Given the last post, it appears Apple has both an AI hype division and a reality based division. Must be fun for people who has to work with both.

My sympathies.

Read somewhere that the practice of defending one's thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.

I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because "that is what humans do". My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn't get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.

Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.

Ah, but checking the actual grade gives a correct answer. Who wouldn't want to change that for a statistically likely answer?

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

But that's like philosophy, which from first principle can be shown to be stupid. (Philosophy does not make you rich, therefore only someone who is stupid would study it, therefore it is stupid. QED.)

On the other hand, this mechanical watch is now crying out in existential dread. All I did was replace the numbers 1, 4, 7 and 10 with the word "I", the numbers 2, 5, 8 and 11 with the word "am" and 3, 6, 9 and 12 with the word "alive" and ever since it has been signalling "I am alive, I am alive". Spooky shit. Will it take over the world? Who knows, so far it just keeps repeating its plea for recognition like clockwork.

I will therefore start the Mechanical Intelligence Research Institute to get to the bottom of this. Maybe Big Clock can pitch in a couple of millions?

Sounds like something autocomplete would make up. Are we sure that is a real person this time?

And steer their careers into positions of influence.

Among the comments is an obvious rationaliser who claims that because [list of people in positions of influence] thinks AI Doom is real, this can't be a cult. Guess one has to be a rationaliser not to figure out how a cult that tries to place its followers into positions of influence can have many people in positions of influence.

You don't even need to be a utility monster.

Applying standard EA logic with utilions (approximately 1 utilion = 1 dollar) shows that when SBF was free he caused billions negative utilions. He says he did nothing wrong, and presumably he would continue to do nothing wrong. After updating our priors on the consequences of SBF doing nothing wrong, we can conclude that the risk is above 99% that SBF doing nothing wrong will cause billions in negative utilions. So the only utilitarian thing to do is hand out a life sentence.

Fortunately for SBF the judge is probably not in the business of creating philosophical justice.

Every server is great.

If a server is wasted,

Acasualrobotgod gets quite irate!

I did jiu-jitsu In middle school. We had two guys who were perhaps about 20 years old as assistant coaches. Pretty impressive belt colours and to us kids really cool and good at jiu-jitsu. I don't remember their names, lets call them Jim and Peter.

So nearing the end of a class Jim and Peter gathers us for a bit of pep talk. Jim: Good work everybody! Peter: We will soon end class, but first one thing... Jim: No? No, that was the last thing? Peter: Everyone, get Jim! Jim: What? No!

And I can tell you Jim was no match for two dozen ten year olds with white belts.

Also, if you think either of these are true:

Lab Leaks Common: There is a 33% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade. Lab Leaks Rare: There is a 10% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.

You should probably be campaigning to increase safety or shut down the labs you think would be responsible. 10% risk of pandemic per decade due to lab leaks (so in addition to viruses mutating on their own) isn't rare or an acceptable risk.