Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
I've been made aware of a new manifesto. Domain registered September 2024.
Anyone know anything about the ludlow institute folks? I see some cryptocurrency-adjacent figures, and I'm aware of Phil Zimmerman of course, but I'm wondering what the new grift angles are going to be, or whether this is just more cypherpunk true believer stuff.
Looks like cypherpunk slop
Tech manifestos are so cringe.
CW: state of the world, depressing
(USA disappears 60k untermensch in a year; three minorities massacred successively in Syria; explicit genocide in Palestine richly documented for an uncaring world; the junta continues to terrorise Myanmar; Ukrainian immigrants kicked back into the meat grinder with tacit support of EU xenophobia; entire Eastern Europe living under looming Russian imperialism; EU ally Turkey continues to ethnically cleanse Kurds with no consequences; El Salvador becomes police state dystopia; Mexico, Equador, Haiti, Jamaica murder rates lowkey comparable to warzones; AfD polling at near-NSDAP levels; massacre in Sudan; massacre in Iran; Trump declares himself president of Venezuela and announces Greenland takeover; ecological polycrisis accelerates in the background, ignored by State and capital)
techies: ok but let's talk about what really matters: coding. programming is our weapon, knowledge is our shield. cryptography is the revolution…
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn't as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they've stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer for...
Deep-1’s misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it “misaligned” because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.
Given the Trump administration, and the US's behavior in general even before him... and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and "Agent-4" over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn't.
Also random part I found extra especially stupid...
It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.
LLM "agents" currently can't coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we're supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache
Man, it just feels embarrassing at this point. Like I couldn’t fathom writing this shit. It’s 2026, we have ai capable of getting imo gold, acing the putnam, winning coding competitions… but at this point it should be extremely obvious these systems are completely devoid of agency?? They just sit there kek
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
I'll start with this gem
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didn't mention that part for some reason.
One more:
I knew there was somethin' not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
This one is just eternally ???!!!
Okay this takes the cake wtf
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasn't written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasn't good TV or even good animation. There wasn't even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
That's it! He usually wasn't allowed to write alone. I'm not sure if we'll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asok's name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. I'm not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
ok if I saw “every male encounter is implied violence” tweeted from an anonymous account I’d see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily it’s just weird brainrot from adams here
it's not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adams's inspiration for the product was that "diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time." He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called "the blue jeans of food".
The New York Times noted the burrito "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste".
Jesus christ that's a murder
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Alice's anger isn't a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
It's the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy -- who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! -- but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider "truth-teller."
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didn't really want that anyway. I've been reading through JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: "Why be #1 when you can be #2?"
I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others
If COVID made you a bad person -- it didn't, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened -- a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress -- then no, I'm sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, it's just a mask-off moment
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we're on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and it's ponderously flabby!
From r/bonaroo in 2024, when the sun was really insisting upon itself.
alt text
Furby smoking a marijuana. A caption says: "Vibes, but at what cost"
From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week
The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.
Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout... or just gullible...
That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.
Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP... But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren't evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren't as bad as '08.
"It sounds so insignificant when you put it like that, I can hardly believe I'm in a bread line because of a manufactured poly-crisis it was a part of!"
Very smart commentator:
This particular explosive barrel is no more potent than any of the dozens of other explosive barrels in this room.
when I saw that they'd rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?
Willison:
I haven't reviewed a single line of code it wrote but I clicked around and it seems to do the right things.
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
Via YouTube recommends, I came across this video about our favorite crypto pivot to ai NeoCloud data center company CoreWeave
How CoreWeave is near insolvency
Interestingly, the author is an LLM shill as evidenced by the video being caked with a hefty layer of copium.
Seems to have struck a nerve amongst the commentariat which didn't appreciate this kind of "FUD".
seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.