gerikson

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Anyone here read "World War Z"? There's a section there about how the health authorities in basically all countries supress and deny the incipient zombie outbreak. I think about that a lot nowadays.

Anyway the COVID response, while ultimately better than the worst case scenario (Spanish Flu 2.0) has made me really unconvinced we will do anything about climate change. We had a clear danger of death for millions of people, and the news was dominated by skeptics. Maybe if it had targetted kids instead of the very old it would have been different.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (19 children)

HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion

Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The SH is catnip to "scientific types" who don't recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can't be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. It's basically elementary!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Shorter HN: wasting gigawatts of power to increase VC valuations - fine. Discarding 80k pounds of butter because of missing allergen information is the worst thing to happen since the burning of the library of Alexandria

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150991

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Some techbro proposes "HumaneRank" as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least "it's better than Communism":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42140664

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Running for office is just a stunt for these people. More unearned publicity.

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

Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. "Fun" fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you're sent to a camp?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago

Kill and dethrone God.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I will never forget the dude who argued online that the sealion is the real victim here (a victim of the “disgruntled female”)

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

I think we can all agree now that US Rationalists are basically all ex-Christians who are looking for the same thing but with the serial numbers filed off.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Yeah that's the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they'll start using it. There's all sorts of rationalizations going on - it's portable, it's performant, it's what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

45
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

 

Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.

 

Apologies for the link to The Register...

Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.

Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.

Quoth ElReg:

Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.

The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."

So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.

3
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Anyone else have this problem? It’s been bothering me for a while and is the last thing keeping me using mobile Chrome.

On the login page , after entering username and password, the “login” button does nothing. It might slightly change color but I am not directed to the site logged in, nor do I get an error.

platform: iOS

The username and password are entered automatically via either Firefox’s password store, or iOS’.

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