gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Using the term "Antichrist" as a shorthand for "global stable totalitarianism" is A Choice.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

old timey eugenicists were all about preventing "unsuitable" people from having kids, thereby circumventing natural selection. It's not as if they didn't purposefully misunderstand the phrase "survival of the fittest"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

You know stuff is bad if the margins aren't "low" or "razor-thin" but "very negative".

The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we'll make up for it in volume?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (14 children)

Guess either term hasn't started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.

FWIW I'd say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Most inhabitants of Iran would dislike being called Arabs... but I guess the lazy racists are just using it as a shorthand for "brown people who are Muslim"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Is Hughes legit, and is this the 3rd time's the charm when it comes to linking to substacks here? ;)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

cue botlickers whining about "robot discrimination"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

HN is all manly and butch about "saying it like it is" when some techbro is in trouble for xhitting out a racism, but god forbid someone says something mean about sama or pg

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Here's a writeup on how to do this practically

https://ache.one/notes/html_zip_bomb

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research

So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say

Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [...] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I'd consider a sign of preference and planning.

OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.

Yud continues:

But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn't try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.

Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?

Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.

4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [...]

NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!

Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I've read some SF/F where the author is way more into worldbuilding than their readers are...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I read HP before JK came out as a rabid reactionary, and while I didn't rate the later books the first 3 or 4 were decent YA fantasy. You could see the lineage of classic British public school stories (if you want a better example, check out Kim Newman's Drearcliff Grange series) and there's enough allusions to classic myth and fantasy to keep the wheels on the cart. But somewhere around there Rowling became richer than God and could basically fire anyone who disagreed with her.

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