istewart, istewart@awful.systems

By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.

tick tick tick tick

(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)

The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable

or flooding the zone?

With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.

Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!

…damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.

I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.

Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.

I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.

I think the rationalist beliefs are quite pervasive among mathematicians

Unsurprising, it’s quite flattering to believe that your area of study is what generates The One True Ethical Code!

The sweaty desperation on both sides is hilarious: both the Forest City developers for getting in bed with a dodgy hustler like Balaji, and Balaji for signing up with such obviously desperate people, whose reputation in the region has already been fairly well torpedoed.

For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital

I am not retreating from public writing

That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

The rest of his “accelerationist"/"decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

“A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

daniel self-flagella, more like

Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor

I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.

Most “regular” people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies

This person has a remarkable lack of self-awareness

Apparently “unions” = “communism”.

…so what’s open-source software, then?

More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:

Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.

I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.

warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed.

Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.

this is what overpriced housing does to an mf

Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.

Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors

cruise ship, duh

brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored