I'm trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. "The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold 'science' and 'rational thinking' as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty."

The lead-in to that is even "better":

This seems particularly important to consider given the upcoming conservative administration, as I think we are in a much better position to help with this conservative administration than the vast majority of groups associated with AI alignment stuff. We've never associated ourselves very much with either party, have consistently been against various woke-ish forms of mob justice for many years, and have clearly been read a non-trivial amount by Elon Musk (and probably also some by JD Vance).

"The reason for optimism is that we can cozy up to fascists!"

"Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously" is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for "problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer", BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they'd need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you'd never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.

To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:

The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.

Downvoting because you are a dorkus

Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.

Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.

From the documentation:

While reasoning tokens are not visible via the API, they still occupy space in the model's context window and are billed as output tokens.

Huh.

The list of diatribes about forum drama that are interesting and edifying for the outsider is not long, and this one is not on it.

I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.

Their writing is so boring I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to make a "senpai has noticed us" joke.

Quoth Yud:

There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see "a solar-powered self-replicating factory". I've never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It's not just the one fact.

It's almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after "these edibles ain't shit" is, I dunno, bad?

... as one does?

Shot, in the post:

Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.

Chaser, from the comments:

Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection

I just can't get over the "struggling with a flour sifter" bit. Like ... what's there to struggle with? What accessory would help a person locked in combat with a flour sifter? Another flour sifter, to intimidate the first with the knowledge that it can be replaced?