yet I hold

space for it

I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real

At the start they state

The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.

This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability

1. worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
2. we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
3. we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
4. we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever

If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.

I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now

The storm rages within

Yet I hold F to pay respects

Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:

hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”

Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.

Oh that tattoo is regrettable

Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.

:'( sad one. feel bad for the bebe, being raised by insane people.

“Conspiracy” is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that “it would be a waste of time for everyone” I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as “the unique solution” to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be “eventually achieved”, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a math book review that said “Do not use for anything.”

“This book is not a place of honor…”

I can use bad analogies also!

• If airplanes can fly, why can’t they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren’t looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.

I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies… let me see if I can find a link… and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027 fanfic forecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexity

Eliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem

Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s

E: it gets even worse as half the AI field says the airplanes fly like how birds do. That is why the anthropomorphization is bad. Because it both doesn’t think as in the function, nor think as in the system. And by anthropomorphizing people make it look like it can do both.

Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.

The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Threats to computing science

This is too fucking dumb to even be called sophistry.

of course MBA came up with this

an airplane doesn’t flap its wings

behold this fever dream animation

Its almost like flapping part isn’t a requirement for something to fly.

As to cryonics… for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.

As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:

• no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD

• no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity

• no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)

• no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”

• no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people

The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.

Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.

Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.

It’s possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.

One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, “trans” is right there in the name!

Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.

Tired: Propaganda of the deed

Wired: Propaganda of the Sneer

One more pic:

Any idea why the flag reassembles the Swiss one (the proportions are wrong though)?

She Licking my County till I back away is this anything?

How much of this is the AI bubble collapsing vs. Ohiophobia

So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn’t sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren’t exactly labor-intensive to run.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there’s an important lesson being lost here.

Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.

This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from “throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic”

Pre-watch: With the prior knowledge that her main job prior to this was wrestling promoter, the ol’ overtonussy is preeeetty loose

Post-watch: lol

hold the fucking phone. The secretary of education is the wife of VINCE FUCKING MCMAHON? I thought this was a “no relation” situation but no, it’s real.

Slather us in steak sauce and serve with a baked fucking potato because we are so cooked.

Tired: AI

Wired (and delicious): A1

They’re giving the American people what they voted for

I mean the left has been mostly absent from America in general since at least the Reagan years, so it’s not all that surprising.