Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Alright that's it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing (note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don't open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)
https://bsky.app/profile/pixeldoesthings.bsky.social/post/3lswcbtkwec2t
Actually burst a blood vessel last weekend raging. Gary Marcus was bragging about his prediction record in 2024 being flawless
Gary continuing to have the largest ego in the world. Stay tuned for his upcoming book "I am God" when 2027 comes around and we are all still alive. Imo some of these are kind of vague and I wouldn't argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance, but my God the LW crew fucking lost their minds. Habryka wrote a goddamn essay about how Gary was a fucking moron and is a threat to humanity for underplaying the awesome power of super-duper intelligence and a worse forecaster than the big brain rationalist. To be clear Habryka's objections are overall- extremely fucking nitpicking totally missing the point dogshit in my pov (feel free to judge for yourself)
https://xcancel.com/ohabryka/status/1939017731799687518#m
But what really made me want to drive a drill to the brain was the LW brigade rallying around the claim that AI companies are profitable. Are these people straight up smoking crack? OAI and Anthropic do not make a profit full stop. In fact they are setting billions of VC money on fire?! (strangely, some LWers in the comments seemed genuinely surprised that this was the case when shown the data, just how unaware are these people?) Oliver tires and fails to do Olympic level mental gymnastics by saying TSMC and NVDIA are making money, so therefore AI is extremely profitable. In the same way I presume gambling is extremely profitable for degenerates like me because the casino letting me play is making money. I rank the people of LW as minimally truth seeking and big dumb out of 10. Also weird fun little fact, in Daniel K's predictions from 2022, he said by 2023 AI companies would be so incredibly profitable that they would be easily recuperating their training cost. So I guess monopoly money that you can't see in any earnings report is the official party line now?
Ed Zitron on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsukqwhjvk26
Haven't seen a newsletter of mine hit the top 20 on Hackernews and then get flag banned faster, feels like it barely made it 20 minutes before it was descended upon by guys who would drink Sam Altman's bathwater
Also funny: the hn thread doesn't appear on their search.
This titbit by Molly White about how whales have captured Polymarket's "dispute resolution" mechanism had me chuckling
So, Zelenskyy is goth?
An interesting takedown of "superforecasting" from Ben Recht, a 3 part series on his substack where he accuses so called super forecasters of abusing scoring rewards over actually being precogs. First (and least technical) part linked below...
https://www.argmin.net/p/in-defense-of-defensive-forecasting
"The term Defensive Forecasting was coined by Vladimir Vovk, Akimichi Takemura, and Glenn Shafer in a brilliant 2005 paper, crystallizing a general view of decision making that dates back to Abraham Wald. Wald envisions decision making as a game. The two players are the decision maker and Nature, who are in a heated duel. The decision maker wants to choose actions that yield good outcomes no matter what the adversarial Nature chooses to do. Forecasting is a simplified version of this game, where the decisions made have no particular impact and the goal is simply to guess which move Nature will play. Importantly, the forecaster’s goal is not to never be wrong, but instead to be less wrong than everyone else.*
*Yes, I see what I did there."
In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:
So two weeks ago I linked titotal's detailed breakdown of what is wrong with AI 2027's "model" (tldr; even accepting the line goes up premise of the whole thing, AI 2027's math was so bad that they made the line always asymptote to infinity in the near future regardless of inputs). Titotal went to pretty extreme lengths to meet the "charitability" norms of lesswrong, corresponding with one of the AI 2027 authors, carefully considering what they might have intended, responding to comments in detail and depth, and in general not simply mocking the entire exercise in intellectual masturbation and hype generation like it rightfully deserves.
But even with all that effort, someone still decided make an entire (long, obviously) post with a section dedicated to tone-policing titotal: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027?open=false#%C2%A7the-headline-message-is-not-ideal (here is the lw link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5c5krDqGC5eEPDqZS/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027-timeline-forecasts)
Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal's post... his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn't really change anyone's mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.
So, morale of the story, lesswrongers and rationalist are in fact not worth the effort to talk to and we are right to mock them. The numbers they claim to use are pulled out of their asses to fit vibes they already feel.
And my choice for most sneerable line out of all the comments:
And I therefore am left wondering what less shoddy toy models I should be basing my life decisions on.
Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal’s post… his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn’t really change anyone’s mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.
Huh, what's this I have open in another browser tab:
The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller's proclamation that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth by 1844, which he called the Second Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to conclude that Daniel's "cleansing of the sanctuary" was cleansing the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared. When Jesus did not appear by October 22, 1844, Miller and his followers were disappointed.
Couple of years back there was a South Korean president that was captured by a cult, with cult reviewing all speeches and presumably influencing policies. No way that something like that could happen in the west, specifically no way it could get cooked in SV, pay no attention to it, nothing unusual happens here, this is not a place of honor,
The Korean president should have been aware of biasses ghat would have stopped him falling for a cult.
Exactly. I would almost give the AI 2027 authors credit for committing to a hard date... except they already have a subtly hidden asterisk in the original AI 2027 noting some of the authors have longer timelines. And I've noticed lots of hand-wringing and but achkshuallies in their lesswrong comments about the difference between mode and median and mean dates and other excuses.
Like see this comment chain https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5c5krDqGC5eEPDqZS/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027-timeline-forecasts?commentId=2r8va889CXJkCsrqY :
My timelines move dup to median 2028 before we published AI 2027 actually, based on a variety of factors including iteratively updating our models. But it was too late to rewrite the whole thing to happen a year later, so we just published it anyway. I tweeted about this a while ago iirc.
...You got your AI 2027 reposted like a dozen times to /r/singularity, maybe many dozens of times total across Reddit. The fucking vice president has allegedly read your fiction project. And you couldn't be bothered to publish your best timeline?
So yeah, come 2028/2029, they already have a ready made set of excuse to backpedal and move back the doomsday prophecy.
I call bullshit on Daniel K. That backtracking is so obviously ex-post-facto cover-your-ass woopsie-doopsie. Expect more of it as we get closer to whatever new "median" he has suddenly claimed. It's going to be fun to watch.
A bit of old news but that is still upsetting to me.
My favorite artist, Kazuma Kaneko, known for doing the demon designs in the Megami Tensei franchise, sold his soul to make an AI gacha game. While I was massively disappointed that he was going the AI route, the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn't have any ethical issues with it.
Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game's AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.
the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art
much simpler models are practically impossible to train without an existing model to build upon. With GenAI it's safe to assume that training that base model included large scale scraping without consent
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... Evangelion Unit 1 with a Superman logo and a Diabolik mask.
Rob Liefeld vibes
Good parallel, the hands are definitely strategically hidden to not look terrible.
the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.
Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.
Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.
Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I'm not shocked.
(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)
Ed's got another banger: https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/
What's extra fun is that HN found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456
There's at least one (if not two if you handle the HN response separately) good threads that could be made from this. Don't have the time personally at the moment.
I will say that I'm shocked to see some reasonable shit in the HN comments, people saying the post is too long or not an acceptable tone are getting told off rather respectably with some good explanations (effectively: this was written this way intentionally you dolt). Broken clock and all that, I guess.
Another winner from Zitron. One of the things I learned working in tech support is that a lot of people tend to assume the computer is a magic black box that relies on terrible, secret magicks to perform it's dark alchemy. And while it's not that the rabbit hole doesn't go deep, there is a huge difference between the level of information needed to do what I did and the level of information needed to understand what I was doing.
I'm not entirely surprised that business is the same way, and I hope that in the next few years we have the same epiphany about government. These people want you to believe that you can't do what they do so that you don't ask the incredibly obvious questions about why it's so dumb. At least in tech support I could usually attribute the stupidity to the limitations of computers and misunderstandings from the users. I don't know what kinda excuse the business idiots and political bullshitters are going to come up with.
You're absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs "bicycle of the mind" concept was still a driving force in the field.
I still don't think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, you've got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillset... and since it's a probabilistic process, you're still not going to get consistent results.
I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you can't say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many people's salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.
I had applied to a job and it screened me verbally with an AI bot. I find it strange talking to an AI bot that gives no indication of whether it is following what I am saying like a real human does with "uh huh" or what not. It asked me if I ever did Docker and I answered I transitioned a system to Docker. But I had done an awkward pause after the word transition so the AI bot congratulated me on my gender transition and it was on to the next question.
@zbyte64 the technical term for those "uh huh"s is backchanneling, and I wonder if audio chatbot models have issues timing those correctly. Maybe it's a choice between not doing it at all, or doing it at incorrect times. Either sounds creepy. The pause before an AI (any AI) responds is uncanny. I bet getting backchanneling right would be even more of a nightmare.
Anyway, congrats on getting through that interview, and congrats on your transition to Docker, I guess?
Now I’m curious how a protected class question% speedrun of one of these interviews would look. Get the bot to ask you about your age, number of children, sexual orientation, etc
Not sure how I would trigger a follow-up question like that. I think most of the questions seemed pre-programmed but the transcription and AI response to the answer would "hallucinate". They really just wanted to make sure they were talking to someone real and not an AI candidate because I talked to a real person next who asked much of the same.
@zbyte64 @antifuchs Something like "I have been working with Database systems from the time my youngest was born to roughly the time of my transition." and just wait for the clarifying questions.
@zbyte64
I will go back to turning wrenches or slinging food before I spend one minute in an interview with an LLM ignorance factory.
@BlueMonday1984
@johntimaeus @zbyte64 @BlueMonday1984 Your choice. They made their choice. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
lol
Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?
You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of "decomputing" that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.