Yeah. The whole Gel-Mann effect always feels overstated to me. Similar to the “falsus in unus” doctrine Crichton mentions in his blog, the actual consensus appears to be that actually context does matter. Especially for something like the general sciences I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect someone to have similar levels of expertise in everything. To be sure the kinds of errors people make matter; it looks like this is a case of insufficient skepticism and fact checking, so Hank is more credulous than I had thought. That’s not the same as everything he’s put out being nonsense, though.

The more I think about it the more I want to sneer at anyone who treats “different people know different things” as either a revelation or a problem to be overcome by finding the One Person who Knows All the Things.

Just gonna go ahead and make sure I fact check any scishow or crash course that the kid gets into a bit more aggressively now.

I mean, it feels like there’s definitely something in the concept of a Where Is Everybody style of episode where Mark has to navigate a world where dead internet theory has hit the real world and all around him are bots badly imitating workers trying to serve bots badly imitating customers in order to please bots badly imitating managers so that bots badly imitating cops don’t drag them to robot jail

ChatGPT finally achieved profitability due to unintended money laundering at unprecedented scale.

It really aggressively tries to match it up to something with similar keywords and structure, which is kind of interesting in its own right. It pattern-matched every variant I could come up with for “when all you have is…” for example.

Honestly it’s kind of an interesting question and limitation for this kind of LLM. How should you respond when someone asks about an idiom neither of you know? The answer is really contextual. Sometimes it’s better to try and help them piece together what it means, other times it’s more important to acknowledge that this isn’t actually a common expression or to try and provide accurate sourcing. The LLM, of course, has none of that context and because the patterns it replicates don’t allow expressions of uncertainty or digressions it can’t actually do both.

I tried this a couple of times and got a few “AI summary not available” replies

Ed: heh

The phrase “any pork in a swarm” is an idiom, likely meant to be interpreted figuratively. It’s not a literal reference to a swarm of bees or other animals containing pork. The most likely interpretation is that it is being used to describe a situation or group where someone is secretly taking advantage of resources, opportunities, or power for their own benefit, often in a way that is not transparent or ethical. It implies that individuals within a larger group are actively participating in corruption or exploitation.

Generative AI is experimental.

about cool technology and how it relates to society

My dude I’ve got bad news for you about what Black Mirror is about.

LMFAO, best known for “Party Rock Anthem”, is actually a failed leftist yodaist sect, standing for the warning “Leopards, my face, ate off”

@David Gerard could probably throw the actual numbers and sources at us to back it up. I don’t really have the background to put the numbers in context and have largely trusted his and others’ reporting on the subject, but my understanding is that especially if you consider the volume of actual USD liquidity rather than trusting Tether and other stablecoins to actually be backed then it’s truly dire. Even if you take the numbers at face value, however, I don’t think there’s nearly enough depth in the order book to absorb a meaningful amount of sell pressure at current prices.

Hat tip to the AI bro in the comments willfully misunderstanding why he sees so much “sexualized schoolgirl trash” from human artists. Both in the sense of “illustrators take commissions from horny strangers who are one of the most consistent sources of actual income and one imperilled by genAI” and in the sense of “my dude in the modern internet if you’re seeing it that frequently it’s because the algorithms have decided you’re into that shit.”

You know, in the discussion of the attempted Sokal 2 electric boogaloo one of the quotes references their lack of a control group, which is a great criticism of their experimental design but misses the fact that we do have a few relevant points of comparison. Jan Hendrick Schoen, for example, nearly made it all the way to a Nobel Prize by faking data about superconductors.

Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The “Ent” framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn’t want to go to war the war came to them just the same.

Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.

Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a “flight to safety” as much as a “morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove”

Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.

Surely the most rational thing to do would be for the Rationalist sphere at large to retreat into their Ratcaves and spend a few years translating the sequences into Mandarin, right?

Ask it to look for repeated faces in each image rather than Waldo. Would be easy enough to pattern-match into the published work and I don’t think anyone out here wants to make customized pieces for this “project.”

Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with those reports, but it’s feeling real bleak.

Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.

Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article […] I offered Grok a very specific query: […] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

Imagine this, but everything and forever.

Edit:

The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

I think calling the current model one where “the listeners became suppliers” is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party’s efforts to profit from it. Like, we don’t see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they’re trying to do, but because it’s profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we’re actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it’s more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.

I also want to know what this “draconian censorship regime” is in Europe, because it isn’t like they’re falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless he’s supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.

Yeah, the whole “they lied!” nonsense is deeply frustrating. People simultaneously want experts to be responsive and provide information immediately but have no tolerance for “as best we now know” or “given the current circumstances” advice. You can’t simultaneously get the most recent cutting-edge information and only get what’s been long-settled and validated.