Entryism in the sneersphere

Absolutely stealing this.

51-post long thread on why rats are a cult,

Jjust finished reading it.

woke:

Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together.

Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel.

Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians.

broke:

I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:

these people are the enemies of humanity.

Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper.

It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck.

Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity.

Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.

Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.

Nice to see he’s been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky.

Just in time for TESCREAL (“the weirdo sf harry potter sex cult that runs AI”) to go viral too.

Yud isn’t necessarily inconsistent here: he really really wants the robot god to become real so it can invent the blowjob machine and win utilitarianism, but he only trusts people he’s met personally to do it, and certainly not those shifty celestials.

Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all.

Or as the AI2027 blog put it:

We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!

Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.

Burn it down and salt the earth then. What’s the point of whinging about it?

D) Could be they finally read the room and realized we’re not that many news cycles before experts warn AI might destroy your livelihood and also incarnate as a dark god of genocide turns to burn it.

Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:

Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”

But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.

image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z

I’m kind of surprised that this made the news in Greece, unlike the other 128 times something very similar happened. I wonder if anthropic marketing is pushing the story harder than usual, or if it’s the opposite and they’re asleep on the wheel or simply don’t think there’s anything to gain from trying to contain such stories anymore.

Running a game for any reasonable amount of time this way will bankrupt you may times over from token overspend. This is just to make investors horny, it’s not getting released in any meaningful way.

wtf is deal of that segyges person

He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of bluesky AI bootlicking fair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky.

Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.

This feels like a problem readily solvable by not playing shitty games.

They didn’t deny it, they said if the other workers’ research ended up in the training data it wasn’t deliberate. Then they gave the researcher who noticed the similarities a “co-publish with us or else” offer.

Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche and pointless as the op makes it sound.

Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.

LLMs can be scalpels

As in better suited for performing very fine tasks? It’s literally the opposite, being everything machines is their main feature, either in terms of churning out endless text at the vaguest provocation or by being a natural language intermediary between the user and the actual scalpel-like tools, that it then wields like a sledge hammer by forcing endless iterations until something sticks.

Wielded in the right hands, they can appear to work magic

Wielded in the right situation more like, which varies between models and can’t be a priori known.

lol pilgramage what. is he converting?

The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about.

Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.

The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.

an insane amount of compute had been used.

You don’t say.

structured language for interacting with LLM

that’s_not_how_any_of_this_works.webm

Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine.

That’s it. That’s the post.

i guess that’s why Cory Doctorow likes them so much.

edit: they are apparently professionally affiliated

What a POS