The grad student survives [torturing rats] by compartmentalizing, focusing their thoughts on the scientific benefits of the research, and leaning on their support network. I’m doing the same thing, and so far it’s going fine.
printf("HELP I AM IN SUCH PAIN")
guys I need someone to talk to, am I justified in causing my computer pain?
The brilliant minds at the orange site have discovered what's stifling research: Academics don't know how to use JSON! Surely, forcing every graduate student to go through a webdev bootcamp is the solution.
In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”
And yet reading that should give us at least some pause
The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.
This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didn't notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. It's funny in a disgusting way.
It's a huge failure of computing that this is the most convenient and obvious way to do this.
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it's a pretty decent source of sneers. This month's contains: "The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin". In classic Moldbug fashion, it's Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I'll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 --
Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that's simple and easy to use that's not a small amount of of work
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 -- a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You're the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 -- here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as "oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy" and responding by saying "nuh uh, urbit is decentralized." Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.
So the top response is asking the painfully obvious question: how is this secure? Some dude (not sure if it's one of the startup employees) responds "Let's just use homomorphic encryption!" then throws a pissy fit because some people downvoted the suggestion of running extremely inefficient computation on rented hardware.
someone re-invented email-threading. It's billed as a way to have "long and complex discussions." Their prototypical example? Yud's utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.
Wow, thanks for sharing this. I didn't realize they were so explicit about it.
I wasn't exactly sure where to put it, so I searched "charter city" and Lemmy threw up a few times but eventually showed me an older SneerClub post about prospera. I would have posted it in techtakes otherwise.
Absent from this analysis: reduction in QALYs resulting from perfectly good men being denied a child bride by some evil meddling NGO. Will someone please think of the poor men?
I'm actually somewhat surprised that the rationalists didn't bring this up.
Sean Munger, my favorite history YouTuber, has released a 3-hour long video on technology cultists from railroads all the way to LLMs. I have not watched this yet but it is probably full of delicious sneers.