Being a LessWrong hater around here doesn't feel like a hobby worth setting up a whole event for, but if any of you regulars happen around western Finland I can offer a pint in exchange for a basilisk joke.
bitofhope
joined 1 year ago
Good point, from the very start RISC was developed with government funding in the people's republic of Berkeley.
Almost forgot it was a commie ISA to begin with. Should have banned it ages ago.
Sure, but even giving him the benefit of doubt that this was actually a botched attenpt at a joke, that's not exactly flattering is it?
I like deadpan humor and often have to clarify that some quip was a pun, a reference or sarcasm, but I don't blame the listeners whenever they don't get them.
If I were a self-identified contrarian habitually posting controversial hot takes in flowery prose, I'd hope to be a little less belligerent and defensive if people mistake an ironic joke for a sincere belief.
It sometimes hurts that people believe you'd actually mean the dumb joke you said but you either have to suck it up and take the L or start marking up your irony.
When you actually work in STEM things you often get to work and spend time with people outside STEM as well and often end up realizing their work is challenging, valuable and not something you can do better than them just because you still remember the quadratic formula long after high school.
Basically this https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Not like he's ever been a competent physicist but he has always had the attitude of STEM chauvinism down pat.
Everything obeys the laws of math and logic, right? Let's just Russel&Whitehead everything out of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Or better yet, something I personally came up with based on vibes and NIH.
This also informs his anti-empiricism. Why bother actually looking or listenging when you can just work everything out from a handful of assumptions.
Ah, of course it's a joke. Should have realized that he'd never sincerely post a bizarre and incorrect take.
The concept is just another grey goo scenario rehash but I grant that "diamondoid bacteria" is a striking name for it.
Ignore the implication that the virus could rewire my guts into an LTE modem or brainwash me into reading and typing out entire bitcoin transaction blocks for a moment. Yud considers the ability to freely mutate humans to an arbitrary extent and the supervillain plan he comes up with is a fucking cryptocoin miner?
How does someone this creatively bankrupt produce 660 thousand words of a fanfic?
Not to dehumanize but are we sure Yudkowski isn't an LLM himself?
Riveting stuff, Eliezer. It takes a polymath genius of the highest caliber to write an apocalyptic sci-fi story full of personal drama that somehow manages to read like a software end user license agreement.
Small detail: biological viruses are not even remotely similar to computer “viruses”.
that's where the LLM comes in! oh my god check your reading comprehension
U-huh, and an LLM trained on video game source code and clothing patterns can invent real life Gauntlets of Dexterity.
Why exactly is he so convinced LLMs are indistinguishable from magic? In the reality where I live, LLMs can sometimes produce a correct function on their own and are not capable of reliably transpiling code even for well specified and understood systems, let alone doing comic book mad scientist ass arbitrary code execution on viral DNA. Honestly, they're hardly capable of doing anything reliably.
Along with the AI compiler story he inflicted on Xitter recently, I think he's simply confused LLM and LLVM.
Seems inappropriate to laugh about this. People spending a fortune on a worthless ugly monkey png deserve ridicule, but not permanent eye damage just because they went to a party with their fellow marks.