A glorious snippet:

The movement connected to attracted the attention of the founder culture of Silicon Valley and leading to many shared cultural shibboleths and obsessions, especially optimism about the ability of intelligent capitalists and technocrats to create widespread prosperity.

At first I was confused at what kind of moron would try using shibboleth positively, but it turns it’s just terribly misquoting a citation:

Rationalist culture — and its cultural shibboleths and obsessions — became inextricably intertwined with the founder culture of Silicon Valley as a whole, with its faith in intelligent creators who could figure out the tech, mental and physical alike, that could get us out of the mess of being human.

Also lol at insiting on “exonym” as descriptor for TESCREAL, removing Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres and the clear intention of criticism from the term, it doesn’t really even make sense to use the acronym unless you’re doing critical analasis of the movement(s). (Also removing mentions of the espcially strong overalap between EA and rationalists.)

It’s a bit of a hack job at making the page more biased, with a very thin verneer of still using the sources.

Ah but not everyone’s taste is the same, therefore the best conceible plate of nachos is made worse by existing, because it can then be confronted to people’s preferences instead of staying in the platonic realm!

Special bootlicking points:

Source: xcancel.com

@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog

@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.

For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg

Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:

Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again

Why the bash hate?

Oh no! I wasted my time on Troll. Typical.

Hard disagree, as much as I loathe JK Rowling’s politcal ideas, and the at-times unecessary cruelty found in the HP novels, it still shaped a large part of the imaginary world of a generation. As beautiful as bird songs are (who the hell refers to birdsong as “output”), this simply cannot be compared.

Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical “art” is already an insult to life and creativity, but a fully-or-mostly automated slop machine is an infinitely worse one.

Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through, people still made choice, even subjected to crazy uninispired didacts from above, the hands that fashion books, movies, music, video-games, tv-shows still have—must have—room to bring a given vision together.

I think people DO care.

I don’t know exactly what you wanted to say, if you wanted to express despair, cynisism, nihilishm or something else, but I would encourage you not to give up hope with humanity, people aren’t that stupid, people aren’t that void of meaning.

The standout monuments of stupidity—and/or monstrosity—in McCarthy’s response for me are.

• Calling JW a failed computer scientist for failing to see that computers and clockwork are different, when really there is no computation a computer can make that Turing Complete clockwork couldn’t be able to replicate.
• Essentially saying that by analogy, where religion should not stand in the way of science, so should morals not stand in the way of science?!?!?! (I mean really? WTF)

Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.

I think beyond “Keeping up appearances” it’s also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.

Seriously though, I can i trust dotnet ever again?

Infinite-garbage-maze does seem more appealing than “proof-of-work” (the crypto parentage is yuckish enough ^^) as a countermeasure, though I would understand if some would not feel confortable with direct sabotage—say for example a UN organization.

I feel the C-SUITE executives are pushing the AI way harder than they ever pushed crypto though, since they never understood the tech beyond a speculative asset, but the idea of replacing work-hours by AI-automation has been sold HARD to them.

I guess the type of lawyer that does this would be the same that would offload research to paralegals, without properly valuing that as real work, and somehow believe it can be substituted by AI, maybe they never engage their braincells, and just view lawyering as a performative dance to appease the legal gods?

This is beyond horrifying:

I don’t know to decide wether I should be glad this wasn’t show to a jury, or sad we don’t get an obvious mistrial setting some kind of precedent against this kind of demented ventriquolism act, indirectly asking for maximum sentencing through what should be completely inadmissible character testimony.

Does anyone here know how ‘appeals on sentencing’ vs ‘appeals on verdicts’, obviously judges should have some leeway, but do they have enough leeway to say (In court) that they were moved for example by what a spirit medium said or whatnot, is there some jurisprudence there?

I can only hope that the video played an insignificant role in the judges decision, and it was some deranged—post hoc—emotional—waxing ‘poetic’ moment for the judge.

Yuck.

It’s also such a bad description, since from their own post, the Bot+LLM they where using was almost certainly feeding itself data found by a search engine.

That’s like saying, no I didn’t give the amoral PI any private information, I merely gave them a name to investigate!

EDIT: Also lol at this part of the original disclaimer:

An expert in LLMs who has been working in the field since the 1990s reviewed our process.

Pre-commitment is such a silly concept, and also a cultish justification for not changing course.

What’s pernicious (for kool-aided people) is that the initial Roko post was about a “good” AI doing the punishing, because ✨obviously✨ it is only using temporal blackmail because bringing AI into being sooner benefits humanity.

In singularian land, they think the singularity is inevitable, and it’s important to create the good one verse—after all an evil AI could do the torture for shits and giggles, not because of “pragmatic” blackmail.

Thank god for wikipedia and other wikis, may they live long and prosper.

I think for the Yud variety specifically a good summary is : “Taking all the wrong lessons from science fiction, and building a cult around it’s villains, and celebrating “Rational” villains + a belief in the inevitability of world changing technological progress”

Pre-millenarian specifically ^^.

Good video overall, despite some misattributions.

Biggest point I disagree with: “He could have started a cult, but he didn’t”

Now I get that there’s only so much Toxic exposure to Yud’s writings, but it’s missing a whole chunk of his persona/æsthetics. And ultimately I thing boils down to the earlier part that stange did notice (via echo of su3su2u1): “Oh Aren’t I so clever for manipulating you into thinking I’m not a cult leader, by warning you of the dangers of cult leaders.”

And I think even expect his followers to recognize the “subterfuge”.