gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 25 minutes ago (1 children)

The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. "Raw milk" pushers are cut from the same cloth.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 26 minutes ago (1 children)

I don't wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren't Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? "be your own pharmacist" sounds like right up that alley

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 3 hours ago (4 children)

Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.

JFC

go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now

before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

oh hey a tankie

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago (3 children)

FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I honestly had no idea of the original Russian meaning of the gloss. To me "refusenik" implies some sort of hard-left hippie.

Edit finally went and read the linked article.

Schneier and Sanders:

We agree with Morozov that the “refuseniks,” as he calls them, are wrong to see AI as “irreparably tainted” by its origins.

Morozov:

Meanwhile, a small but growing group of scholars and activists are taking aim at the deeper, systemic issues woven into AI’s foundations, particularly its origins in Cold War–era computing. For these refuseniks, AI is more than just a flawed technology; it’s a colonialist, chauvinist, racist, and even eugenicist project, irreparably tainted at its core.

But the original term was not for people refusing to take an action - it was the state refusing to allow their actions! It's done a 180, but considering no-one now remembers the plight of Soviet Jews attempting to emigrate to Israel it's not that strange.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Doctor Parkinson declared, "I'm not surprised to see you here
You've got smokers cough from smoking, brewer's droop from drinking beer
I don't know how you came to get the Bette Davis knees
But worst of all young man, you've got industrial disease"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Diamond Age is an interesting idea, the original Primer was for the elite and used distributed encryption to farm out the qualified work to skilled artisans. In the end though, a cut-down primer (using some sort of AI? it's been a long time since I read it) is used to educate and train the girl army used by one of the faction in the final battle.

It's not really explained but I suspect the OG Primer had a robust payment model that ensured that the service oculd be kept solvent.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 21 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Assuming the company will last 5 years is awfully optimistic.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago

sounds horrorshow to me

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago

Pretty sure this person has been watching a lot of very inappropriate anime

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago

RAF's aims were explicitely accelerationist - their terror would provoke a ferocious repressional response that would open the eyes of the masses to the repressive government and trigger a revolution.

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

 

Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.

 

Apologies for the link to The Register...

Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.

Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.

Quoth ElReg:

Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.

The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."

So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.

 

In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote

For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.

Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!

The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence

I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.

What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?

 

[this is probably off-topic for this forum, but I found it on HN so...]

Edit "enjoy" the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233810

view more: next ›