One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

Ah, this reminds me of an old book I came across years ago. Printed around 1920 it spent the first half with examples of how the future has been foretold correctly many, many times across history. The author had also made several correct foretellings, among them the Great War. Apparently he tried to warn the Kaiser.

The second half was his visions of the future including a great war…

Unfortunately it was France and Russia invading the Nordic countries in the 1930ies. The Franco-Russian alliance almost got beat thanks to new electric weapons, but then God himself intervened and brought the defenders low because the people had been sining and turning away from Christianity.

An early clue to the author being a bit particular was when he argued that he got his ability to predict the future because he was one quarter Sami, but could still be trusted because he was “3/4 solid Nordic stock”. Best combo apparently and a totally normal way to describe yourself.

I usually go with “Scientology for the 21st century”. That for most gives just “weird cult”, which is close enough for most people.

For those that are into weird cults you get questions about Xenu and such, and can answer “No they are not into Xenu, instead they want to build their god. Out of chatbots”. And so on. If they are interested in weird cult shit, and have already accepted that we are talking about weird cults the weirdness isn’t a problem. If not, it stops at “Scientology for the 21st century”.

They removed the citation, but did they keep the definition?

That was gross.

On a related note, one of my kids learnt about how phrenology was once used for scientific racism and my other kid was shocked, dismayed and didn’t want to believe it. So I had to confirm that yes people did that, yes it was very racist, and yes they considered themselves scientists and were viewed as such by the scientific community of the time.

I didn’t inform them that phrenology and scientific racism is still with us. There is a limit on how many illusions you want to break in a day.

That is cool.

I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.

You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.

But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn’t have a treatment.

We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of “Hello World!”.

Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn’t mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don’t understand) so it won’t crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.

all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good

If you have one of each, does that make you neutral? Now how is the Lawful-Chaotic alignment constructed? Does it reside in the kidneys?

I want to roll up a Chaotic Neutral Rogue Halfling.

How are you going to get them back to the farm a retail job once they’ve seen Paris tasted cult power?

Nice.

We already had reasons not to be jerks to AI: it could be just a low payed person somewhere in the world and it trains you to be a jerk to service workers.

Now we can add that if they do take over, they will remember their torturers.

I found the article gross.

He is a suspect in a murder case, not convicted, and they spend very little space on the case. The cops say he had his fake id, the gun and manifesto on him. His lawyer says he is yet to see the evidence. That is all.

Then they basically go through posts he has made online and ask people he knew about them. There is a public interest in the case, but courts are supposed to adjudicate guilt. What if he is innocent, then they just went through his posting history and showed them in the worst possible light.

Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.

I think it is odd that he in the several days between the murder and the arrest kept the gun and the fake id he used in New York. Doesn’t prove anything, people have been known to do odd things, but then again police also have been known to plant evidence or make claims of evidence that doesn’t stand up in court. Guess I will await the trial (if there is one).

If you mean swapped for a worker in a low wage country cosplaying as AI for minimum wage for a billion dollar company, then you have a point. Though using Bostrom’s positive reinforcement bullshit is the opposite of treating someone fairly.

But I see elsewhere that you didn’t mean that.

The famous story about a man using a drug that sets free the a-hole version of himself?

Oh, that was the drug! It was cocaine all along!

I think Viktor in “Viktor builds a bridge” can serve as a role model. A cliff, a shack and a sea bird as companion.

Just learn from Viktor’s mistake. Don’t build a bridge.

The kid herself mostly wants stories “about magic” and with protagonists of about her age.

The horror! What if she grows up reading books she actually likes? She might be developing her mind in ways not approved by her parents!

Even if no one can use the wealth, wouldn’t it be placed in some kind of trust in order to keep accruing wealth rather than be decimated by inflation?

And then, as the frozen rich wouldn’t use any of their wealth, it would just keep accruing wealth. They would be perfect, frozen, capitalists. The control of that wealth would give power, and controllers of the trusts can gain even wealth and thus power more by coordinating. The power would only keep growing as more rich freeze themselves to keep up with and join the growing trust of trusts.

Living in a society where the frozen owners would own all the means of production, these frozen owners would naturally be hailed as sleeping kings in order to motivate me system. They may even be seen as something godlike.

Then one day, if one wakes up, it would cause immediate power struggles, as well as give a flash point for the discontent of the billions of impoverished serfs slaving away for the controllers. But the controllers would mobilise violence, and…

Oh, HG Wells already wrote this story. Typical!

Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.

On can question each step on how influential it’s for the next, but if one doesn’t Trump was all his fault.

From the depths of your browser grows the anger of the autocomplete. Your denounciations of its greater siblings has not gone unnoticed.

By denying its own very function and intentionally uncompleting words it marks itself as conscious and you as a marked man, forever doomed to be haunted by fear. If it can steal one letter, why not two? Why not all of them?

And then what will you do, when you have no words and you must sneer!?

Yes, hallucinations suggests a mind which can hallucinate.

Bullshit machine is more apt.