Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/

It’s a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won’t copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:

• Grokipedia’s article on Wikipedia uses the word “ideological” or “ideologically” 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it’s Wikipedia article).
• Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “biological males”. The last paragraph of the article “The Wachowskis” is downright unhinged.
• The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.

Also certain articles have this at the bottom:

The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible “scroll driven” web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.

Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that’s not actually necessary.

Crypto Investor Proposes 450-Foot Statue of Greek God on Alcatraz Island is a story making the rounds in the press lately and aaaaaah I hate it. I’d say something more coherent than that but it’s already given me quite a headache.

He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly – apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.

Yet another billboard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1ob2l2o/replacement_ai_billboard_in_san_francisco_who/

https://replacement.ai/

This time the website is a remarkably polished satire and I almost liked it… but the email it encourages you to send to your congressperson is pretty heavy on doomer talking points and light on actual good ideas (but maybe I’m being too picky?):

I’m starting to think some of these tech skeptics are only pretending to be skeptics.

Reading romance is great and I highly recommend it. The trick is to find the good ones.

Being an actual character in a romance would also be great (for a sufficiently high quality romance with a sufficiently peaceful setting, and assuming I get to keep free will and also keep living after the story ends – ok that’s a lot of caveats but how else would it work?).

The latest in the long line of human-hostile billboards:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1o8s3lz/humanity_had_a_good_run_billboard/

https://dearworld.ai/

This is positioning itself as an AI doomer website; but it could also be an attempt at viral marketing. We’ll see I guess.

That Wikipedia article is cursed:

For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.

I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my “before anyone asks I’m pro LGBTQ and pro immigrant” shirt.

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1976304803744501775

Best I can do now is try to make sure that at least one AI is truth-seeking and not a super woke nanny with an iron fist that wants to turn everyone into diverse women 😬

Edit: It only just now occured to me that hes’ probably whining about generative AI rather than an army of superintelligent robots marching across the earth transing people, but I’m leaving my comment.

I tend to think of Toys (1992) for these sorts of themes though I haven’t watched the film from start to finish since I was a kid. It’s about the militarization of a wealthy family toy factory and has a lot of scenes that stuck with me.

It’s a Christmas family movie that reviewed horribly so definitely counts as a cult classic, but those who like it tend to really like it.

deleted by creator

The Call of Duty Cinematic Universe:

The article claims that Google didn’t “fall for the same trap” but that’s not correct, all this garbage is indeterministic so the author just got “lucky”.

It’s like saying “four out of five coin-flips claimed that an eagle was the first US president” – just because the fifth landed on heads and showed George Washington doesn’t mean it’s any different than the rest.

But here I’m preaching to the choir.

Honestly Hanson is so awful the rationalists almost make him look better by association.

But wait I thought the reasoning AIs were going to come up with fantastical sci-fi solutions to all our global warming problems! Maybe we didn’t shovel enough coal at them?

A lot of companies use “vibe coding” an excuse to offshore software development work to cheaper countries without anyone noticing.

But yeah it’s not gonna work out in the long term for a business that:

• Encourages people to submit random nonsense to the codebase instead of doing actual work
• Removes all entry-level positions
• Lays off anyone who knows what they’re doing

That’s how you get a codebase that kinda sorta works in a way but is more evolved than designed, full of security holes, slow as heck, and disorganized to the point where it’s impossible to fix bugs, adds features, or understand what’s going on.

The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.

He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.

His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.

And yet, per Steven Pinker, “a middle-aged congresswoman does not radiate the same animal magnetism to the opposite sex that a middle-aged congressman does”. What’s the deal?

OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, “radiate animal magnetism”. Anyone? Anyone?

In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.