Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024

Max Kennerly:

For a client I recently reviewed a redlined contract where the counterparty used an "AI-powered contract platform." It had inserted into the contract a provision entirely contrary to their own interests.

So I left it in there.

Please, go ahead, use AI lawyers. It's better for my clients.

Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google's latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.

just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah

this season's word is: kleptokakistocracy

reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some.... boutique... views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

• Lab-grown meat
• Modern architecture is rotten
• Population decline is an existential threat
• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

your regular reminder that the guy with de facto ownership over the entire Rust ecosystem outside of the standard library and core is very proud about being in Peter Thiel’s pocket (and that post is in reference to this article)

e: on second thought I’m being unfair — he owns the conferences and the compiler spec process too

OK so we're getting into deep rat lore now? I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.

LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:

https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398

if I got something wrong, please don't tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. "it's spreading disinformation" I hope I am

Lots of developments in the UHC shooter case

• They (probably) caught him

• He's even hotter without his three identical jackets

• He's a Thielhead

Not very happy with how this day's going

https://xcancel.com/pepmangione

That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.

the grok AI is now available to free twitter users, evidently not enough paying users were interested

it's somewhat more tedious than Gemini and that's saying something

On the third day of OpenAI my true love enemy gave to me three french hens Sora.

The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.

"12 days of OpenAI" lol. Such marketing.

Big eye roll to this part too:

We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.

Adam Christopher comments on a story in Publishers Weekly.

Says the CEO of HarperCollins on AI:

"One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author."

Please, just make it stop, somebody.

Robert Evans adds,

there's a pretty good short story idea in some publisher offering an AI facsimile of Harlan Ellison that then tortures its readers to death

Kevin Kruse observes,

I guess this means that HarperCollins is getting out of the business of publishing actual books by actual people, because no one worth a damn is ever going to sign a contract to publish with an outfit with this much fucking contempt for its authors.

I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around TPOT like we're all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.

For anyone else confused: that part of Twitter. It's techbro "phillosophists" like Peter Thiel.

A major train station in Vienna has just been defaced by "AI art".

Saw something about "sentiment analysis" in text. While writers have discussed "death of the author" and philosophers and linguists have discussed what it even means to derive meaning from text, these fucking AI dorks are looking at text in a vacuum and concluding "this text expresses anger".

print("I'm angry!")

the above python script is angry, look at my baby skynet

yet another whistleblower is dead; this time, it’s the OpenAI copyright whistleblower Suchir Balaji

Someone made a... thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the "bots" are hilarious: "ennui" for low-effort posts; I don't think that word means what they think it means. "Legion" for automatic spam posts. Cause that's not a dogwhistle or anything.

Ed Zitron found this post about a WIlly-Wonka-Experience-style cheese injection facility in Toronto:

https://xcancel.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1865956680481354184#m

This is what it was like to live in Chasm City during the Melding Plague.

OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment.

Thread on r/technology.

edited to add:

From his personal website: When does generative AI qualify for fair use?

Let them fight. https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/

Just received a newsletter from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 about their book The AI Con - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want being available for preorder. I'm looking forward to it!

Character dot AI continues to be contemptible.

https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/10/tech/character-ai-second-youth-safety-lawsuit/index.html

found a new movie plot threat https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158

funded by open philanthropy, but not only and also got some other biologists onboard. 10 out of 39 authors had open philanthropy funding in the last 5 years so they're likely EAs. highly speculative as of now and not anywhere close to being made, as in we'll be dead from global warming before this gets anywhere close from my understanding. also starting materials would be hideously expensive because all of this has to be synthetic and enantiopure, and every technique has to be remade from scratch in unnatural enantiomer form. it even has LW thread by now hxxps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87pTGnHAvqk3FC7Zk/the-dangers-of-mirrored-life

it hit news https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/a-second-tree-of-life-could-wreak-havoc-scientists-warn.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/12/unprecedented-risk-to-life-on-earth-scientists-call-for-halt-on-mirror-life-microbe-research

Baldur Bjarnason just put out his interim notes on tech

Reading through his notes, I get the feeling my off-the-cuff predictions from two months ago are very likely to come true - much more likely than I had anticipated. I'm gonna focus on Predictions 2 and 3:

2. A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates

Whether or not tech crashes like I expect, AI's likely did some serious damage to the notion of "tech/STEM = high-paying job" as it sent the job industry into turmoil (with junior positions being particularly affected).

3. Tech/STEM’s Public Image Changes - For The Worse

Whilst my original post focused on AI turning the public against the tech industry, one thing I didn't account for was the tech industry directly aligning itself with Trump. As such, tech/STEM's public image is now firmly intertwined with Trump's public image - with predictable results.

EDIT: this probably isn't him, but I'll leave it up. the real account appears to be /u/mister_cactus

Unsure where to put this or if it's even slightly relevant, but I've had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.

I think I've found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it's been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he's completely nuts

He got raked over the coals for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/126vycx/why_scientists_cant_be_trusted/

https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/comment/?author=burntbabylon

edit again: holy shit these people all suck. assuming the youtube channel is the shooter, he's a friend-of-a-friend of this guy:

and if that's true, he'd be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of nick fuentes