TechTakes

Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they've switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7

Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.

Quote: Humans able use the adversarial bots’ tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? “It’s a great question I definitely wrestled with,” Gleave says. “We’ve started saying ‘typically superhuman’.” David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are “superhuman on average” but not “superhuman in the worst cases”.

Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.

Funniest fuckin' sentence I have read today:

First off, if you've read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.

From the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:

Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.

Crypto

Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.

Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space

Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.

When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.

https://xcancel.com/kitten_beloved/status/1810709361175691474

In which TPOT unites to yell at scooter because he isn’t down with mental health apartheid schemes.

And in other news:

Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.

Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?

(I’ll try put a decent summary of links on this later)

there’s a UK party that (aiui) committed electoral crimes by submitting non-existing genML-created people as candidates, a whole new usecase!

gonna be real fun to see that catching sunlight, if TNI manages to do due process right

Over at "work on climate" there's been an influx of companies that will greenwash using ChatGPT. One company I interviewed for (in my estimation it) boiled down to using ChatGPT to make generic greening recommendations for a business and attach hallucinated numbers that the client can then pass off for themselves.

Edit: is there a list of companies that use "prompt engineering" so that I can just avoid them?

found this linked in ed zitron comment section for some reason: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/

With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.

joke's on you, MSDSs are already dogshit. these things only exist to cover ass of manufacturers and are filled with generic, useless advice https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/un-safety-data-sheets there is MSDS for sand, MSDS for tear gas and ethanol lists the same dangers, toxicity is overemphasized (because it's common) and some other dangers like explosiveness are underappreciated (because it's not), we don't even need LLMs for this, humans (lawyers mostly i guess) did the same on accident

also bonus points for first-principling what could have been instead of asking somebody that actually knows, like any proper rationalist would do. also, vinyl chloride is not reactive with water and spraying pressurized containers with water can be a sensible thing to do, because this cools them down, so it decreases pressure meaning it decreases risk of rupture, which would be a bad thing, if manageable for firefighters to do it safely. see: some fires involving propane tanks

An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;

Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one ("appropriate respirator"), it's your job to figure out what it is

NSFW, Sterling on the weird language of LLMs

https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b

I've been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?

we've reached some zenith of insane facebook AI slop

hot Japanese cabin crew, barefoot, on a farm, with Jesus

(image)

https://t.co/rBxJwxtqDl

Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).

If Books Could Kill back with Hanania's piece of work https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/afe6b965e80359c1edbb86f78bde3997

opening line "This book's so fucking stupid, I regret choosing it"

tesla: special treatment for those that might cause embarrassing press

gives all the “it works for me” type comments a whole new colour

This happened a while ago and I still have mixed feelings about it: a band I like started a music label and named it p(doom): https://pdoomrecords.com/

So remember when Google Domains got sold off to Squarespace because it wasn't profitable enough and Google has the attention span of a squirrel?

Well that meant bye bye MFA for anyone who didn't check their email diligently enough, allegedly leading to a number of cryptocurrency domains getting hacked.

The cryptocurrency aspect is mostly just funny, but Google and Squarespace should know better than to effectively disable MFA out from under people. Tech companies put profit over people all the time. And then everyone blames the people for not being hyper-vigilant about computer security.

Edit: The tweet linked in that bleepingcomputer article is funny if this was indeed the issue: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi/status/1811683909509558562

Some "defi" company realized this could be a problem 22 hours before they were hacked. Even had time to write a tool to mitigate the impact of getting hacked. Got hacked anyway. Did they uhh... IDK change their password? Make sure MFA was set up? They don't say.

This released today: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf

Cool (horrifying) look into one of the active Russian bot farms and their use of generative AI

Pedro Domingos tries tilting at the doomers

The doom prediction in question? Dec 31st 2024. It's been an honour serving with you lads. 🫡

Edit: as a super forecastor, my P(Connor will shut the fuck up due to being catastrophically wrong | I wake up on Jan 1st with a pounding hang over) = (1/10)^100

This part of Ed Zitron's latest post jumped out at me:

While Acemoglu has some positive things to say — for example, that AI models could be trained to help scientists conceive of and test new materials (which happened last year) — his general verdict is quite harsh: that using generative AI and "too much automation too soon could create bottlenecks and other problems for firms that no longer have the flexibility and trouble-shooting capabilities that human capital provides."

Click, click, search... Oh:

The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.