It’s never too late to git merge --abort!

Thanks! I am truly grateful for the opportunity and humbled by the tasks ahead 😊.

I’m posting this before the bit gets old.

This works just as well to defend mass punishments of villages suspected of harboring partisans. Which makes sense, since that is pretty much what the Gaza war is about.

I googled “eco-atheism” and dedicated a post to what I found: https://awful.systems/post/5314810

I like that his first argument out of the gate is “You call us a secular religion? Well maybe we are, what happened to religious tolerance?” Just perfect how you tee yourself up to fall in line with the religious conservatives when needed.

We really need bring some sceptical epistemic attitudes back. Maybe some kind of eco-atheism, keeping yourself grounded on actual real shit. (for some definition of real)

This was one obscure shitpost to decode.

The Brian Merchant article shared recently made a good point. It’s most likely a symbiosis of an organic AI panic from incredibly out-of-touch people and savvy capitalists that learned to use it for marketing.

Yeah, the same thing struck me. I’d guess they were jumping on the buzzword, but x-risk just was deemed gaudy and unserious.

Might be semi-related: the german aerospace/automotive/industrial research agency has an “AI Safety” institute (institute = top level department).

I got a rough impression from their website. They don’t seem to be doing anything that successful. Mostly fighting the unwinnable battles of putting AI in everything without sucking and twiddling machine learning models to make them resilient against malicous data. Besides trying to keep the torch of self-driving cars alive for the german car industry. Oh, and they’re doing the quantum AI bit.

They’re a fairly new institute, and I heard rumors they’re not doing great. Maybe the organization resists the necessary insanity to generate new AI FOMO at this point. One can dream.

I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I’m in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.

(This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)

Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.

Didn’t come up with that simile, but it might fit:

It’s like a fleshed out version of a 12 year old thinking “everything would be great if I was in charge, because I’m smart and people are dumb”

Something about people who are too impressed with their own smarts and swap pet theories that make them feel smart.

Honestly the most surprising part was when she went “of course we know fanfiction can be used for cult indoctrination, ever since that other cult did it”

I skipped that episode because it seemed boring, but now I might come back to it.

be me, super genius autodidact

be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck

proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by contributing to a school of thought that justified a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also by inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

mein face when

…pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.

Yes, deceitful corporations are truly a troubling new phenomenon, which brings them closer to the baseline for evil: democratic governments

High IQ politics hour over here.

https://www.byom.de/trashmails/

Decent functionality, and it didn’t get flagged most of the time I used it.

can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.

After reading his older article, I can totally see how he fits into one of the middle layers of the diagram in the UAntwerp paper. He moved beyond basic followership and knows enough to stan EA to potential recruits. But he hasn’t advanced to the part where you score comfy research positions in backroom deals with rich benefactors. So AI doom is just one of those things he doesn’t really get, but a lot of people he respects take it super seriously, so it’s got to be something.

Amazing how well he it the nail on the head back then.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.