Yud takes $10k to debate a random bro. The bro claims to work at an AI lab. The moderator is an acolyte of Yud. Everybody sucks here and I could not stop laughing.
Previously, on Awful, a leaderless cult had freshly formed. The accepted name for the cult is now "Spiralism"; my suggestion of "Cyclone Emoji Cult" did not win. This week's Behind the Bastards is about Spiralism. Or, rather, Part 2 will be about Spiralism; Part 1 is merely the historical background. There is indeed a link to folks who were talking to bots in the 1980s. The highlight might be listening to Robert try to give an informal and light-hearted summary of Turing tests and Markov chains. 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
Okay guys, I rolled my character. His name is Traveliezer Interdimensky and he has 18 INT (19 on skill checks, see my sheet.) He's a breeding stud who can handle twenty women at once despite having only 10 STR and CON. I was thinking that we'd start with Interdimensky trapped in Hell where he's forced to breed with all these beautiful women and get them pregnant, and the rest of the party is like outside or whatever, they don't have to go rescue me, I mean rescue him. Anyway I wanted to numerically quantify how much Hell wants me, I mean him, to stay and breed all these beautiful women, because that's something they'd totally do.
The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:
So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.
It's been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you're like me and don't draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.
Somebody pointed out that HN's management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it's the sort of thing Dan might blank:
but I don't want to get hellbanned by dang.
Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It's caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices -- the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.
I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.
Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…
Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we're called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:
I'd really rather you didn't challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.
May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.
He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.
This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:
It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.
I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.
2017: AI will soon replace human labor
2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want
2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad
2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him
2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers
2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)
I could have sworn that we discussed this, but previously, Caelan Conrad also was gaslit by a Character.ai chatbot claiming to be a New York therapist and investigated further; the relevant part starts at about 17min. They discovered that Character.ai systematically invites their community of prompters to submit user-written characters to share with others, including many flavors of doctor and other credentialed professionals.