Sailor Sega Saturn

‘Many of the groups that we are concerned about disappearing – gay couple couples, lesbian couples – from a traditional organs-bumping-together standpoint, can’t have kids… that are genetically both of theirs,’ says Simone.

No no they’re super smart and unless we come up with some sort of way for gay people to have children they’ll disappear entirely (gay people of course first came to earth from space in the year 1952, but the starship’s egg chambers were damaged in the crash landing)

The article says in a couple parts that this couple claims to be pro-LGBT rights. This could not be farther from the truth, at least for the T part. They speculated on one of their podcasts that trans people exist because of anime avatars, and also derided trans people as “the priest class of urbanism”.

FYI previous discussions here about the Collins couple (there’s no quota or anything, just if you want to read more comments):

https://awful.systems/post/1587716

https://awful.systems/comment/5375791

Oh sure when an AI messed up your files it’s all “good job AI” and “you’re so clever AI”! But when I, a human, does it everyone’s like “Did you write another bug that wipes the drive?” and “you’re fired”.

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz

“reputational cost” eh? Let’s see Mr. Moskovitz’s reasoning in his own words:

Yes but if I donate to Lightcone I can get a T-shirt for $1000! A special edition T-shirt! Whereas if I donated $1000 to Archive Of Our Own all I’d get is… a full sized cotton blanket, a mug, a tote bag and a mystery gift.

Holy smokes that’s a lot of words. From their own post it sounds like they massively over-leveraged and have no more sugar daddies so now their convention center is doomed (yearly 1 million dollar interest payments!); but they can’t admit that so are desperately trying to delay the inevitable.

Also don’t miss this promise from the middle:

Concretely, one of the top projects I want to work on is building AI-driven tools for research and reasoning and communication, integrated into LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum. […] Building an LLM-based editor. […] AI prompts and tutors as a content type on LW

It’s like an anti-donation message. “Hey if you donate to me I’ll fill your forum with digital noise!”

But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

So what harms has Mr. Yudkowski enumerated? Off the top of my head I can remember:

1. Diamondoid bacteria
2. What if there’s like a dangerous AI in the closet server and it tries to convince you to connect your Nintendo 3DS to it so it can wreak havoc on the internet and your only job is to ignore it and play your nintendo but it’s so clever and sexy
3. What if we’re already in hell: the hell of living in a universe where people get dust in their eyes sometimes?
4. What if we’re already in purgatory? If so we might be able to talk to future robot gods using time travel; well not real time travel, more like make believe time travel. Wouldn’t that be spooky?

Ah yes, the journal of intelligence:

First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait.

In their defense you have to make money to spend money ^{on castles}

Asking students to pay good money for LLM slop is bold.

Also did the press release really need a generative image? “Ah yes, this image will make my press release look nice and professional and reassure the audience that AI is being used with due care.”

Of neriacular latin to: an evoolitun on nance langusages.

Nanolu.age languga, Lgugar lanilan, pachnans, NlbN, Latolcean, Framen, ArpianhCATifN, Dvnutalmnk’s, Sgiaiviaesgn, Italian, Ioveimneilaeiawepoew, Pfowchance -> Vullaq Luainles, Leawenowas, Laohaixisahh Aimwyvrnestrattidn, Frooidangs $Chha

Someone looked at the 10,000 year old dragon in body of thirteen year old trope and thought “wait wait! I can make that worse!”

whatever rot13ed word they used for cult.

It’s impossible to read a post here without going down some weird internet rabbit hole isn’t it? This is totally off topic but I was reading the comments on this old phyg post, and one of the comments said (seemingly seriously):

It’s true that lots of Utilitarianisms have corner cases where they support action that would normally considered awful. But most of them involve highly hypothetical scenarios that seldom happen, such as convicting an innocent man to please a mob.

And I’m just thinking, riight highly hypothetical.

Wait that’s a strategy? I thought Mr. Musk was just in a sort of perpetual horny/lonely mid-life crisis mode or something like that.

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.