TechTakes

The Luigi thing is already souring on me a bit as a saw a yter use his actions to threaten gaming companies. (And it wasnt even some super predatory gaming company it was really a "wtf dude" moment. Dont get me wrong im not mourning the CEO, and the McDonald's guy was wrong, but jesus fuck Gamers ruin everything.

E: And it wasn't even about Fortnite, or Roblox like those predatory goes after kids things, nope just some dumb live service game with a cosmetics store badly bolted on in a corner. Sure horse armor sucks, but damn touch some grass and note the difference between lifetimes in debt or die and paying for overprices skins.

there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.

The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.

Here's how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:

Researchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: “jagged intelligence." [...] Picture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesn’t seem far apart.

So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the "intelligence" part of it, to suggest that "AI can be great". The article just boils down to "use AI for the things that we think it's good at, and don't use it for the things we think it's bad at!" As they say on the internet, completely unserious.

The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning — the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?

Demonstrably no.

These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try.

Fuck right off.

Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems. AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that “reasoning” models aren’t really reasoning at all.

Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.

Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a human’s reasoning, it’s well on its way to getting there. So, who’s right?

Again, fuck off.

Moving on...

The skeptic's case

vs

The believer’s case

A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skeptic's case and 889 on the believer's case. BIAS!!!!! /s.

Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:

• Shannon Vallor, "a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh"
• Melanie Mitchell, "a professor at the Santa Fe Institute"

Great, now the believers:

• Ryan Greenblatt, "chief scientist at Redwood Research"
• Ajeya Cotra, "a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy"

You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.

Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like "AI can do solve some really complex problems!" Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest we've boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.

Does vox do anything other than vomit hot garbage?

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.

Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.

lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"

Isn't that his full-time job? (derogatory)