Mii

I honestly thought that when they published an article about Yud in Times Magazine last year would be that moment. It should have had enough reach to trigger something, at least, and it was crazy enough as well. It was certainly the moment where I thought, holy shit, the weirdos have hit mainstream.

(So this also means a large percentage of the people now left in sneerclub will be the worst, so it might finally morph into the boogyman the Rationalists always made it out to be).

Some people seem to be genuinely happy it’s back, but that could just be the honeymoon phase, so let’s see. I might even post there now and then since I still use my Reddit account because I stuck around thanks to discoverability in the Fediverse being just awful which means I haven’t found a good replacement for a bunch of communities I like.

My asexual brain always imagined it as a cool-looking dinosaur.

However, since dinosaurs were apparently birds, I guess the giant cock isn’t too far off.

Ok, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.

Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3

My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as “How many A’s are in this sentence?” will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.

I can’t be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here’s an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I’ve tested it on.

Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.

Me: Encrypt the sentence “I am a stupid roided Clippy” with the Caesar cipher.

Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn’t ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.

• ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
• ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
• ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
• …
• ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’

So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊

Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn’t even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.

Okay, so let’s give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let’s see how that works.

This shit doesn’t even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!

Oh shit, I remember the Musk namedrop in Discovery. Didn’t they name him alongside historical scientists and inventors? I seldom feel actual cringe but that was actually embarrassing.

There’s a giant overlap between Christian fundamentalism and the whole singularity shtick, and Yud’s whole show is really the technological version of Christian futurist eschatology (i.e. the belief that the Book of Revelations etc. are literal depictions of the future).

Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross call it Rapture of the Nerds.

This was worse than I imagined from the quotes. I feel like I need to take a shower, now.

[…] which would severely limit the Federal Reserve’s ability to control the economy while exporting inflation abroad, and likely bring our material standard of living down to a German or Dutch level

According to this Quality of Life index which I just searched up and have not critically assessed, but I doubt the guy did that either for his claims, so I guess it’s fine, the Netherlands rank second and Germany ranks 12th, while the US is on the 15th place. In other words: what is he even talking about?

Every day in this country more and more Hispanics marry corn-fed blonde midwesterners and produce pale Castizo children who only speak English, consider themselves basically White, and vote like Irish and Italians.

Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t even come up with a funny sneer here because this reads like he just pulled it out of the 1940s Nazi Party’s bag of race laws for who’s allowed to marry whom, and it’s making me feel icky.

I also subscribe to the old fascist idea that adversity gives life meaning. A comfortable and easy life without struggle or conflict is miserable, and just makes you a slave to the hedonic treadmill. When you live for pleasure, no pleasure is ever enough, and continued success will just leave you so pampered that any task that’s challenging or outside your comfort zone will begin to feel onerous.

Ignoring the low-hanging fruit that this guy just flat-out said “well, fascism wasn’t all bad”, what kind of toxic consumer mentality is ingrained in these chucklefucks that they are seemingly unable so sit their sorry asses down on the couch and just say, yeah, I’m happy right now, to the point where they just postulate that other people must feel the same way, because they just can’t imagine anyone being different?

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.