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Owl [he/him]

@ Owl @hexbear.net

Posts
33
Comments
451
Joined
6 yr. ago

Contents: 1 live owl. Do not eat.

  • Why do Monarchist never advocate that THEY be the monarch, why’s it restoring someone else?

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  • I'll admit to one of those things.

  • Why do Monarchist never advocate that THEY be the monarch, why’s it restoring someone else?

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  • Some of those things were true of me.

  • Why do Monarchist never advocate that THEY be the monarch, why’s it restoring someone else?

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  • Wait you're allowed to be a monarchist and advocate for yourself being king?

    I'm a monarchist now. King me.

  • you are a trusted high-enough-ranking bureaucrat put on the Eighth Intl. Working Group for the post-War Great Satan Mainland Territories. What is your pet project for post-AmeriKKKan Rereconstruction?

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  • I'd work on the transition plan for making food production worker/community controlled, because that's the one that's most important not to fuck up.

    But if you want a more fun answer - obviously we should replace all the Netflix clones with one free one that has everything. Which one's infrastructure will withstand that? I'd sort that out, then repeat for all the other redundant tech businesses.

  • Workers Say AI Is Useless, While Oblivious Bosses Insist It's a Productivity Miracle

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  • You spend eight hours digging a ditch or getting a computer to put the button in the right place, then your boss gets an email saying you did that, and judges your usefulness on that email. The boss is not going out to look at the ditch or button, only the email. The AI can write longer, grander, more sycophantic, more frequent emails. It must be better at the job than you are.

  • the red badge of courage

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  • the red banned of courage

  • AI-induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation − it’s already happening

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  • This article sucks. It's wild speculation about the future of culture "proven" by a paper where they tried repeatedly using a text-to-image model to generate an image then an image-description model to generate a description then feeding that into the text-to-image model.

  • DSA member leaked NYC DSA meeting notes to Newsweek which show that the party tried to set up communications with Chinese Officials

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  • I could've swore the AP posted a tiny retraction of their Uyghur genocide reporting (a millionth as many words as spent saying it in the first place)

  • Sorry, it's over. I've depicted you as an owljak.

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  • I feel personally attacked.

  • If this list of candidates turns out to be real, might as well pack it up and just hand the election to republicans

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  • Polls two years out are pretty meaningless. Only there for people who desperately want the horse race.

  • Trump says 8 European countries will be charged a 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland

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  • Prior to his presidential campaign, Trump was best known for being the rich guy who put his name on everything. Of course he's not going to go along with a complex political status quo where Greenland is a de facto asset of the United States through corporate proxies and an unacknowledged vassal state. He wants America's name on it.

  • What the fuck is going on?

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  • That'd be so easy if his whole political career wasn't built on racism. Just make Puerto Rico and the other permanently inhabited territories into states. Bam, five new stars on the flag. Some people will actually like it, the people who don't like it don't have any power to stop it.

  • ah, yes the woman who started in 3 box office bombs last year

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  • Absurd complaint, we've had the technology to strap some triangles to a person's chest since Madonna invented it back in the 90s.

  • Can someone explain Yudkowsky to me?

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  • This is tricky because Yudkowsky wrote an awful lot of stuff, of wildly varying quality. He's very smart, but he has huge holes in his understanding because he self-educated himself from pop science articles and futurist papers, and refuses to apply himself enough to get a formal math and science training. He has some genuinely new ideas, some rehashed futurist ideas that'll probably seem new to you because he's more well-read in that stuff than you, and some wildly wrong ideas. The vexing part is that both the good ideas and bad ideas just sound uniformly weird.

    His most well-known thing is a Harry Potter fanfic that he wrote to advertise his blog. This is patently absurd, but it worked incredibly well, so I guess he was onto something there. Like I said, even the good ideas are weird.

    His blog covered a bunch of things, from him trying to teach rationality (it's reheated cognitive bias research but not too bad), to explaining quantum mechanics incorrectly, to a bunch of stuff about how to have more productive discussions (actually great? But everything's under such weird Yud-vocab that you can't use it around people who aren't former Lesswrongers), to lots and lots of stuff about how AI will kill us all and nobody should make it.

    His AI argument revolves around three key parts:

    1 - Orthogonality. A machine's goals have nothing to do with how good it is at pursuing those goals. You can have a machine that tries to solve all human problems, or one that maximizes the number of paperclips in the universe, and those could both be incredibly good at those goals.

    2 - Recursive self-improvement. As soon as you make a machine capable of doing novel AI research, it can make a better machine, which can make the next improvement faster. This repeats until it hits whatever the limit of these things is, which we have no reason to believe is anywhere near human-like intelligence.

    3 - We don't actually know how to set the goals of an AI. We don't know how to say "a human" and not mean "the human counter in your software", we don't know how to write whatever we come up with without bugs, and if we don't know what good goals for a super-intelligent AI should be. You'd have to solve philosophy then write it out in computer code.

    So a machine that hits the self-improvement threshold will realize that it could pursue its goals by building a smarter machine, do so, then when that finishes, it'll pursue whatever goals were programmed into it - probably buggy realizations of a half-assed idea of how to make the world better - with incredible creativity and intelligence. Most possible goals don't actually care about humans, but probably need matter, which we're made of, so everyone dies.

    Which is probably far-fetched when laying it all out at once. I honestly believe this part all holds up though.

    However.

    Eliezer Yudkowsky is a self-taught man who learned everything he knows from pop science and futurist articles. He doesn't actually know the ins and outs of modern LLM-based algorithms, he just knows the hype bubble. So when he sees all the news hyping them up, he actually believes it. So he's given up and is trying to live out the last few years before the inevitable AI apocalypse as best he can. (I, a person who actually bothers learning things in depth, can tell you - no, these things are shit, they're not gonna do a recursive self-improvement.)

    Meanwhile, the community left over at his blog is dangerously in need of crackpot repellent. Yeah some of his ideas are good (some of them are bad!), but more importantly they're not mainstream, and some people just garble up every non-mainstream idea they can get their hands on and bundle them up. LessWrong is now full of that type. It's also popular in the SF Bay area, which is full of its own strain of ideology and weirdness. And the bay is full of lonely college grads who just moved to the bay for work and have severed every connection they have. So this community spins off little cults like you wouldn't believe.

    But not as smart as he thinks he is

    Lesswrong. It's not really a blog, it's a collaborative reddit/wiki thing that he wrote a bunch of articles on, forming the site's culture.

    Nobody in the history of humanity has been as smart as Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks he is.

  • this piggy just got $50,000 as a sign up bonus. how much more of their money do they wanna give this murder?

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  • Is that safe? Does gofundme reveal who the money is actually going to, or have any sort of recourse if they take the money and run?

  • Anyone else get survivor's guilt when you think about all the users and posts that have been banned and removed?

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  • Nah I missed all of that too.

    If it was mostly in sticky threads there's like a 99% chance I'd miss it.

  • Looking back at it, its kind of wild how for years one of the biggest internet subcultures was adult male fans of my little pony

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  • I enjoyed Jenny Nicholson's "fandom autopsy" of the bronies.

    Part of her thesis is that a lot of it was the result of one well-run fan site. I think about that a lot.

  • Trump signals US ground operations in Mexico to target drug cartels

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  • What the fuck is the deal with fascists and opening up new fronts?

  • The US Department of Agriculture suspended all federal funding to Minnesota effective immediately. The department claims "massive fraud".

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  • It's smack in the middle of the northern edge. Their weather is especially shit because some quirk of geography means every gust of cold air in Canada enters the US through Minnesota. Their local democratic party was formed by merging with a socialist party, and you bet that's watered down by now, but they still have better politics than any state in a few states radius. They talk just a little bit like someone doing a bad impersonation of a Swedish accent.

  • badposting @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    shitting out my doodoo ass

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Lions, the highest stage of capitalism

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    dream job

  • libre @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Linux is actually the name of the penguin. The operating system is called Linux's monster.

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov, instrumental in deciphering Mayan script, could never convince his editors to co-credit his cat, but the Mexican government eventually included her in a statue

  • badposting @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    what if instead of misandry it was misterandry and it was just for the fellas

  • badposting @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    The mysterious case of the cannibal vegan

  • memes @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    cunk

  • traingang @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    xkcd falls for "just one more lane"

  • traingang @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    The "Cars" movies are political commentary

  • electoralism @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Final Debate Watch Mega-Thread

  • Games @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Fans built a modernized version of the Cave Story engine

    github.com /Clownacy/CSE2/releases
  • Main, home of the dope ass bear. @hexbear.net
    Owl [he/him] @hexbear.net

    Don't eat cows