Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Just had a video labeled "auto-dubbed" pop up in my YouTube feed for the first time. Not sure if it was chosen by the author or not. Too bad, it looks like a fascinating problem to see explained, but I don't think I'm going to trust an AI feature that I just saw for the first time to explain it. (And perhaps more crucially, I'm a bit afraid of what anime fans will have to say about this.)
Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think he's weird for not disclosing his politics to people he's trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which — again, very weird, no possible explanation for this — nobody has adopted. Don't worry, he's well-read:
So far I've only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who don't want their beliefs examined:
I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, ["who did you vote for?"] … In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.
To which the top reply is my choice sneer:
In my friend group it's clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didn't. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if you're secretly interested in their demise.
Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
image transcription
Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled "Left" and "Right". Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: "What people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually is".
Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled "Left" and "Right" and the vertical axis is labeled "Independent Thought" at the top and "Groupthink" at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.
Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled '"Un-intentional moderates" (from Paul Graham's The Two Kinds of Moderate)'. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Graham's shitpost.]
Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled "Intentional moderates".
In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to "@shw1nm".
I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
Finally, someone has solved the political compass. No-one will ever come up with a new political spectrum again. Soon we will have world peace
Did they try to add a bell curve in a place where it shouldn't be te last image? Im fascinated by how little sense it makes, and by how bad the adding a groupthink axis is.
So "unintentional moderates" are those that both choose deliberately to believe in centrist political ideology and to participate in groupthink?
It is some Paul Graham thing apparently, i have not read that blog post.
Those tariff rates, and especially the targets, were 100% pooped out by grok.
My University Keeps Sending Me Stupid Emails About AI, a continuing series:
From the email:
The debate will be chaired by Michael Pike. Speaking for the motion are Prof. Gregory O'Hare (TCD), Maeve Hynes, Prof. Gary Boyd and Chatgpt assisted by Student Curator Ruan McCabe, all UCD. Speaking against the motion are David Capener (UU), Lucy O'Connell, Peter Cody and Meabh O'Leary, all UCD.
Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.
Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like I've always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what that's become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.
Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. I'd be interested to know if anyone feels any different.
I have no knowledge or insight on the topic, but I used to get recommendations for "intelligence squared" videos on YouTube and I always thought it was a terrible, self-aggrandizing title for a series or event. Smart People Taking About Smart Things.
Intelligence Time Cubed now, that's the real deal.
Intelligence^2^ didn't seem half bad when Robert Anton Wilson was the one talking about it way back when, in retrospect all the libertarianism was a real time bomb.
"So, [Elsevier] added an AI question and answer to my article in Computer & Education.
The answers are wrong! They did not ask permission! The answers are WRONG!
How is this science?!"
misread as Eliezer, semantic content unchanged
An AI faceswapper/nudifier's database got leaked thanks to its nonexistent security - unsurprisingly, its loaded with explicit images, including massive amounts child porn and almost certainly some revenge porn.
WIRED tried reaching out to the company behind the "imagery", but they nuked everything and closed their doors in response.
I would also like to complain that I have finally started getting AI summaries in Google, and I may have to switch to a different search engine. Neither wanted nor needed!
The url manipulation trick doesnt work for you?
E: this I mean, somebody even made a site for it. My own setup is weird and I have ancient strange habits so I just added it to my search bookmark.
I should probably give it a go!
It works for me, if that means it also works for you I don't know. Not sure how much of this stuff is also region blocked etc.
AI-Powered Wi-Fi 7 Versatile Outdoor/Indoor Mesh AP
we're at the "the washing machine without a dateclock is marked millenium-bug safe in its marketing brochures" level of stupid
(that might seem like a stupid comparison but it's one of the things I most viscerally remember seeing from that time (when I was still a youngin who was still largely years away from computertouching))
My favorite meme message board on the internet keeps putting out bangers, but this one is extra good and relevant http://www.b3ta.com/board/11416629
NaNoWriMo? Na, No Mo'. Does this have anything to do with their bungled AI policy? Maybe, maybe not, but hey, the news article that I saw this announcement in thought that it was pertinent to mention.
considering their endless history of scandal, good riddance
Why does NaNoWriMo need a nonprofit anyway? What's next, No Nut November LLC?
As funny as that is, I am sure that there are nonprofits that are aiming to stop fapping.
however they are exactly canceled out by nonprofits aiming to promote fapping
the Effective Onanism movement
Refractorive Altruism
There's a fucking for profit that does this and it's used by the god damn USA Speaker of the House so that his son can monitor his fondling
I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. I’m part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.
If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.
I'll believe it! I didn't want to make that claim since I had no evidence.
Not dating your press releases on your own site is a choice. (Lot more places do this and it is driving me slowly mad) So, did they drop this yday? Some weird schrodingers april fools joke deflection attempt?
tip from a discord:
I've been doing some micro tasking to train LLM's the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it's all dried up, no tasks available. I can't help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.