While magic has always been exploitative, this feels like 'there is just too much'. Not sure if that makes sense. But more and more I see these franchises bloat and bloat and bloat with more and more content. And it just shatters any desire I have to even get back into it. And this isn't just a problem with magic, it is a problem with all these IPs. It feels very late stage superhero comics, where every character had such a long incomprehensive background that it was impossible to follow (and also a lot of 'to understand this storyline completely, you need to also buy a few random comics from a different story line. What do you mean to understand the last star wars movie I need to have played fortnite?).

And you know when the IP's fill up too much and the sales finally slump they will just kill half the content anyway, to refill it with more slop later (AI is going to be grand for this), or rebrand it, marvel ultimates style (but wait, it is all part of a universe, so it is all true. Eurgh). At least star wars killed their expanded universe so these old storylines no longer intersect (ow wait, they are selectively bringing stuff back of course. But wait, if new Thrawn has not done what old Thrawn has done, how is he cool? He didn't even throw rocks at people, this is all a scam!)

And don't take me as some sort of design minimalist btw, I do at times like kitchen sink designs (like nethack/slash'em for example). But this eternal milking and adding more and more to IPs is just too much. And it isn't just the world building, it is also nothing is just one thing anymore. Everything has the book(*)/videogame/movie/boardgame/bathsoap/mouthwash tiein. Anyway bit of a rant sorry.

*: you know the strange character that was underdeveloped in Rebel Moon (No not that one. The other one)? Well it is worked out better in Rebel Moon the directors cut. You saw that and it actually made the plot worse because of a glaring plot hole? Well that is explained in the book. AAAA

Edit: and it isn't just IPs who go for more and more. Presenting the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app (amazing how in a way the USA has seen the pillarisation problem of the past Netherlands and thought, we are going to do that but with a lot of capitalism added on top).

E2: More examples comparing somewhat regular outputs with ever expanding IP slops. All of HP Lovecrafts fiction work basically fits into 3 books. Look at the size of the mythos that spawned. But also compared the impressive output of somebody like Charles Stross, he has written about ~45 books (from a quick count of wikipedia, not counting collections/reprints). Compare that to Warhammer 40k's Horus Heresy, this book series (it is also 2 board games, and a card game) is 64 books long. With the last story, being written over 10 books (and 3 of those 10 are basically a trilogy). That is an insane amount of books, and it is only about a small part of the whole universe. People have to be unemployed to keep up with this kind of shit.

I know im a big nerd but "Musk also presented the Optimus robot, your plastic pal who’s fun to be with — “your own personal R2-D2, C-3PO!”.

Why would I need an astromech droid Musk? At least a GNK droid provides power. Stupid sexy gonk droid.

lazily regex

I'm having a sneaking suspicion that this is what they do for all the viral 'here the LLM famously says something wrong' problems, as I don't think they can actually reliably train the model it made an error.

Considering that the idea of the singularity of AGI was the exponential function going straight up, I don't think this persons understands the problem. Lol, LMAO foomed the scorpion.

(Also that is some gross weird eugenics shit).

E: also isn't IQ a number that gets regraded every now and then with an common upper bound of 160? I know the whole post is more intended as vaguely eugenics aspirational but still.

Anyway, time to start the lucrative field of HighIQHuman safety research. What do we do if the eugenics superhumans goals don't align with humanity?

Yes we could just shoot the severs, but what if the AI develops an anti-bullet shield, and then we shoot it with anti-bullet shield bullets, and then it creates an anti-bullet shield bullet bullet shield, and then, ... and then ...

Anyway, those kinds of kids reality free, imagination games of move and counter move were pretty cool when you were 8 years old.

Sorry got distracted a bit and just wanted to share, not related to the topic at hand.

Welcome to TechTakes, I see you have gotten the official traditional new user welcome already, and you might be confused why your centrist 'it could happen' take got treated like you were in dumb and dumber. TechTakes is an offshoot from reddits SneerClub, a place where we all gathered to make fun of the movement started around people who take science fiction way to seriously and who would rather reinvent christian eschatology with robots than go to therapy. They made a nice community filled with smart people intellectually masturbating, creating weird cults, fraud, sexism and racism, but enough about SBF. Sadly due to cryptocurrencies, Peter Thiel, and the rise of LLMs (iirc the LW people had betted against LLMs creating the paperclypse, but they now did a 180 on this and they now really fear it going rogue), this group of people and their ideas is on the rise again. You can read more about it here.. If they recreated eschatology, we are basically their variant of ~~Satan~~ (no wait, they don't think of us as that bad) more like Satanists, the evil bad guys actively working against them and trying to cause the end of the world. We even made Covid worse! In reality we are more like a bunch of aging shock rockers, mostly irrelevant, and fun to be around if you don't touch one of the rant/mock topics (for an example of people doing that, see this post, people like that will get a pretty unfriendly reactions.

You seem to be still very much into taking the ideas of this group seriously. Which is quite silly, the amount of nested assumptions which all need to be true before AGI can exists (and science that will need to be rewritten) is quite large, and that is before we come at all your weird 'how did all the aliens kill themselves?' thing. (Which if they were to happen here on earth would also need there to be a large amount of people who take their jobs very seriously (see the '3 letter agencies') to be asleep at the wheel, and our industrial capacity needs to be out of control, or it needs magic, which all adds more weird assumptions which need to be true before this can happen, and we simply don't live in that world).

You might as well worry about the moon getting mad. Wait, that COULD HAPPEN! Surely somebody is already working about this, let me do a quick google. Ah thank god, the conference for emotional moon research is on the case

Please do note that this isn't an offer to debate the finer points of why this is might all not be a risk and we should take Roko's Basilisk seriously. So please don't. I'm just trying to explain why you are getting this pushback, and trying to make a funny post for people in the know to read. Also, I do worry about the moon.

The covid didn't happen at all substack (I checked their twitter) also doesn't believe any recent pandemic happened (no swineflu's ever), and it gets better the spanish flu also was a planned event, nor do they believe that anti-depressants help people, is a climategate truther etc (They are also pretty pro Israel in the current conflict but that should come as no surprise). So well done linking to that Scott.

Dont anthropomorphise. There is quite the difference between a human and an advanced lookuptable.

The average r/sneerclub post consisted of finding something seemingly absurd or offensive said by a rationalist and then mocking it. The resulting threads are obviously biased and not epistemically rigorous.

This is correct

Like, Wytham abbey was technically a manor house

Lol, 'technically it was a manor house not a castle' come on, you cannot just complain about how low effort sc is and then post something as silly as that.

Wait, was this bait? Have I been baited?

'Come out against the woke agenda'

I'm reminded of the person on twitter who went 'Wonder when his sex crimes come out' after Russell Brand rebranded as a conspiracy rightwinger. Note: This tweet was made before his sex crimes came out.

As somebody said, and im loosely paraphrasing here, most of the intelligent work done by ai is done by the person interpreting what the ai actually said.

A bit like a tarot reading. (but even those have quite a bit of structure).

Which bothers me a bit is that people look at this and go 'it is testing me' and never seem to notice that LLMs don't really seem to ask questions, sure sometimes there are related questions to the setup of the LLM, like the 'why do you want to buy a gpu from me YudAi' thing. But it never seems curious in the other side as a person. Hell, it won't even ask you about the relationship with your mother like earlier AIs would. But they do see signs of meta progression where the AI is doing 4d level chess style things.

Men will literally write a 17 minute article before asking women 'hey how can I become more attractive'

And I'm adamantly against pretending real things aren't real. I think that's actually more fundamentally toxic than is homophobia, transphobia, etc.

Euh, well at least all the red flags will attract tankies.