Philosoraptor

Curtis Yarvin wants to be the baddie. He's an edgelord.

No argument from me. It absolutely has its uses--some potentially really significant--and "Attention is All You Need" and the subsequent literature very much is a landmark development in automation. It's just terrible for like 97% of the use cases it's being pushed for right now, as well as being developed with the explicit goal of actively making the world worse (because it's under the control of the world's worst guys, for the most part). If this tech were genuinely open, being developed responsibly, and used for the things it is genuinely good at without being shoved into applications it isn't good for, it could definitely solve some problems.

Industrial scale assembly lines at least have the virtue of consistency. That's one of their main benefits: you get the same thing at the same quality every time. LLMs don't even get you that.

Holy shit, no wonder they wanted to keep this under wraps. This is lazier than what I'd expect from a high school senior with senioritis. How embarrassing.

It's free if you just want to watch on your local network (for now). The pay features are to be able to stream off-network (and a few other things). Still outrageous.

Definitely no poors living on Lake Tahoe. This is a real

situation in my opinion.

The hot new techbro idea is that we'll all get "universal basic compute" instead of income after the hallucination machine takes everyone's jobs. These guys really are so far up their own ass that they think that's pretty much the only compensation anyone could want or need.

Billionaires' Rock is the name of the 60 foot cliff we're gonna Midsommar the billionaires off of.

Our whole school operation is shut down just in time for finals. Maybe running every single educational institution on a single point of closed-source failure was a bad idea.

Even if you thought that the Chinese government was going to the trouble of spying on you, what would they be doing with that data? You don't live in China! Every single thing you touch in the United States is a privacy nightmare because of the US Government and tech corporations, and they're in direct control of your every waking minute. What's China going to do to you?

When you tell generative AI to make a picture you're commissioning something from an algorithm. Davinci created a work of art in the Mona Lisa, the patrician who commissioned the painting did not create art.

Great analogy, comrade. I like that a lot.

While there are zealots who genuinely do think that the brain is literally a digital computer, I think most people would, when pressed, admit that it's an analogy. The prevailing technology of the day has a long and distinguished history of being used as a metaphor for describing thought--early modern philosophers loved to talk about mental events as a kind of clockwork mechanism, for instance--but those analogies are not generally to be taken literally. The mechanists of the 18th century didn't think that there were literally gears inside your skull; they just thought that the idea of an unimaginably intricate clockwork mechanism was a useful way to think about the functioning and organization of cognition (which it is, at least in some ways).

There's maybe more literalism about it these days than is standard, but even most of the people who take this analogy very seriously aren't saying something so trivially false as "your brain has a literal CPU and works exactly the way your laptop does." That's pretty obviously not true. But the analogy is a useful one in many ways, and can help us understand what the hell is going on in there that lets a big chunk of meat give rise to such an extraordinary phenomenon as consciousness. The observation that when I do something like add two and two in my head there must be something going on that is, in some relevant sense, functionally identical to what goes on in a desk calculator when I enter 2+2 isn't totally vapid. It's possible to take all this too seriously, and moving from "there's some amount of functional parallelism here" to "these two systems are functionally identical in general" is (I think) an unwarranted one. But, again, I don't really think that's the interesting thesis here.

Computers, quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog.

They really don't, at least no more literally than brains do. Computers don't "know" anything about numbers, words, formulas, images, or algorithms. They don't even know anything about 1s and 0s or bits and bytes: every single one of those things is an abstraction that helps us track the real pattern in how an extraordinarily complicated system changes over time. Computers are cleverly designed arrangements of metal, plastic, and other physical material that, when subjected to certain boundary conditions, will evolve over time in predictable ways that we can then use to model various patterns. They're physical models in about the same sense that a model airplane in a wind tunnel is a physical model of a full-sized airplane in the open air--they're just more complicated by far. There's nothing magical about this kind of arrangement that makes it "real" information processing while the brain (or anything else) is ersatz; that is, information processing just is that kind of stable, predictable physical change. Computers process information in exactly the same sense that brains do and in exactly the same sense that any other physical system does. Computers (and brains) have the virtue of being a combination of complex and stable that lets them process a lot of information across a wide variety of contexts, given appropriate inputs and boundary conditions.

Consider the difference between a modern digital computer and something like Babbage's analytical engine. There are enormous physical differences between those two systems. The analytical engine was purely mechanical: it took its input via punch cards and stored its internal state via wooden or metal pegs inserted into rotating barrels. Is something like that "quite literally processing information" on this view? Is it encoding data as bits and bytes? Or is that something that only electronic digital computers can do? This strikes me as an obviously silly question: there are ways in which the analytical engine and my laptop are functionally similar, and ways in which they are different. Whether the similarities or differences are more salient depends on what you care about, or what kinds of things you think are important to track. Either they're both doing information processing, though, or neither of them is--there's nothing special about electronic digital computers that makes them "real" instances of computation and everything else just a simulacrum. But if the analytical engine can process information despite huge differences in material constitution and operation from an electronic computer, then surely the brain can as well. That doesn't mean a brain is a digital computer, just that (again) there are elements of similarity between the two, and that the formalism of information theory can be a useful lens for understanding the operation of both.

The court heard that Woods was told during the encounter that some deputies were allergic to bees, and that she replied: “Oh, you’re allergic? Good!”

C-suite executives, meanwhile, are facing the heavy burden of squeezing blood from AI’s proverbial stone. 72 percent of all surveyed execs said their company’s AI strategy is causing them stress or anxiety, 32 percent of whom characterize their stress as “high” or “crippling.”

lol, lmao

If we stay on the current trajectory, I think more-or-less complete collapse by 2060 at the outside.

Definitely not belittlement, but my committee didn't necessarily agree. Climate scientists are often rather conservative--not so much in the political sense as in the "we think that the middle-of-the-road ensemble model prediction is probably basically right" sense. When you say something like "I think that even the more pessimistic model forecasts are underselling how bad the situation is" they tend to be pretty skeptical. I got pushback, but not really disdain or belittlement. A lot of the new work coming out seems to be vindicating the position I was taking though which (again) sucks because it is very bad.

Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]

@ Philosoraptor @hexbear.net

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Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]

NYT: Marx failed to consider the petit bourgeoisie

“Jews would have deserved the holocaust if they reacted violently to it” as a talking point in defense of Israel is truly breaking new ground in right wing intellectualism

Revenge of The Business Idiot

Revenge of The Business Idiot

Federal charges for Israeli man connected to Las Vegas illegal biolab dropped

(cw: bodyshaming) Judge, MOGGED.

Motorcade for one of the fabled 9/11 steel beams. It will be on display at the Alameda county fair for the 25th anniversary.

DNC releases 2024 autopsy, with chair apologizing for ‘creating an even bigger distraction’

Lifetime Plex Pass Increasing From $250 to $750

'It's like we don't exist': Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents face power loss as utility redirects lines to data centers | Fortune

Techbro forced to have one independent thought cut off from "ai"; suffered complete homeostasis collapse

Billionaires Rock

Hackers breach Canvas learning platform, exposing data on millions of students and teachers [in US]

Libshit Fears Over Plummeting Their Social Credit Score

The right can't meme

Your brain does not process information & it is not a computah

Buzz Off

The CIA is quietly using AI to build emulated versions of world leaders. In the absence of real intelligence, CIA tries to use artificial one.

Palantir fashposting on main

Gen Z Sabotaging AI at Work So It Won't Take Their Job

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation

The Cruel Kids' Table - The Cultural Ascendancy of the New Young Right

Looking into it

Incredible things happening at Bari Weiss' University of Austin

Musk's X office in France raided by Paris prosecutor

"March For Billionaires" this weekend (this does not appear to be a bit)

That little girl? Albert Einstein

In a shocking turn of events, Republicans will not be allowing the vote on the health insurance subsides they super duper promised they would

US Congress made it so that when the military's shit breaks, it's illegal for them to repair it themselves

Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time as climate crisis warms country

Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming

Dan Dennett has died