welcome to the community!

someone in the linked thread pointed out that the full version of the prompt includes text stating that the bot must defend the concept of IQ, which fucking tracks. a very specific type of mastodon reply guy got very spicy in response

lmfao @ "Arya, a noble assistant"

other proposed names:

• Adi
• Wotan
• Reichotron 3009
• Oracle of Dolphi

welcome! this is a good first post.

"Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything, to understand the universe."

It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.

He's only in his early 30s, but he'd already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.

and I can see why you needed to sneer. the entire fucking article quirkwashes e/a and BasedBeffJezos by sharing some of the absolute stupidest opinions and memes ever formed (an e/a staple) and a small fraction of the bigotry in their community, and handwaves it all away by claiming BasedBeffJezos must be a genius cause he was a nepo hire at two google subsidiaries and was a “Quantum AI computing scientist”, whatever the fuck that means

Despite the apparent war, e/accs and doomers have a surprising amount in common.

wow, it’s almost like your ass forgot to interview anyone outside of an AI cult for this article

This journo: "Hmm, a guy that was deeply in this community says it's a fucked up shithole with bad politics. I'm going to ignore that aspect of it and just uncritically platform them wholesale"

The thermodynamic god is a kind of in-joke for e/acc; a reference to the laws of physics

But apparently asking a physicist whether these people are all full of shit is too much.

So, all this tells me is that GPT5 is going to be scary good and I can't wait.

Amazing how much tech hype nowadays is 'the next version will be great!'. Parts of this always have existed, and there is also the other part of tech hype 'You don't get it, this isn't just tech, this allows you to be A Platform!'. Vast fields of new possibilities, always just out of reach. Fusion is 17.6 years away people!

E: Related to that, also see how people always need to shift to the next big thing. The next codebase will fix your problems, no the next new AI system will be better, dump the old and learn the new thing. (Don't forget to not notice you are not actually doing things, just learning new systems over and over).

What do you mean “fixed” an entire repo? How were you prompting and what were you fixing?

crickets

Don't forget to read OPs "take" on the Halting Problem.

While the above analysis may seem to be critical, we do believe that many of our points could be adopted in the next version of this work. More scrutiny of the “new” materials needs to be performed prior to putting them into a database and claiming “...an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. In fact, we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the GNoME and Stable Structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions.

This brings us to our final point concerning the claim of “an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. We would respectfully suggest that the work by Merchant et al. (1) does not report any new materials but reports a list of proposed compounds. In our view, a compound can be called a material when it exhibits some functionality and, therefore, has potential utility. Since no functionality has been demonstrated for the 384,870 compositions in the Stable Structure database, they cannot yet be regarded as materials.

then they proceed to explain how badly have they fucked up in the only one example where they tried to find some utility of "new" "material"

The few examples of functionality mentioned in the article are associated with Li+-ion conductors. While the proposed materials are encouraging, their compositions leave much to be desired since they incorporate chemically soft anions. These anions are usually associated with narrow electrochemical stability windows, which renders materials that incorporate them somewhat pointless as Li+ solid electrolytes. (29)

this is basically closest you can get to "you fucked up, do better" in a published article. saying "you fucked up, actually don't even try to do better, go home" is not what i've seen ever really in published piece, excluding obvious cases of cooked data, even if it's warranted this time. it's in conclusions section https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

it's really the "i'm doing 1000 calculations per second and they are all wrong" meme in machine form

that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of 'you can no longer take over the world as easily' thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesn't mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of 'ruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural decline'. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games don't do as well and don't recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a 'conquerer' type player while civ tries to also appeal to the 'builder' type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the 'multiplayer' type player which is in conflict with the 'conquerer' type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a 'clash of civilizations I want to take over the world' type of game is going to want a different type of game than a 'clash of civilizations I want to build the best civ' game or a 'clash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friends' game).

This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur.

Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didn't first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could 'win' the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not 'win by taking out all other empires' based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you don't play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.

Because I am a glutton for punishment I found the unrolled thread here (via HN but they don't have anything to say apart from complaining you have to be logged on to Twitter to read it).

All I'm gonna say is that if you're coming after me with a thesis about the Fall of the West, you'd better not have apostrophes in your possessive its.

edit I read the first few tweets and it sure seems like this dude is mad Civ is no longer the realization of the core ideas of Mein Kampf.

I suffer from monkey mind, chronic imposter syndrome, and the hedonic treadmill. A few friends have confided that they have the same issue too. Perhaps you can relate as well. To improve my mental well-being, I meditate, write morning pages, and keep a gratitude journal. However, as helpful as these techniques are, they primarily rely on introspection. What was missing was an external perspective—someone who could ask follow-up questions, challenge my assumptions, and help untangle my thoughts and emotions.

please, for the love of fuck, see a real therapist for the ADHD and depression (and the hedonic treadmill? which just seems to be your mood regulating back to normal after bad shit happens?) you’re desperately trying to cloak behind pseudopsychological terminology

Enter ChatGPT. Over the past year, I’ve been using it as my therapist and coach. It’s been surprisingly helpful and meets all the needs above, plus it’s available 24/7. And I don’t have to worry about being judged (hopefully our AI overlords will be benevolent!) So far, every “session” has been insightful and I almost always leave with a lighter heart.

there’s so much to unpack in “I don’t have to worry about being judged, haha hopefully the AI gods won’t hate me haha” alone

System Prompt: You are Tara, an empathetic, insightful, and supportive coach who helps people deal with challenges and celebrate achievements.

You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.

but what good is a therapist if it can’t help you hustle and grind! certainly stealing ideas from a magic 8 ball will help you with your chronic imposter syndrome!

"could it be that we both have the predisposition to believe batshit fairytales because of our social background rooted in an environment filled with them? no, must be that the AI truly will kill us!"

The AI worry gene.

From the comments: "wait, how did he discover LessWrong and stay a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian?" lol

I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.

My coworker at work asked me if I had read HPMOR and said it was "really good".

I know I work in silicon hell-hole, but that still surprised me a bit -- to have what I thought was the weird obscure drama corner of the internet brought up in real life.

For it to have also reached some evangelicals... well that could turn into a real problem.