rhamph

I don’t get the fuss here. The KDE LLM policy is essentially the same as the Linux kernel. Psssst! Slop in the kernel is also bad

wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196 Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n? Community: no you should not do a fascism Techbro: woah this got heated, locked

I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)

It’s our favourite word: Nuance! The world needs nuance!

Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user Source: well I wouldn’t have much of a talk if it weren’t true so I really really hope that it is

complex life developed around 300 million years ago LOLWAT I wouldn’t even pin the Cambrian explosion as the beginning of ‘complex life’, yet it’s almost twice as far back as your date.

I continue to be amazed by those random university students somehow outwitting all of LessWrong on this matter.

I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.

It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. This would be a sensible course of action, since AI famously doesn’t require any significant source of energy to operate.

It’s easier to imagine the end of causality than the end of capitalism.

Firefox’s biggest priority: rounding corners Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough. www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/ Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too: We are bringing back compact mode as well We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about. Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how ‘AI safety’ is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.

There’s this: “Built for agents: Omarchy’s pipeline moves to DigitalOcean” digitalocean.com/…/digitalocean-joins-omacom-foun… Alongside the infrastructure move, DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation, the nonprofit that funds Omarchy’s infrastructure and the open source projects it depends on, as a Founding Corporate Patron, and will serve as Omarchy’s agentic compute provider. So fascism and slop. Name a more iconic couple.

I had some interest in trying out Bevy for some future projects, in no small part due to their anti-slop policy. Guess I won’t bother?

TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard Out in the wild, I’ve actually seen somebody cite that piece earnestly… as an example of how Wikipedia still has problems even if it’s generally a useful source of information. It’s like praising with faint damnation.

Don’t suppose we could track down how the announcement got any publicity whatsoever…

Sloperators declare: slopping kinda sucks It was fine when I was free to foist slop upon my coworkers, but now everyone is returning the favour?? What the hell. This sucks. Naturally commenters are careful to note that they of course use the chatbot with care and precision, it’s those insidious others taking the easy approach and not having the moral fortitude to apply a little thought

This is an incredible read It really is. Regards to BioMan for finding it: awful.systems/post/9389883/12420011

Here’s a helpful link for the reading-averse drewdevault.com/weird-guys/#rauch

Once we have superconductors, all computation will immediately switch to relay-based logic

This is his rationale: (For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.) And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious! I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail. If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?

Is this some fascist RETVRN nonsense then? 🤔

I’m sorry but you’d have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours

After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”

Haha, check out this comment from the other Sneer Club: They had me till the part near the end where they say doing an LLM slowdown is like banning medical research and if you don’t like it you are literally an ‘enemy of humanity’. Like is this accelarationists doing sneer entryism? What’s happening? Also the thread could’ve used a nod towards the pervasiveness of eugenics in the ratsphere but I guess that’s not the audience segyges’s going for.

Software programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost “Do Not Create the Milkshake Duck”

In this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly. What if someone is taking a photo at a wedding, but the scene metering is a bit off, so they apply a +1 EV bias to bring the shadows into view and wash out the background? (in photography land, EV is ‘exposure value’)

There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here. Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author: Firefox’s new redesign is—at least to me—a welcome one. It no longer looks like a browser from 2015. What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?

Well now I’m very confused. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly special about ‘töten’, and its object is accusative. So why should it be dative in this… uh, case?

You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job! Many software writers are committed to not knowing what engineering is, as demonstrated by their commitment to calling themselves ‘engineers’. (I do defend the notion of ‘software engineering’, but so many many people who name that as their profession are doing anything but)

Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.

Moaning about missing features from a nonprofit, and volunteer project doesn’t look good. Mozilla Corporation, whose CEO was paid six million dollars last year, and 6.9 million in 2022, is a nonprofit volunteer project?

What I don’t get is the dwindling numbers. Mozilla do not operate a pervasive network of internet monopolies that can relentlessly push for Firefox adoption and sabotage compatibility of other browsers. If Mozilla had any sense, they might dedicate some more budget to advocating antitrust and campaigning other counter-monopolistic policies, but instead… they want to make the corners rounder. And flip back and forth on supporting a compact layout, while deliberating over whether they need more AI or even more AI.

So that’s a “yes” Also, are the very powerful and sophisticated tools in the room with us now?

The ‘sex cult’ framing really seems to be catching on. Of course, none of the eugenics comes up. Keep spreading the good sneer, everyone! There are still horrors to detail!

I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason. Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.

Not spite, but some secret other thing completely indistinguishable from spite. Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special as to have some sort of principle motivating a spiteful act? All the NPCs in the world just randomly harm themselves with zero rationale whatsoever? Smashing that toy and bragging about it actually proves to the robot god that Eliezer won’t be blackmailed, checkmate causists

Blink, the engine developed by the Chromium project? What a fascinating and important distinction.

How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD? Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.

I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!

On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.

I think this perplexes us because we’re tying ourselves in knots trying to rephrase it that it might be deemed more ‘mature’. But that is missing the point: bringing up the concerns of the users at all is just a fundamentally immature remark. We, the developers, are the adults in the room, and we want to slop it. So fuck off.

it’s solved Navier-Stokes This phrasing is obvious nonsense, but surely Scott should know better?? Oh yeah, I solved the Navier-Stokes equations. Check it out: u = 0.

For a while I’ve said that people moaning about ‘Luddites’ really just wish they could have some child labour going on. Nice of him to just outright say it: [the machines being smashed] “replaced the scarce and expensive factors, the skilled artisans, by relatively cheap and abundant factors, unskilled manual labor of men, women, and children.” The Luddites treated this as an outrage. An outrage! Oh, my monocle!

But don’t forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second

Strangely, ‘model welfare’ always takes priority to ‘human welfare’

their equivalent of a NACL I can only infer you mean some sort of salt circle to keep the AGI demons at bay.

My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important. More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that marginalia-search.com excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.

Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.