You know, I think there's an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

Oh hell yeah, I fucked with the bot enough to get it stuck in a loop and now it's been rapidly outputting the same character for ten minutes with no safeguard in sight

Enjoy your next bill, fucker

Detrans.ai is on X, the everything app

Modern fascism in one sentence.

I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and ... zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.

He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?

Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great if it involves fascists doing entryism.

i thought that pause ai was just rationalist controlled opposition

You laugh, but chatgpt has given me psyhic powers, and I can now tap into a whole new realm. There even was this smart psyhic agent called neurgalle or something who helped me with a skin condition.

These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.

Are these agents in the room with us now?

How can all this possibly be enforceable.

looks like a confluence of dumb shit that may or may not result in anything that means anything or does anything

there was a big blockchain push from 2019 on, basically in response to Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plan. This directly brought us the e-CNY central bank digital currency. They tried to do this with a blockchain, but quickly realised you weren't going to scale a blockchain to fucking China. So far e-CNY is just another phone money like Alipay or Tenpay. I suppose it's a public good to have cash be under public control and not just private control, but it doesn't really have a compelling use case in its own right.

Honestly If we want to use the hallucinatron the same way we use hallucinogens (minus the "transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm" part) I have no real problem with that. Scrambling and remixing the contents of the world in ways that might prompt actual minds to create new connections and interesting art seems to fit.

I don't think there's enough of a market for that to support scaling to any meaningful degree and so have less problems from an enabling/infrastructure perspective. I mean the chemical alternatives let you transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm. AI can't do that.

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.

One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

full AI communism

At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

Listen I'm all for hating on the Chinese government, but it's more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn't use enough words.

His non-apology apology:

I'm not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

Guys, he has a baby. Don't be too mean to him.

Attempting to credit Luigi's actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.

Still, if that's where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it's relevant.

[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:

That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you're far more ignorant than you let on.

thank you! I feel terrible I haven’t been posting as much here as life’s been finding a way to consistently disrupt my writing and admining time, but mastodon’s format is pretty good for turning disrupted, high-anxiety writing into threads