blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Blockquote glitch?

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

From the comments:

If Said returns, I'd like him to have something like a "you can only post things which Claude with this specific prompt says it expects to not cause " rule, and maybe a LLM would have the patience needed to show him some of the implications and consequences of how he presents himself.

And:

Couldn't prediction markets solve this?

Ain't enough lockers in the world, dammit

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 24 points 1 month ago

Of course, commenters on LessWrong are not dumb, and have read Scott Alexander,

It's like sneering at fish in an aquarium

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 22 points 1 month ago (6 children)

"They don't need to develop protocols of communication that facilitate buying castles, fluffing our corporate overlords, or recruiting math pets. They share vegan recipes without even trying to build a murder cult."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Longtime friends of the pod will recognize the trick of turning molehills into mountains. Creationists take a legitimate debate over a detail, like how many millions of years ago did species A and species B diverge, and they blow it up into "evolution is wrong". Hossenfelder and her ilk do the same thing. They start with "pre-publication peer review has limited effectiveness" or "the allocation of funding is sometimes susceptible to fads", and they blow it up into "physicists are a cabal out to suppress The Truth".

One nugget of fact that Hossenfelder in particular exploits is that the specific way we have been investigating the corner of physics we like to call "fundamental" is, possibly, arguably, maybe tapped out. The same poster of sub-sub-atomic particles that you'd have put on your wall 30 or 40 years ago is still good today, with an edit or two in the corner. We found the top quark, we found the Higgs, and so, possibly, arguably, maybe, building an even bigger CERN machine isn't a worthwhile priority right now. Does this spell doom for physics? No, having to reorganize how we do things in one corner of our subject after decades of astonishing success is not "doom".

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

His group chats with Kevin Roose must be epic.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that "OpenAI is learning from its greatest success." He wrapped up a whole story with the following:

At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.

Weaselly little promptfucker.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.

https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A bit of jank I have noticed on mobile: If I use the "view votes" feature of the mod menu, after I close the list I cannot scroll the page up or down. I have to close the tab and then undo, and then everything works again. (Am still on Firefox for mobile.)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am not sure that quantum computing's having been advertised as a code-breaking technology would actually give it a bad rep. Quantum information science has also been advertised as enabling key distribution, for even longer (1984 versus 1994). The quantum giveth and the quantum taketh away.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

I didn't get a message like "all quantum research is crankery" from the original post.

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