jax

a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Émile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

and my personal favorite, that Marx's drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the "last ten-fifteen years just [haven't] been very rational"

Karl Marx's whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.

nsfw, and at a risk of beating a dead horse, but this article, although brief, does a decent job at connecting the dots between "silicon valley pronatalism" and regular ol' nationalism/white supremacy, while debunking some of their EA bullshit too

The Collinses are leading spokespeople for a movement called pronatalism, popular in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, a father of 11, is one of its leading proponents. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk tweeted.

Demographers disagree: there is no collapse, and one is not even predicted. Such evidence has not stopped the rise of pronatalism in response to an imagined “population bomb.”

In short, the problem for pronatalism is not declining reproduction, but who is reproducing. Pronatalism is inextricably tied to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity.... Here, nationalism tips into ethnonationalism and reproductive debates descend into violent racism.

The couple both said they found the backlash they faced on social media to be racist since, they argued, minorities often hit their children without the same backlash.

"We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy. It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups," Simone Collins said via email, linking to a CNN article published in 2011.

Malcolm Collins said it was "uniquely offensive" to him considering "the majority of Americans practice some form of corporal punishment, as you can see from the statistics with specifically that being the minority groups of Americans. So yeah, I think it's an arguably racist position."

this is the stupidest fucking thing I've read all year

Over 50% (!!) of the country I live in (hint: 6th biggest country by area in the world, so it's a big bit of land) is used for cattle grazing.

Sure, a fair amount of that land isn't ideal for cropping, but a large portion of it would be, and the rest is what we have left of native vegetation. It'd be great if we stopped letting cattle trample it, and who knows, maybe we'd even have some land available for serious land-back and treaty talks??

"Dad, why is my sister's name Octavia George?"

"Because your mother loves the Roman Empire."

"Thanks Dad."

"No problem Industry Americus."

reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.

me: y tho?

reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!

me: y tho?

reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!

me: sorry, y tho?

reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!

me: begins weeping

reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???

While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.

What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.

edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!

how have I not heard of sigbovik before, this is excellent

this is most certainly a clerical error

I know approximately nothing about Nix (or computers really lol), but I do know that if your community crisis has reached the point that someone suggests using the orange site as a guiding star, you're fucked?*

Hi all, fwiw Hacker News has evolved a set of community & moderation guidelines over many years, aimed at fostering thoughtful curiosity and minimizing flame wars. Context is similar but not exactly the same, so may or may not be useful, but posting just in case it is. Moderator @dang does a good job at reminding folks from time to time to stick to the guidelines, not heavy-handed but effective and respectful.

*edit for obligatory appending of ?

gems from the comments:

Academics and Journalists could interview an arbitrary EA forum user on a particular area if they wanted to get up to speed quickly. The fact they seem not to do this, in addition to not giving a right to reply, makes me think they're not truth-seeking.

Why don't academics and journalists do their job properly and interview random forum members to inform their research?

trailing-question-marks: the consensus bypassing trick anarchists don't want you to know?

????

Virtual Veterans is an AI-driven chatbot that, when interacted with, assumes the persona of a World War I soldier, named ‘Charlie’. It uses AI techniques and algorithms to provide a guide to rich collections of resources from State Library of Queensland, Trove (Queensland digitised newspapers) and the Australian War Memorial.

https://www.anzacsquare.qld.gov.au/virtual-veterans