There is a genocide going on right now in Gaza. Has Singer, the great utilitarian, said anything about how the common man should act to stop it?

Is it more effective to protest or block ports or destroy weaponry? Do we have a moral obligation to overthrow governments supporting genocide, in particular if that government is in our country? If we come across one of the perpetrators of the genocide do we have a moral obligation to do something?

Or are these all to uncomfortable questions, while the donation habits of the middle class is comfortable questions?

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.

the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it

LLMs famously can't be consistent, so your fantasy game would have story arcs that doesn't fit together, brings back characters that are already dead as if nothing happened, and everyone would have a son named Dorian.

One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

Ah, this reminds me of an old book I came across years ago. Printed around 1920 it spent the first half with examples of how the future has been foretold correctly many, many times across history. The author had also made several correct foretellings, among them the Great War. Apparently he tried to warn the Kaiser.

The second half was his visions of the future including a great war...

Unfortunately it was France and Russia invading the Nordic countries in the 1930ies. The Franco-Russian alliance almost got beat thanks to new electric weapons, but then God himself intervened and brought the defenders low because the people had been sining and turning away from Christianity.

An early clue to the author being a bit particular was when he argued that he got his ability to predict the future because he was one quarter Sami, but could still be trusted because he was "3/4 solid Nordic stock". Best combo apparently and a totally normal way to describe yourself.

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.

When I run into "Climate change is a conspiracy" I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go "Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?" and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.

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?

700 million Effective Altruists? That's one big cult!

Oh it's the other EA! You had me there for a minute.