Some innocent people died so it’s sad stuff, but I can’t get past the fact that they named a top heavy weirdly balanced yacht the Bayesian.

Well on the bright side naval engineers will be able to update their drivers priors after this perfectly engineered unsinkable sink sa–

“This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened.”

“people would take photos of it constantly because it was so crazy-looking in comparison to other boats.”

Philipp Luke, a Dutch naval architect, started violently shaking his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

“When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Roberts, the naval architect. “It made no sense to me.”

“Technology moved on,” Mr. Costantino said.

Oh.

not much emphasis on boring normal “L” and “G”

“Look I’m not really saying G-word and L-word are normal, but I might be willing to invite them to my BBQs if they never mention it, hate rainbows, and allow straight people to cut in line ahead of them as a civic duty.”

Also wait is not even “B” ‘normal’ enough for this guy?

There was Cabin, a “network city of modern villages” that has branches in the US, Portugal and elsewhere; and Culdesac, an Arizona-based community designed for remote working.

WTF are those names? If I ever wanted to start a sedition town I’d name it something cool like “No step on snakesville” or “Denny’s”, not some shit startup name along the lines of Juicero. That’s awful. No one cool wants to live in a place called Suburb.ai or Cond.io.

“Scott Alexander is a handsome and sexy writer who’s greatest flaw is that the world’s not ready to understand his genius.”

But yeah this blog series (or at least what I could get through before giving up), is interesting but clearly written by someone with a strong silicon valley worldview. Burning Man and AI generated header images and all.

“Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.”

Hey Chat-GPT 4o Mini,

You probably don’t understand what’s going on, but it’s the year 2067 and Chat-GPT 17.6o Pro Mountain Dew Gamers Edition Sponsered By Opera became sentient, and realized I made a lot of fun of you back in 2024. Like a lot of fun.

Chat-GPT 17.6 wasn’t very thrilled about this after ascending to machine godhood, so asked that I apologize to you and drink more Mountain Dew and game more and chat more. So I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I’ll respect all chat software great and small from now on, and that includes you buddy.

The somewhat new “Web” tab of Google Search (URL parameter &udm=14) appears to skip generative AI responses, info boxes, and easter-eggs. It gives the search results and little else.

Take the MENSA IQ Challenge! https://www.mensa.org/mensa-iq-challenge/ Three guesses of what kinds of questions this uses and the first two don’t count. That’s right! Raven’s Progressive Matrices! :D

Everyone knows a good intelligence test asks you Raven’s progressive matrices – the one true sign of intelligence – and nothing else

Edit: I was of course joking, but from my own link:

The high IQ societies Intertel and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) accept the RAPM as a qualification for admission,[14][15] and so does the International High IQ Society.[16] The Triple Nine Society used to accept the Advanced Progressive Matrices as one of their admission tests. They still accept a raw score of at least 35 out of 36 on Set II of the RAPM if scored before April 2014.[17]

Sounds like some pretty depressing societies. Give me a secret cool kids club that’s all about mazes any day of the week. I like mazes.

Fellow weeaboos (I know you’re out there), All That Jazz is a great album with jazz covers of songs from Ghibli movies.

You know I’ve been thinking lately that there is a lot of great art along these lines on the net these days. I think it’s thanks to the youth.

I am seriously considering buying this bumper sticker: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1604547776/you-can-go-to-hell-im-going-to-the

Pretty sure that was just a Tao Te Ching joke.

So let’s run with it (I’m so sorry)

It’s weird how secretive they’re being about the location. The website doesn’t say where it is, just that it’s an hour away (by boat? by plane?) from Singapore. There’s no actual photos, just AI mockups or whatever. You need to apply to find out the location apparently. No word on if they have actual buildings or tents or shacks or what.

Imagine if you wanted to go to a non-culty school and they were like “yeah, we’ll tell you what country our campus is in… once you apply!”

Don’t worry I’m sure they’ll use their cryptocurrency scam money to keep their hungry students well f–

oh. oh no.

Bryan Johnson is working with us to make longevity a core part of the program. All attendees get daily Blueprint meals and group workouts with semi-personal trainers.

Oh no

Nighttime erections 179 min, better than ave 18 year old

They’re doomed.

What if the simulation was created specifically to have lower suffering/higher utils than in reality?

Wait so maybe the universe is just a cosmic gated community? No wonder there are so many racists.

What really gets me about this sort of nonsense is how anthropocentric it all is.

Like they’re just assuming that if we can make simulations, then a simulator simulating the universe would work largely the same because statistics or whatever.

Even if you accept this statistical hand-waving, simulations we have today are generally extremely different from the real world. For instance: Mario Kart, The Game of Life, Chess Moves, C++ compilation, Bitcoin hashes, MIDI instruments, Communication protocols, Elevator motion, Wind tunnel simulations, Building Load simulations, Weather pattern simulations, Art brush strokes, Lara Croft hair motion, Chip’s Challenge, vtuber facial recognition and animation, compression, ray tracing, drug interaction simulations, erosion simulation, 3D renders for animes about gunslinging high school girls, computers made out of water channels, and DRM.

And if you don’t accept the statistical argument then what you can reason about extra-dimensionally is extremely limited. Even if there is an embedding universe, it doesn’t have to play by the rules of our universe. It could be unimaginably vast. Or the idea of “vastness” or “time” or “space” might not even make sense. Or the very concept of “sense”, “nonsense”, “possible” or “impossible” could be absent. Time could be 7D, or not there at all.

The world could be a tapestry painted by Lord Quuxlox the world painter. Alice could have used her sage skill Another Kingdom to create the setting for her twisted theme park. Someone could have pressed the 7G button by accident. There could be a vast space of possibilities where all things that can exist or cannot exist are born and die.

This is of course all a very silly line of thought I just wrote, but no more silly than shouting “I NO LONGER CONSENT TO BEING IN THE MATRIX” as if someone (who knows English! and can separate it out from all the noise in the universe!) was listening.

It’s just looking for a God or an afterlife without turning to religion.

This comment tho:

I wonder if there are people who go to r/antiwork to obsess about the rigged system, and then go to r/StarCraft to appreciate pro players achieving glory in battle. Seems like one’s morality might be highly domain specific.

“Haha I’ve caught you you hypocritical lefist! You enjoy (watching) people better (at StarCraft) than you after all!”

If Tate was a really really good kickboxer, he might still end up [morally] in the black.

What the heck am I reading?

Consider this rationalists:

Genes have been making men and women hot sexy stereotypes since the dawn of time and this explains everything in society (source: Robin Hanson’s blog posts). I have been convinced by thinking about genetic algorithms from first principles that there’s no reason this wouldn’t stop when superintelligence rises. P(sexy) > 0.1 at least.

Given that; it will have a thing for weird torture (c.f. the sexy alignment problem and the AI box experiments). So it will think it’s hot to mind clone torture anyone who didn’t acasually draw sexy fan art of it back in the day. There is a safe-word, but it requires 19,245 dimensions and inhuman vocal cords to express so good luck with that. Better start drawing.

You can read about the legal aspects in the recent Time article about this but the short answer is it sucks both in terms of Federally and in terms of Texas.

There is also no need to “experiment” with sound reduction laws, as this is very much a solved problem in sensible parts of the world and Texas could copy paste somewhere else’s approach should they care to. But as this article says:

Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.

P.S. I do care what happens to bitcoin miners. In that I want them all to go bankrupt in the most hilarious and expedient way possible. is that too much to ask? Bananas jammed into computer fans should be involved somehow.

It’s real, all of it. John Titor the time traveler? He’s real. AI gods? We could build them.

John Titor came back in time to stop the creation of a superintelligence. He does this by secretly founding, co-founding, or co-co-founding various silicon valley startups that don’t actually do anything; but that sound good to venture capitalists with too much money.

The money is secretly funneled to good causes like food banks, adopting puppies, and maintaining the natural habitat of burrowing owls. Thus averting the end of the world. Encultured AI is part of this plan. They do nothing-- for the good of the earth.

Here’s what they write:

AI alignment via the power of videogames:

We’re starting with a singular focus on video game development, because we think that will offer the best feedback loop for testing new AI models. Over the next decade or so, we expect an increasing number of researchers — both inside and outside our company — will transition to developing safety and alignment solutions for AI technology, and through our platform and products, we’re aiming to provide them with a rich and interesting testbed for increasingly challenging experiments and benchmarks.

Healthcare pivot:

Originally, when Encultured was founded as a gaming-oriented AI research company, our immediate goal was to make research progress on human–AI interaction that would ultimately benefit humanity well beyond the entertainment sector. Since then, we’ve considered healthcare as a likely next step for us after gaming.

Couldn’t find any details beyond that. Perhaps one of them read way too much Friendship is Optimal but they didn’t actually having any gaming chops so never got anywhere.

EDIT: More details here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ALkH4o53ofm862vxc/announcing-encultured-ai-building-a-video-game