swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 48 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Megacorp LLM death spiral:

  1. Megacorp managers at all levels introduce new LLM usage policies.
  2. Productivity goes down (see study linked in post)
  3. Managers make the excuse that this is due to a transitional period in LLM policies.
  4. Policies become mandates. Beatings begin and/or intensify.
  5. Repeat from 1.
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

Great. First, my AI girlfriend drops her tables because I ran out of tokens, and I can't buy more tokens because I can't write code anymore, because Cursor is too expensive. Next, you'll be telling me I can't jork it to LLM hentai! I mean, what are even doing here??? (jk)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

I mean, if a lawyer uses LLMs as counsel, that might cause a judge to stay the proceedings to tell that lawyer to get their shit together and be professional. Or if a company slaps AI into their mission statement, that could stay their stock price for a while until investors lose faith or they pivot to the next bubble. In that sense, "AI is here to stay."

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

a “cant tell you my ideas or you might steal them” guy

This reminds me of A Guy that I knew through an internship at a MegaCorp. After landing a job at said MegaCorp and moving to the MegaCorp Bay locale, former intern Guy hit me up for dinner when he was visiting. With no reason to say no and a plethora of free time, I said, sure.

It turned out that Guy was a total techpilled crank. He was talking like he was giving a TED talk the whole dinner. Some things I remember:

  • "billionaires are good people, actually."
  • "because of things that I know and have learnt, I know I will become a billionaire"
  • Guy was pitching me his "billion-dollar" startup idea of a payments layer for donating to charity. He was convinced that this was an ethical idea. He had no counterpoint when I pointed out that the idea was essentially to skim money off the top of donations.
  • Favourite moment of the night was when he said something to the effect of: "I'm going to tell you a truth that you might not be able to handle", followed by him saying something trivial or banal or otherwise forgettable; I remember reacting with indifferent silence and him going silent, literally shaking with anger, then him breaking the silence with "I'm sorry, I just got really angry for a moment there."

I don't know what guy has been up to since, but my money would be on something LLM based.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Can’t find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be “Horse_ebutts”.

Anyway: recently I’ve been burdened with the knowledge that there’s a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. They’re all obviously terrible.

  • Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
  • EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
  • BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.

Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago

Capitalism is a human pyramid made up of idea guys.

Carl Marks, Tha Capital

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

“You’re going to lick boot in 20 years anyway, why not get used to the taste now?”

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Abundance just be repackaged free-market libertarian shit. The liberals that are pushing it are participating in the storied liberal tradition of courting reactionaries and fascists, thinking they are immune to the effects of intero-abyssal staring.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago

not debate club

source? (jk jk jk)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The comments are fun. Here's the pinned comment, authored by the video's author:

I'm not the best at thinking on the fly, so here are two key points I tried to make that got a little lost in the discussion:
1. I think our entire disagreement rests on Eliezer seeing increasingly refined AI conclusively making the jump to actual intelligence, whereas I do not see that. I only see software that mimics many observable characteristics of intelligence and gets better at it the more it's refined.
2. My main point of the stuff about real v. fake + biological v. machine evolution was only to say that just because a process shares some characteristics with another one, other emergent properties aren't necessarily shared also. In many cases, they aren't. This strikes me as the case for human intelligence v. machine learning.

MY CONCLUSION
By the end, I honestly couldn't tell if he was making a faith-based argument that increasingly refined AI will lead to true intelligence, despite being unsubstantiated OR if he did substantiate it and I was just too dumb to connect the dots. Maybe some of you can figure it out!

Here's my favourite:

"Ooh Ross making an interview!"
5 minutes in
"Ooh Ross is making an interview Neil Breen of AI".

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

“It’s really hard to think about alignment. Maybe we need to redesign thinking” type shit

 

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

 

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

 

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

333Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

556Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

 

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

 

Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

 

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

 

Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

 

As is tradition I am sharing this link without having listened yet.

 

The video game in question:

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