gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 9 hours ago

Deep cut, I love it!

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 11 hours ago (7 children)

TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)

here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community

I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Michael Hiltzik in LATimes: "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash"

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

https://archive.ph/2025.08.20-113134/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

Fun quote:

The rest of [AI 2027], mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent “finally understands its own cognition,” is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn’t meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven’t received a reply.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

Granted, I played a bit fast and loose with the term ancient. "Long-running" is better.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

This is in the running for most LW comment ever.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Someone mispelled "painfully triangulated center" as "left".

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Not sure why this "member of technical staff at METR" felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. I'm sure it's nothing.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I hate to "give it to them", but the targets of TESCREAL are reprehensible BUT fascinating. It's kinda fun to learn about people like the Cosmists or Nick fucking Land. But the targets of this dude are basically unknown academics. The right doesn't need a convoluted acronym to dump on those, they already have "woke".

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (2 children)

you say "neo-luddite" as if that's a bad thing

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

Look, I am shockingly uninformed about the current conflict in the Middle East - mostly b/c I got sucked into Ukraine-watching and then Oct 7 + Trump II basically killed any motivation to learn more depressing things. But then I'm just a nobody, while Yud aspires to change world leaders' minds about AI so it doesn't kill us all[1]. And the Arab/Israel conflict is one of the longest-running in our world, it hinges on important stuff like national self-determination, how to treat civilians in war, how limited natural resources can lead to conflicts - all the kind of stuff you might want your robot god to be "aligned" about, in whatever direction.

It's ok to say you can't be bothered about Gaza, or not having the energy to learn more. But then people might just not be interested in reading about your ideas on how LLMs will destroy the world.


[1] latest outburst here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-problem

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Also "orate" is a fucking verb

 

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

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