It will be very interesting to see who/which firms among the VC class attempt to buy off the new Democrats, and who sticks to A16Z’s “build! techno-optimism!” bit.

What Yudkowsky doesn’t get that Hubbard certainly did is that this sort of belligerent boundary-setting against wrongthinkers and skeptics needs to be a consistent practice, not an occasional outburst.

I will assert again that ~nobody who claims that prompting is a skilled practice also offers a guide to how to develop that skillset. And it would be effectively the same claim as having cracked the use of English as a computer programming language, so it should be pretty easy to produce that guide, right? Anthropic should have this shit front and center! First clickable link on their front page!

uwu pls don’t take away my sense of technological progress - it is the only thing that gives meaning to my life and culture

A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are.

When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isn’t really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.

I have more hope for putting serious pressure on my middle-of-the-road Dem rep. The district here only really turned Dem around 20 years ago thanks to the influx of Bay Area bedroom-community commuters, but there are still plenty of families around who immigrated as ag workers. So he already felt a degree of pressure, but now I feel like urging him to get on board with properly punishing the very worst Trump excesses might (might!) not be an empty gesture anymore.

I don’t understand why anyone would think this would ever be possible for LLMs.

Yes, as I understand it, inference requires strictly less computational capacity than training; it’s just that a training setup can be turned around and run inference sessions massively in parallel. Just because you can run inference doesn’t mean you can accomplish a training run. Unless there’s some rationalist super-computer-science I’ve been missing this whole time…

The shape of the story feels like Anakin was aged down late in development and he was meant to cut a more harrowing figure as both a run down victim of generational slavery as well as a target of racism/speciesism all too eager to prove himself

I’ve never thought of it this way, but that does in fact make the most sense. Lucas swerved at the last minute to make Episode 1 a kiddy movie? I can’t imagine he would have needed to do that to secure funding for the then long-awaited continuation of Star Wars, but stranger things have happened.

wasn’t there a thing where the other kids were being demeaning to him about humans being too slow in the head to be good pod racers

Yes, this is a pretty critical plot point, Anakin can only participate as a human because he can use the Force.

Anakin’s massacre of the Tusken raiders is also the wrong kind of step into evil, from a character perspective. We’re supposed to see Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and Vader is in the main a cold-blooded villain

I’ve said for 20 years that Anakin’s fall, in the movies, comes off mostly as an ass-pull. The scene where he kneels to Palpatine and Palpatine literally seems to dream up his iconic villain name on the spot has always felt like exactly that. “Oh well, Windu fell out a window, guess I’ll be evil now!”

That’s probably why these fash weirdos are pumping the ROTS novelization rather than the movie itself, as I understand it sheds light on Anakin’s internal narrative in much more detail. I’ve always had the sense that Lucas was trying to say something about the (sadly still relevant) trend of American school shootings with both the Tusken massacre and the infamous youngling slaughter, but we don’t get enough time with Anakin in the movies to gain much idea as to why he would reach directly for mass violence. If you’re just going by the movies, the idea that he’s still carrying unresolved trauma from being enslaved carries nearly all that weight. And if that’s all you’ve got to go on, it reflects pretty badly on the Jedi not helping him with that for the 10-15 years he’s with them. The movies do seem to admit that the Jedi Order is a failing institution, but this conflicts with the shiny happy optimism of Luke growing into a Jedi in the original trilogy. Rian Johnson tried to square this circle later, but obviously he didn’t convince everybody.

If anything, Anakin’s interactions with Dooku are the most convincing bit. Hotheaded apprentice gets in over his head -> later matures just enough that he has to be pushed into taking murderous revenge. That points toward the violent-cop narrative you suggest, but we don’t spend nearly enough time with that storyline for it to breathe. My favorite fan works posit Vader as essentially being Palpatine’s slave, and thus psychologically beaten down to the point of near collapse. fialleril on AO3 is one of the most inspirational in writing this sort of stuff.

This stuff should be taken as proof that Twitter is not mainstream anymore, and any media professionals still on there “for work” are just microwaving their own brains. This is genuinely stupider (and the Malfoid shit much creepier) than anything that was ever posted to Something Awful. Obsessively posting on Internet forums needs to go back to being the niche hobby of weirdos, and then all these people need to eat a permaban + 100,000 hour probation just to be sure.

It does lend me some impetus to finally write my idea where Anakin doesn’t join Palpatine, the Jedi keep him around contingent on restorative justice to the Tuskens, and he is otherwise a glorified space tow-truck driver for ships that break down who now abhors violence.

damn, I thought my sneers were on point, but clearly I must up my vip game. seems like boots optimized for rapid heel-turn vipping may be the meta

Kurzweil actually liked the warp 10 lizard sex episode – pass it on

Artemis III is going to be so embarrassing, isn’t it. Next summer they’re supposed to link up with a lunar lander-configuration Starship (and also Bezos’ company’s slightly more reasonable lander design) in orbit as a proof-of-concept.

Not that Altman’s company is ahead in the AI coding race, but everyone’s PCs will still need increasing amounts of DRAM to be able to run the next generation of slop-coded JavaScript apps.

Yeah, I’ve read a few stories in the past year or two that updated suspiciously rapidly and weren’t terribly well written. But overall the culture there is against AI generation.

Tesla Semi went up in flames on I-880 in the Bay Area: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-semi-fire-i880-hayward-traffic/4165797/

Between this and the carload of freshly manufactured Teslas that burned to the ground on the Grapevine on I-5 last year, that seems like only one (1) freeway-closing big-rig related explosion per year. That’s not so bad, right?

Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?

I feel like it plays to their aesthetic, which is partly built on their insecurities. Oh, humans aren’t smart enough to handle all this advanced research (read: very few of these people were committed enough to get bio or chem degrees, let alone follow through with research careers), but the superintelligent AI surely will be able to! If we submit to the AI god now, it will make up for the gaping voids of meaning and skill inside ourselves.

Too bad our old friend Kirk Johnson couldn’t make it in

Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

one of the most damning sentences in the whole post, really

The ease and comfort of Liquid Ass