To get a bit meta for a minute, you don't really need to.

The first time a substantial contribution to a serious issue in an important FOSS project is made by an LLM with no conditionals, the pr people of the company that trained it are going to make absolutely sure everyone and their fairy godmother knows about it.

Until then it's probably ok to treat claims that chatbots can handle a significant bulk of non-boilerplate coding tasks in enterprise projects by themselves the same as claims of haunted houses; you don't really need to debunk every separate witness testimony, it's self evident that a world where there is an afterlife that also freely intertwines with daily reality would be notably and extensively different to the one we are currently living in.

Conversely, people who may not look or sound like a traditional expert, but are good at making predictions

The weird rationalist assumption that being good at predictions is a standalone skill that some people are just gifted with (see also the emphasis on superpredictors being a thing in itself that's just clamoring to come out of the woodwork but for the lack of sufficient monetary incentive) tends to come off a lot like if an important part of the prediction market project was for rationalists to isolate the muad'dib gene.

That's the second model announcement in a row by the major LLM vendor where the supposed advantage over the current state of the art is presented as... better vibes. He actually doesn't even call the output good, just successfully metafictional.

Meanwhile over at anthropic Dario just declared that we're about 12 months before all written computer code is AI generated, and 90% percent of all code by the summer.

This is not a serious industry.

Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.

One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.

It's useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don't mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.

Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.

To be clear, this means that if you treat someone like shit all their life, saying you're sorry to their Sufficiently Similar Simulation™ like a hundred years after they are dead makes it ok.

This must be one of the most blatantly supernatural rationalist Accepted Truths, that if your simulation is of sufficiently high fidelity you will share some ontology of self with it, which by the way is how the basilisk can torture you even if you've been dead for centuries.

I'm not spending the additional 34min apparently required to find out what in the world they think neural network training actually is that it could ever possibly involve strategy on the part of the network, but I'm willing to bet it's extremely dumb.

I'm almost certain I've seen EY catch shit on twitter (from actual ml researchers no less) for insinuating something very similar.

It's a sad fate that sometimes befalls engineers who are good at talking to audiences, and who work for a big enough company that can afford to have that be their primary role.

edit: I love that he's chief evangelist though, like he has a bunch of little google cloud clerics running around doing chores for him.

Honestly, the evident plethora of poor programming practices is the least notable thing about all this; using roided autocomplete to cut corners was never going to be a well calculated decision, it's always the cherry on top of a shit-cake.

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

birdsite stuff:

Had to google shit-test, apparently it's a PUA term, what a surprise.