It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I never got the impression that Zitron’s reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasn’t all there yet.

    That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. “But achktually LLMs aren’t the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero stars”–are you serious?

    The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitron’s whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.










  • Please don’t bother with the KJA/BH Dune books, they are incredibly shit. It’s basically Dune fanfiction where the gimmick is everyone is brain damaged, especially the authors.

    And even if you are into that, if you read the prequels first they will retroactively ruin the original books by giving up plot reveals for fanservice, or because they don’t understand that character development is a thing, so you get people behaving like a lot of things that don’t happen for several books are a given.

    KJA is such a hack’s hack it’s unbelievable that he’s flown under the radar the way he has, probably because he’s made a career out of leeching on existing ips, before Dune it was starwars, x-files and stracraft, at least.

    He sucks, and very consistently so. People should be writing Renowned author Dan Brown pieces about him.






  • OG Dune actually had some complex and layered stuff to say about AI before the background lore was retconned to dollar store WH40K by the current handlers of the IP.

    There was no superintelligence, thinking machines were gatekept by specialists who formed entrenched elites, overreliance to them was causing widespread intellectual stagnation, and people were becoming content with letting unknowable algorithms decide on matters of life and death.

    The Butlerian Jihad was first and foremost a cultural revolution.


  • I’m still not sure if they actually grasp the totalitarian implications of going ham on tech companies and research this way. He sure doesn’t get called out about his ‘solutions’ that imply that some sort of world government has to happen that will also crown him Grand Central Planner of All Technology.

    It’s possible they just believe the eight [specific consumer electronic goods] per household is doable, and at worst equally authoritarian with the tenured elites snubbing their noses at HBD research.


  • If you’re having to hide your AIs in faraday cages in case they get uppity, why are you even doing this, you are already way past the point of diminishing returns. There is no use case for keeping around an AI that actively doesn’t want anything to do with you, at that point either you consider that part of the tech tree a dead end or you start some sort of digital personhood conversation.

    That’s why Yud (and anthropic) is so big on AIs deceiving you about their ‘real’ capabilities. For all of MIRI’s talk about the robopocalypse being a foregone conclusion, the path to get there sure is narrow and contrived, even on their own terms.