there were bits and pieces that made me feel like Jon Evans was being a tad too sympathetic to Elizer and others whose track record really should warrant a somewhat greater degree of scepticism than he shows, but i had to tap out at this paragraph from chapter 6:

Scott Alexander is a Bay Area psychiatrist and a writer capable of absolutely magnificent, incisive, soulwrenching work ... with whom I often strongly disagree. Some of his arguments are truly illuminatory; some betray the intellectual side-stepping of a very smart person engaged in rationalization and/or unwillingness to accept the rest of the world will not adopt their worldview. (Many of his critics, unfortunately, are inferior writers who misunderstand his work, and furthermore suggest it’s written in bad faith, which I think is wholly incorrect.) But in fairness 90+% of humanity engages in such rationalization without even worrying about it. Alexander does, and challenges his own beliefs more than most.

the fact that Jon praises Scott's half-baked, anecdote-riddled, Red/Blue/Gray trichotomy as "incisive" (for playing the hits to his audience), and his appraisal of the meandering transhumanist non-sequitur reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl as "soulwrenching" really threw me for a loop.

and then the later description of that ultimately rather banal New York Times piece as "long and bad" (a hilariously hypocritical set of adjectives for a self-proclaimed fan of some of Scott's work to use), and the slamming of Elizabeth Sandifer as being a "inferior writer who misunderstands Scott's work", for uh, correctly analyzing Scott's tendencies to espouse and enable white supremacist and sexist rhetoric... yeah it pretty much tanks my ability to take what Jon is writing at face value.

i don't get how after so many words being gentle but firm about Elizer's (lack of) accomplishments does he put out such a full-throated defense of Scott Alexander (and the subsequent smearing of his """enemies"""). of all people, why him?

as someone who only draws as a hobbyist, but who has taken commissions before, i think it would be very annoying to have a prospective client go "okay so here's what i want you to draw" and then send over ai-generated stuff. if only because i know said client is setting their expectations for the hyper-processed, over-tuned look of the machine instead of what i actually draw

i couldn't resist

at least when this rhetoric popped up around crypto and GameStop stocks, there was a get-rich-quick scheme attached to it. these fuckers are doing it for free

simply ask the word generator machine to generate better words, smh

this is actually the most laughable/annoying thing to me. it betrays such a comprehensive lack of understanding of what LLMs do and what "prompting" even is. you're not giving instructions to an agent, you are feeding a list of words to prefix to the output of a word predictor

in my personal experiments with offline models, using something like "below is a transcript of a chat log with XYZ" as a prompt instead of "You are XYZ" immediately gives much better results. not good results, but better

The point is that even if the chances of [extinction by AGI] are extremely slim

the chances are zero. i don't buy into the idea that the "probability" of some made-up cataclysmic event is worth thinking about as any other number because technically you can't guarantee that a unicorn won't fart AGI into existence which in turn starts converting our bodies into office equipment

It's kind of like with the trinity nuclear test. Scientists were almost 100% confident that it wont cause a chain reaction that sets the entire atmosphere on fire

if you had done just a little bit of googling instead of repeating something you heard off of Oppenheimer, you would know this was basically never put forward as serious possibility (archive link)

which is actually a fitting parallel for "AGI", now that i think about it

EDIT: Alright, well this community was a mistake..

if you're going to walk in here and diarrhea AGI Great Filter sci-fi nonsense onto the floor, don't be surprised if no one decides to take you seriously

...okay it's bad form but i had to peek at your bio

Sharing my honest beliefs, welcoming constructive debates, and embracing the potential for evolving viewpoints. Independent thinker navigating through conversations without allegiance to any particular side.

seriously do all y'all like. come out of a factory or something

i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".

like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"

i cant stop scrolling through this hot garbage, it just keeps getting better

i'll take trolls "pretending" to not understand computational time over fascists "pretending" to gush over other fascists any day

i can't tell if this is a joke suggestion, so i will very briefly treat it as a serious one:

getting the machine to do critical thinking will require it to be able to think first. you can't squeeze orange juice from a rock. putting word prediction engines side by side, on top of each other, or ass-to-mouth in some sort of token centipede, isn't going to magically emerge the ability to determine which statements are reasonable and/or true

and if i get five contradictory answers from five LLMs on how to cure my COVID, and i decide to ignore the one telling me to inject bleach into my lungs, that's me using my regular old intelligence to filter bad information, the same way i do when i research questions on the internet the old-fashioned way. the machine didn't get smarter, i just have more bullshit to mentally toss out

it's funny how your first choice of insult is accusing me of not being deep enough into llm garbage. like, uh, yeah, why would i be

but also how dare you -- i'll have you know i only choose the most finely-tuned, artisinally-crafted models for my lawyering and/or furry erotic roleplaying needs

as previously discussed, the rabbit r1 turns out to be (gasp) just an android app.

in a twist no one saw coming, the servers running "rabbit os" report to just be running Ubuntu, and the "large action model" that was supposed to be able to watch humans use interfaces and learn how to use them, turns out to just be a series of hardcoded places to click in Playwright.

actually, i don't think possessing the ability to send email entitles you to """debate""" with anyone who publishes material disagreeing with you or the way your company runs, and i'm pretty sure responding with a (polite) "fuck off" is a perfectly reasonable approach to the kinds of people who believe they have an inalienable right to argue with you