BlueMonday1984

Text version just came up - excellent read as usual.

A lot of Yudkowsky’s despair is that his most devoted acolytes heard his warnings “don’t build the AI Torment Nexus, you idiots” and they all went off to start companies building the AI Torment Nexus.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

While we’re talking about what rationalists actually believe, I’d be remiss not to mention one deeply unpleasant thing about the rationalist subculture: they are really, really into race and IQ theories and scientific racism. Overwhelmingly.

Considering the whole thing's deeply fucking steeped in fascism, I'm not shocked.

I originally planned to mention it was only senior programmers who'd likely benefit - I definitely screwed up leaving it on the cutting room floor.

Adding that now.

Good catch, I'll quickly update my post now.

I decided to look deeper into that subreddit, and I found the most utterly cursed sentence I've read all week (coming from the aptly-titled "Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn't)"):

If that doesn't sum up everything wrong with AI sloppers in a single sentence, I don't know what does.

EDIT: Incorrectly claimed it came from "My Unethical Strategy to Hit 4000 Hours Watch Time in 40 Days" - fixed that now.

except they have none of the academic ability of the TESCREAL authors

This has two potential readings, and both of them are funny.

Ed Zitron has chimed in on OpenAI's woes, directly comparing their situation to a dying MMO:

Zitron is in a pretty good position to make this comparison - he worked as a games journalist in the '00s before pivoting to working in public relations.

In other news, Politico's management has gone on record stating their AI tools aren't being held to newsroom editorial standards, in an arbitration hearing trying to resolve a major union dispute.

This is some primo Pivot to AI material, if I do say so myself.

New piece from Brian Merchant, about the growing power the AI bubble's granted Microsoft, Google, and Amazon: The AI boom is fueling a land grab for Big Cloud

ZITRON DROPPED

Another day, another case of "personal responsibility" used to shift blame for systemic issues, and scapegoat the masses for problems bad actors actively imposed on them.

Its not like we've heard that exact same song and dance a million times before, I'm sure the public hasn't gotten sick and tired of it by this point.

Probable hot take: this shit's probably also hampering people's efforts to overcome self-serving bias, as well - taking responsibility for your own faults is hard enough in a vacuum, its likely even harder when bad actors act with impunity by shifting the blame to you.

Given the trajectory of the world, yeah, let's go with that

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?

In a literal sense, Google did attempt to make GPT Doom, and failed (i.e. a large language model can't run Doom).

In a metaphorical sense, the AI equivalent to Doom was probably AI Dungeon, a roleplay-focused chatbot viewed as quite impressive when it released in 2020.