They think leather jackets are cool but don’t know why, and have never been challenged on their fashion choices. Fuckers need a good mugging to change their ways.

Nothing like the ascendancy of fascism in the US triggering a new level of public awareness of my own niche concerns of both the inevitability of fascism via capitalism and how the western tech world breeds a specific ideological mindset that enables said fascism. Of course, it should go without saying that the only effective way to end fascism is to have the ideological opponents of fascism break the fascist country through total war vote blue no matter who

I think, in some sense, it is the purest version of social media. You take anything and everything in your life, commodify and corrupt it into content that serves as some insight into achieving higher business status, garnering reactions, and, in turn, actual higher business status. No other social media is as direct in delivering the desired result.

It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view.

I think this is absolutely true. A more concrete metaphor might be a quidditch/quadball league. There are all kinds of people there for different reasons. Some are there purely for the love of the game, even if they look weird to outsiders. Others are there because they need exercise but have trouble finding joy in playing the sport itself. Some people LARP as the first camp for ulterior motives, like making friends or getting laid. I occasionally walk by the field where they play for the spectacle.

You’d think that, at this point, LW style AGI wish fulfilment fanfic would have been milked dry for building hype, but apparently Salty doesn’t!

❌ “Why would you do this to me?” ↳ Why: Instantly creates tension. ↳ Instead: “What did I do wrong, and how can I do better next time?”

Just incredible that good leadership equals gaslighting yourself into an abusive relationship

This came across my desk today. Anything to be skeptical about?

https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/?ref=platformer-newsletter

The original version shows Gemini telling a cheesemonger that gouda makes up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption”

“Wait, it’s 50-60% gouda?” 🧑🏿‍🚀🔫🧑🏿‍🚀 “beep boop try this mushroop”

Idea for another megathread: go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction). Here’s mine:

FWIW I checked a few comment threads and guy is playing this off as lighthearted/a joke, but folks here know better than that.

It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but let’s do a little here.

People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create

Diogenes’s corpse turns

which leads to the world getting better for all of us.

Of course Saltman means “all of my buddies” as he doesn’t consider 99% of the human population as human.

Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.

Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didn’t jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.

In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.

AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CAN’T CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS

We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.

I must be blind.

1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.

“Intelligence” in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. “Data” is finite, which negates the idea of “continuous” gains. “Predictable” is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!

2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

“Moore’s law” didn’t change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses “moore’s laws” outta be mangione’d. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Don’t just literally cherrypick one window?

3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

“Linearly increasing intelligence” is meaningless as intelligence has not been… wait, I’m repeating myself. Also, “super-exponential” only to the “socio” that Ol’ Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.

If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.

Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???

Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.

The condescension and patronisation is well deserved. Your question is answered in the fucking title of the paper.

The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking

If you’d ever engaged in critical thinking, then maybe we could have avoided this exercise.

Fagin, of course, the cocreator of Steely Dan… right?

LLM experts aka poop sommeliers

Is General reasoning in the room with us now?