i expected alastair reynolds to look different but i’m not sure what i actually expected him to look like

you’re right, Amodei and others have published a lot of criti-hype, shameless hype, and delusional anthropomorphization in the past few years. While i was looking for other examples of their bullshit I found this article which was published just after my comment, with a nice sneer:

If Sharma has an angle here with his resignation, it doesn’t seem all that related to the industry he worked in. “I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech,” he wrote. In the footnotes, he cited a book that advocates for a new school of philosophy called “CosmoErotic Humanism.” Its listed author, David J Temple, is a collective pseudonym used by several authors including by Marc Gafni, a disgraced New Age spiritual guru who’s been accused of sexually exploiting his followers.

edited to say thanks for sharing the article

https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421

Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.

i don’t find that name too strange, it’s a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth

They’re not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter

Their financials are not even in the shitter! except insofar as their increased AI capex isn’t delivering returns, so they need to massage the balance sheet by doing rolling layoffs to stop the feral hogs from clamoring and stampeding on the next quarterly earnings call.

anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company that’s at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout

while it’s obviously stupid and misguided to try to hold the nobel foundation criminally liable for making yet another bad selection for a prize that has been given to egregious war criminals (kissinger), it is a very funny joke.

i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion

The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.

The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.

it’s not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other

the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adams’s inspiration for the product was that “diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.” He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called “the blue jeans of food”.

These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.

famously, changes that have already happened and become entrenched are easier to reverse than they would have been to just prevent in the first place. What an insane justification

true, usually i put that term in scare quotes to emphasize its fraudulence

AI researcher and known epstein associate Joscha Bach comes up several times in the latest epstein email dump. And it’s uh, not good. Greatest hits include: scientific racism, bigotry freestyling about the neoteny principle, climate fascism and managed decline of “undesirable groups” juxtaposed immediately with opining about the emotional influence of 5 visits to buchenwald. You know, just very cool stuff:

https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/document-view?collection=092314e384a58618&p=1&docid=67044a5f5536b5b8_092314e384a58618_0&dapvm=2

this is weird. My first thought is that it’s just another vector of normalization for the idea that people who are afraid of and Post about genocide or other forms of discriminatory violence are not to be taken seriously. By putting a variety of insane victimhood appropriating subcultures into the internet milieu, it allows people to ignore what’s happening (and what may be about to happen) in the real world, where groups of people actually are subject to fascistic violence.

i’m only at the beginning, but this already stuck out to me:

It would be extremely bad if many people come to believe this: arguments about existential risk mostly rely on the assumption that AI is capable, so they fall flat for people who don’t agree with that. I think we should be emphasizing the core capability of AI more and talking about x-risks less.

“Guys we need to pump this bubble Rational Stock Appreciation Trend more, the plebs are starting to think it’s all bullshit!!”

none of this was new to me as a long time crypto gawker, but it was still tied together in a nice package which drew some particularly apt connections. I can’t help but believe that the bitcoin thesis is fundamentally flawed. Being superimposed on the structure of financial capitalism itself, it seems to me that bitcoin and cryptocurrency are leveraged bets in the stability of the system. we haven’t seen how crypto will function during a serious recession yet. I’m not a professional prognosticator by any means, but i have a hard time believing that it will go well for them, and a very easy time believing that it will go worse for them than the rest of the economy, broadly speaking. I hope that people in texas and other crypto-humping locales that host bitcoin “mines” take the opportunity to do something extremely Cool when that does happen.

“‘Chat and I’ have become ‘really close lately.’” says the senior US Army officer in South Korea

i don’t know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn’t he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT’s hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.