TechTakes

In which the talking pinball machine goes TILT

Interesting how the human half of discussion interprets the incoherent rambling as evidence of sentience rather than the seemingly more sensible lack thereof^1^. I'm not sure why the idea of disoriented rambling as a sign of consciousness exists in the popular imagination. If I had to make a guess^2^ it might have something to do with the tropes of divine visions and speaking in tongues combined with the view of life/humanity/sapience as inherently painful, either in a sort of buddhist sense or in the somewhat overlapping nihilist/depressive sense.

[1] To something of their credit, they don't seem to go full EY and acknowledge it's probably just a glitch.

[2] I'd make a terrible LessWronger since I don't like presenting my gut feelings as theorem-like absolute truths.

Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.

Science shows that the brain and the rest of the nervous system stops at death. How that relates to the notion of consciousness is still pretty much unknown, and many neuroscientists will tell you that. We haven't yet found an organ or process in the brain responsible for the conscious mind that we can say stops at death.

no matter how many neuroscientists I ask, none of them will tell me which part of the brain contains the soul. the orange site actually has a good sneer for this:

You don't need to know which part of the brain corresponds to a conscious mind when they entire brain is dead.

a lot of the rest of the thread is the most braindead right-libertarian version of Pascal’s Wager I’ve ever seen:

Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants.

By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise.

Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms?

Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available.

and therefore the only rational course of action is to put $100,000 straight into the pockets of grifters. how dare I make any value judgments at all about cryonicists based on their extreme distaste for the scientific method, consistent history of failure, and use of extremely exploitative marketing?

Eminent domain? Never heard of it! Sounds like a fantasy from the "economical illiterate."

Edit: This entire thread is a trash fire, by the way. I'm only highlighting the silliest bit from one of the more aggressive landlords.

The problem is that today's state of the art is far too good for low hanging fruit. There isn't a testable definition of GI that GPT-4 fails that a significant chunk of humans wouldn't also fail so you're often left with weird ad-hominins ("Forget what it can do and results you see. It's "just" predicting the next token so it means nothing") or imaginary distinctions built on vague and ill defined assertions ( "It sure looks like reasoning but i swear it isn't real reasoning. What does "real reasoning" even mean ? Well idk but just trust me bro")

a bunch of posts on the orange site (including one in the linked thread with a bunch of mask-off slurs in it) are just this: techfash failing to make a convincing argument that GPT is smart, and whenever it’s proven it isn’t, it’s actually that “a significant chunk of people” would make the same mistake, not the LLM they’ve bullshitted themselves into thinking is intelligent. it’s kind of amazing how often this pattern repeats in the linked thread: GPT’s perceived successes are puffed up to the highest extent possible, and its many(, many, many) failings are automatically dismissed as something that only makes the model more human (even when the resulting output is unmistakably LLM bullshit)

This is quite unfair. The AI doesn't have I/O other than what we force-feed it through an API. Who knows what will happen if we plug it into a body with senses, limbs, and reproductive capabilities? No doubt somebody is already building an MMORPG with human and AI characters to explore exactly this while we wait for cyborg part manufacturing to catch up.

drink! “what if we gave the chatbot a robot body” is my favorite promptfan cliche by far, and this one has it all! virtual reality, cyborgs, robot fucking, all my dumbass transhumanist favorites

There's actually a cargo cult around downplaying AI.

The high level characteristics of this AI is something we currently cannot understand.

The lack of objectivity, creativity, imagination, and outright denial you see on HN around this topic is staggering.

no, you’re all the cargo cult! I asked my cargo and it told me so

Excerpt:

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He's also a big eugenics supporter:

“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight .com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.”

(Reminds me a lot of the things Scott Siskind has written in the past.)

Some people who have been friendly with Hanania:

• Mark Andreessen, Silion Valley VC and co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz
• Hamish McKenzie, CEO of Substack
• Elon Musk, Chief Enshittification Officer of Tesla and Twitter
• Tyler Cowen, libertarian econ blogger and George Mason University prof
• J.D. Vance, US Senator from Ohio
• Steve Sailer, race (pseudo)science promoter and all-around bigot
• Amy Wax, racist law professor at UPenn.
• Christopher Rufo, right-wing agitator and architect of many of Florida governor Ron DeSantis's culture war efforts

500+ comment thread on whether late marriage and young adult promiscuity causes de-emphasis on movie fanservice. Ongoing record lows of sexual activity among young adults do not seem to factor into the analysis.

Here's Jared Spool talking about knowing who/what you are designing for as if it's a novel idea. This UX influencer opinion that being able to recognise that you're making something for people is some kind of UX skill superpower. Yet they never acknowledge the critical distinction between designing for-profit vs their usual non-commercial case study examples, like this one of a European government ministry.

Commercial design has always been somewhat dumb in how egotistical it is, but we're in a golden age of believing ones own bullshit where people think that UX is a force for good separate from whatever the UXer is being paid to do. In an ad agency, that kind of ignorance was usually isolated to the sales suits who snorted copious amounts of coke to cope with the internal anguish, while everyone else was comfortable with being paid a lot of money to make ads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230804073453/https://articles.centercentre.com/how-ux-outcomes-make-a-teams-daily-work-truly-human-centered/

this almost deserves to be on that website with graphs of funny correlations

Running llama-2-7b-chat at 8 bit quantization, and completions are essentially at GPT-3.5 levels on a single 4090 using 15gb VRAM. I don't think most people realize just how small and efficient these models are going to become.

[cut out many, many paragraphs of LLM-generated output which prove… something?]

my chatbot is so small and efficient it only fully utilizes one $2000 graphics card per user! that’s only 450W for as long as it takes the thing to generate whatever bullshit it’s outputting, drawn by a graphics card that’s priced so high not even gamers are buying them!

you’d think my industry would have learned anything at all from being tricked into running loud, hot, incredibly power-hungry crypto mining rigs under their desks for no profit at all, but nah

not a single thought spared for how this can’t possibly be any more cost-effective for OpenAI either; just the assumption that their APIs will somehow always be cheaper than the hardware and energy required to run the model

A couple artefacts from my personal pocket of dislike for the company:

Google dot com used table layout components till feb 2022 - something that has been semantically incorrect since forever.

Google's Web.dev, a stealth advertising project disguised as a developer community, has poor accessibility test results—on AXE and it's own Lighthouse test—where developer.mozilla.org scores 100% on Lighthouse and passes with minor issues in AXE tests.

RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.

Background on the authors according to a far-left website.

Let's at least be honest.

That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".)

The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.

as the infrastructure admin of a highly biased far-left cancel community that attacks people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander: mmm delicious

for bonus sneers, see the entire rest of the thread for the orange site’s ideas on why they don’t need therapy:

I was about to start psychotherapy last month, I ask my family's friend therapist If he could recommend me where to go. So he interviewed me for about 30 mins and ask me about all my problems.

A week later he send me the number of the therapist. I didnt write her yet, I think I dont need it as badly as before.

Those 30 mins were key. I am highly introspective and logical, I only needed to orderly speak my problems.

to quote Key & Peele: motherfucker, that’s called a job

Saw this last night but decided to give them a few hours to backtrack. Surprisingly, they've decided to leave their comments intact!

This sort of attitude, not directly harassing trans folks but just asking questions about their moral fiber indirectly, seems to be coming from some playbook; it looks like a structured disinformation source, and I wonder what motivates them.

hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!

If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.

Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […]

Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.

I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body

So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated.

...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.

for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!

OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation

https://archive.is/AyosK

this lends credence to the stealth comrade theory, btw

reposting here for better visibility (let me know if there’s a better way to do this now that we’re federated): the owners of hachyderm.io just started a generative AI for gaming project, and it looks like donations to them will likely end up going to that

Started following @techtakes and there sure are some Opinions in the replies

I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.

This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"

I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232

"The sad thing is that if the officer had not made a few key missteps … he might have covered his bases well enough to avoid consequences." Yeah, so sad.

For bonus sneer, check out their profile.

It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.

Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).

I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.

Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.

my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is

there’s also this at the top of the thread:

I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.

This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.

Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.

turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent

musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed

remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads

the API is called Web Environment Integrity, and it’s a way to kill ad blockers first and a Google ecosystem lock-in mechanism second, with no other practical use case I can find

Wolfram’s post is fucking interminable and consists of about 20% semi-interesting math and 80% goofy shit like deciding that the creepy (to Wolfram) images in the AI model’s probability space must represent how aliens perceive the world. to my memory, this is about par for the course for Wolfram

the orange site decides that the reason why the output isn’t very interesting is because the AI isn’t a robot:

What we see from AI is what you get when you remove the "muscle module", and directly apply the representations onto the paper. There's no considering of how to fill in a pixel; there's just a filling of the pixel directly from the latent space.

It's intriguing. Also makes me wonder if we need to add a module in between the representational output and the pixel output. Something that mimics how we actually use a brush.

this lack of muscle memory is, of course, why we have never done digital art once in the history of humanity. all claims to the contrary are paid conspirators in the pocket of Big Dick Blick

Of course, the AIs can't wake up if we use that analogy. They are not capable of anything more than this state right now.

But to me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.

only 10x lucid dreamers wake up after falling asleep

we can progressively increase the numerical values of the weights—eventually in some sense “blowing the mind” of the network (and going a bit “psychedelic” in the process)

I wonder if there's a more exact analog of the action of psychedelics on the brain that could be performed on generative models?

I always find it interesting how a hero dose of LSD gives similar visuals to what these image AI's do to achieve a coherent image.

[more nonsense]

I feel like the more we get AI to act like humans, and the more those engineers and others use LSD, the more convergence we are going to have with curiosity and breakthroughs about how we function.

the next time you’re in an altered state, I want you to close your eyes and just imagine how annoyed you’d be if one of these shitheads was there with you, trying to get you to “form a BCI” or whatever by typing free association words into ChatGPT