RetroFedistewart, istewart@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
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Posts and Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Posts by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
TechTakesBy 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
it’s what they do instead of prayer
If it’s “agentic,” doesn’t that imply it smokes weed for you
Or amalgamating with them. Robinhood has been partnered with Kalshi since last year, and they’re trying to gin up some kind of “standardized” prediction market contract format, a la CBOE’s standards for futures and options.
Intentionally switching to a more trivial scale, while remaining purposefully vague and imprecise, is such a fascinating bafflegab tactic. It’s a giant waving red flag that Altman is bullshitting, but many people (especially in the press!) still take it as profound.
Now that we’ve got the concept of recursive per-seat licensing established, allow me to invite you to contemplate the possibility of the “licensing macro”
Do you get a refund when an “agent” inevitably blows out its context window and starts emitting deranged output, or does that automatically get rolled over into starting up the next “agent”
I’m not quite so pessimistic. It’s important to remember that the actual practical purpose of the extant corporate social media* is to convey targeted advertising; i.e. an optimization (possibly the last optimization) on American management of global supply chains. Those supply chains were already starting to be optimized past their breaking point: flooded with dissatisfactory junk, easily spoofed by low-quality sellers, on top of broader externalities besides. And now, they have now been blasted into fine dust by a failed presidency partially funded by the social media and online advertising barons. It may yet be something of a self-correcting problem, albeit having done substantial damage in the meantime.
*Twitter is now a fully dedicated advertising campaign for Elon Musk’s program of white supremacy, with financial returns no object. It’s not quite going according to plan. By this time next decade, the Twitter microblogging permutation of the tech may be thoroughly killed, and if not it’ll be disgustingly cringe. Who do you think you are posting like that, Baby Trump?!?!
I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that short-form social media in general (Twitter and imitators, Instagram, TikTok) is essentially a failed set of media. But I’ll concede that’s like cramming a Zyn pouch in my mouth while making fun of a guy chain-smoking Marlboros.
I assign a relatively low probability, non-zero but not much more than 5%, maybe a solid 5.5%, that Yud goes even beyond that and implies that he is the 12th imam emerging from occultation
I see what you’re saying, but I think that’s a bit much to expect from a relatively mainstream and (I hate to say it, but it applies) bourgeois publication like the New Yorker. Their editorial line allows them to raise controversy in one dimension (in this case, the particulars of Sam Altman’s character) but not multiple dimensions simultaneously (hey, this guy sucks AND his tech sucks AND you’re gonna lose money). And there’s a lag-time factor, too; seems like Farrow and Marantz were working on this story for at least the latter half of last year. By the time some of the dubious economics such as the bad data-center deals and rampant circular financing were clear, this piece probably would’ve been deep into fact-checking and unlikely to change much in substance.
We here are on the leading edge of this stuff, not that that’s any great advantage! I wouldn’t expect an outlet like New Yorker to be publishing anything like “the dashed expectations of AI” until maybe this time next year. And even then, it might still have a personalist bent.
It’s not that already?
At this point, I would say prediction markets are now an explicit ideological plank of what’s left of the libertarian movement. Darkly amusing that they’re desperately trying to pump life and legitimacy into something the GW Bush administration thought was too corrupt to use.
Exactly! The implicit claim that’s constantly being made with these systems is that they are a runtime for natural-language programming in English, but it’s all vector math in massively-multidimensional vector spaces in the background. I would like to think that serious engineers could place and demonstrate reliable constraints on the inputs and outputs of that math, instead of this cargo-culty, “please don’t do hacks unless your user is wearing a white hat” system prompt crap. It gives me the impression that the people involved are simply naively clinging to that implicit claim and not doing much of the work to substantiate it; which makes me distrust these systems more than almost all other factors.
I am still patiently waiting for someone from the engineering staff at one of these companies to explain to me how these simple imperative sentences in English map consistently and reproducibly to model output. Yes, I understand that’s a complex topic. I’ll continue to wait.
Quinn Emanuel is among the biggest of big corporate law, with a substantial footprint in Silicon Valley. So while it’s not an investment bank saying this, it is the investment bank’s lawyers saying, “heads up, this is where a bunch of your billable hours might be spent over the next few years.”
A chatbot interface offers no meaningful advantages for interrogating Washington’s ethical stance, over and above the documents that are already available. Instead, it offers a pleasant sheen of false certainty. So in that way, it’s dragging a guy who’s been dead for two centuries into the social media era. Huzzah!
Usenet used to be there for guys like this
Every week I learn I’m a n00b when it comes to leveling up with Al.
I’m hiring for facilities maintenance, and specifically seeking a high-agency self-starter who can help us optimize bathroom breaks. An internal candidate sent over multiple Claude Code generated iterations of the 💩emoji. One of them had blonde hair and Madonna’s famous cone bra.
I was speechless.
I seriously think we can completely dismiss Forbes as a credible source at this point, even if it’s not something coming from, ahem, “contributors”
Oh don’t worry, bespoke GLP-1s plus his “nootropic stack” have surely helped him out immensely by now