quantum mechanics but lately I've been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what I'm understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either it's pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or it's a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. This... might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because it's such a literal vision trying to be cool.
I don't know, tell me if I'm off the mark!
There's a whole lot of assuming-the-conclusion in advocacy for many-worlds interpretations — sometimes from philosophers, and all the time from Yuddites online. If you make a whole bunch of tacit assumptions, starting with those about how mathematics relates to physical reality, you end up in MWI country. And if you make sure your assumptions stay tacit, you can act like an MWI is the only answer, and everyone else is being ~~un-mutual~~ irrational.
(I use the plural interpretations here because there's not just one flavor of MWIce cream. The people who take it seriously have been arguing amongst one another about how to make it work for half a century now. What does it mean for one event to be more probable than another if all events always happen? When is one "world" distinct from another? The arguments iterate like the construction of a fractal curve.)
Humans can't help but return to questions the presocratics already struggled with. Makes me happy.
Unfortunately "states of quantum systems form a vector space, and states are often usefully described as linear combinations of other states" doesn't make for good science fiction compared to "whoa dude, like, the multiverse, man."
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your regular reminder that the guy with de facto ownership over the entire Rust ecosystem outside of the standard library and core is very proud about being in Peter Thiel’s pocket (and that post is in reference to this article)
e: on second thought I’m being unfair — he owns the conferences and the compiler spec process too
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reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it
So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some.... boutique... views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:
- Lab-grown meat
- Modern architecture is rotten
- Population decline is an existential threat
- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?
the absolute state of american politics: rentseeker ceo gets popped by a libertarian
We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that's still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?
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StRev was calling him TPOT adjacent and woodgrains was having a bit of a panic over it.
"Our righteous warriors are only supposed to kill brown people and women, not captains of industry!!"
dust specks vs CEOs
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It's so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.
"My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can't possibly imply violence... can it???"
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That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.
The whole internet loves CEO Murderer, a handsome murderer that targets CEOs! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the murderer is into AI
Lots of developments in the UHC shooter case
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They (probably) caught him
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He's even hotter without his three identical jackets
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He's a Thielhead
Not very happy with how this day's going
On the third day of OpenAI my true ~~love~~ enemy gave to me ~~three french hens~~ Sora.
The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.
"12 days of OpenAI" lol. Such marketing.
Big eye roll to this part too:
We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.
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I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around TPOT like we're all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.
For anyone else confused: that part of Twitter. It's techbro "phillosophists" like Peter Thiel.
yeah, TPOT is specifically the uwu smol bean neoreactionary race scientists
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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