TechTakes

genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief

hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days

Nostalgiabait is the slopgens' specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn't an issue if you're trying to fabricate an idealis-

such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I've got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck's so different across the pond?

(Even from a "making nostalgiabait" angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD's directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you've got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)

I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.

Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?

After seeing this, I reminded myself that I've seen this type of thing happen before. Over the past half year, so many programmers enthusiastically embraced vibe coding after seeing one or two impressive results when trying it out for themselves. We all know how that is going right now. Baldur Bjarnason had some great essays (1, 2) about the dangers of relying on self-experimentation when judging something, especially if you're already predisposed into believing it. It's like a mark believing in a psychic after he throws out a couple dozen vague statements and the last one happens to match with something meaningful, after the mark interprets it for him.

Edit: Accidentally hit reply too early.

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets.

They are openly admitting this? Do they really not realize how completely damning the number is...?

I took a quick peek at his blog.

Oh dear, there is a dedicated rationality subsection...

Great response^

I think Julian is going to be mildly surprised that METR’s chart keeps going up, and yet, will have relatively small effect on the majority of swe roles.

At the same time, he did create alphaZero so he has a big old noggin! I wonder, after his success at Go, was he swept up in the mania that we would quickly translate that success to create super duper ai?

Links to the METR tasks w/ massive error bars at 50% level lmaou.

Someone in the comments rightly points out the comparison with covid isn’t apt. With covid, underlying mechanism caused an exponential effect in covid’s spread

With LLMs the exponential trend is being caused by exponentially spending money and a healthy dose of targeting benchmarks, which is why people are calling the top. The money literally doesn’t exist for this shit to go on so you can create your 50% accurate mechanical turk.

Edit: idk the more I think about this the more it irks me. Like if I was allowed to pick and choose benchmarks that agree with my biases I would post something like this…

… and claim model performance is actually getting worse over time.

https://xcancel.com/sayashk/status/1966144670561612202#m

links to AI 2027.

In Dutch we have a saying (from a commercial, well done on the advertisers there) 'Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend' (we from the company Wc-eend, suggest you get Wc-eend), which seems appropriate here. It is used in a sarcastic context when somebody gives advice with a clear conflict of interest.

Anyway, just going from the title, 'X is exponential' has been the pro AI cry since the singularity is near. (Which said, well individual tech follows an S-curve, but all the techs combined are exponential, and variants on that). All seems very hopeium, immortality is near!

He's been on the vibecoding bandwagon for quite some time on lobste.rs.

Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.

So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.

On top of everything else, "the father of quantum computing" is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard's proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch's quantum Turing machine... No one person should be called "the father of" a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.

Also, chalk up another win for the "billionaires want you to think they are physicists" hypothesis. It's perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it's putting in a strong showing.

the father of quantum computing agrees

And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.

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