Some light uplifting news amid *gestures at everything*. I saw this a minute ago from the guy who runs TheCodingHorror and co-founded Stack Overflow and Discourse: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ifd3ys/im_giving_away_half_my_wealth_to_make_the/

No EA stuff! $1M each going to eight great charities and non-profits as far as I can tell: Children’s Hunger Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and Team Rubicon. (from The Trevor Project's blog post)

This stuff is getting pushed all the time in Obsidian plugins (note taking/personal knowledge management software). That kind of drives me crazy because the whole appeal of the app is your notes are just plain text you could easily read in notepad, but some people are chunking up their notes into tiny, confusing bite-sized pieces so it's better formatted for a RAG (wow, that sounds familiar)

Even without a RAG, using LLMs for searching is sketchy. I was digging through a lot of obscure Stack Overflow posts yesterday and was thinking, how could an LLM possibly help with this? It takes less than a second to type in the search terms and you just have to look at the titles and snippets of the results to tell if you're on the right track. You have the exact same bottleneck of typing and reading, except with ChatGPT or Copilot you also have to pad your query with a bunch of filler and read all the filler slop in the answer as it streams in a couple thousand times slower than dial-up. Maybe they're more equal with simpler questions you don't have to interrogate, but then why even bother? I've seen some people who say ChatGPT is faster, easier, and more accurate than Stack Overflow and even two crazy ones who said it's completely obsolete and trying to understand that perspective just causes me psychic damage.

I'm in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It's one of those things where AI bros will go, "Look, it's so good at poetry!!" but they have no taste and can't even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It's a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that's a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.

slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they'd work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is "small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!")

I don't think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.

Orange site example:

Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]

I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]

Reddit:

I think that's cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)

It's the first time I've used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I'm very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.

For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I've actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can't imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.

Friends don’t let friends OSINT

i can stop any time I want ^I^ ^swear^

The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.

apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/brian-thompson-unitedhealthcare-death-investigation-12-9-24#cm4hp9zyk000m3b6nobdudr15

not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it's his). didn't appear in the internet archive though.

also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don't touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what's in there):

• https://twitter.com/AntiTechCabin
• https://t.me/antitechcabin

I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn't make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them ("How Humans Are Becoming Dumber") cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and "Anti-Tech" was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?

edit: channel names were a little wrong, I put them in the parent comment

I think he might have adhd.

Oh no, I don't think we're ready for him to start mythologizing autism + ADHD.

Watching my therapist pull up Musk facts on his phone for 40 minutes going "bro check this out you're just like him frfr" the moment he learned I was autistic was enough for me. Please god don't let musk start talking about hyperfocusing.

I feel like the Internet Archive is a prime target for techfashy groups. Both for the amount of culture you can destroy, and because backed up webpages often make people with an ego the size of the sun look stupid.

Also, I can't remember but didn't Yudkowsky or someone else pretty plainly admit to taking a bunch of money during the FTX scandal? I swear he let slip that the funds were mostly dried up. I don't think it was ever deleted, but that's the sort of thing you might want to delete and could get really angry about being backed up in the Internet Archive. I think Siskind has edited a couple articles until all the fashy points were rounded off and that could fall in a similar boat. Maybe not him specifically, but there's content like that that people would rather not be remembered and the Internet Archive falling apart would be good news to them.

Also (again), it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours. Like it'd take one crazy person to do serious damage to it. I don't know but I'm hoping their >100PB of storage is including backups, even if it's not 3-2-1. I'm only mildly paranoid about it lol.

Oh look! Human horrors ~~beyond~~ regrettably within my comprehension

https://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817

If he collects enough metrics, he could make a horrendously cursed blogpost out of it like Aella

Chiming in with my own find!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/38590803/chapters/96467457

I've seen this person around a lot with crazy takes on AI. They have a couple quotes that might inflict psychic damage:

If I had the skill to pull it off, a Buddhist cultivation book would've thus been the single most rationalist xianxia in existence.

My acquaintance asks for rational-adjacent books suitable for 8-11 years old children that heavily feature training, self-improvement, etc. The acquaintance specifically asks that said hard work is not merely mentioned, but rather is actively shown in the story. The kid herself mostly wants stories "about magic" and with protagonists of about her age.

They had a long diatribe I don't have a copy of, but they were gloating about having masterful writing despite not reading any books besides non-fiction and HPMoR, their favorite book of all time.

There's also a whole subreddit from hell about this subgenre of fiction: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/

I love this but I don't know if I have the same royal Grape Fanta energy in me. I think I'm on one of the alternate themes but I like #333333

I'm not familiar with Indian politics but I'm curious if anyone understands what this site is or what its politics are https://democracycollective.in (I'm just nosy and curious, I saw this pop up out of nowhere)

Though maybe I already have an idea:

I hate that I saw that same post earlier today

Here's a quote from the book:

AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.

Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel