I never got the impression that Zitron’s reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasn’t all there yet.

That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. “But achktually LLMs aren’t the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero stars”–are you serious?

The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitron’s whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.

the father of quantum computing agrees

And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.

Oh sure, postgrads grading and even substitute teaching occasionally is very normal here too (edit: Greece)

For those who didn’t read the article, the culprit is a Massachusetts company called Cognia that’s apparently doing essay grading to the tune of $36.5M yearly revenue, which, what?

The essays being scored by a contractor, is that just normal weird or also USA weird?

deleted by creator

She’s popped up once or twice, owing to how she got on a lot of normal people’s feeds as a science influencer before she couldn’t contain the crank any longer.

I for one don’t mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.

To be fair to Mr. Gay, he went in with the noblest of intentions, to get a chance to ask Thiel how in the hell does he not see that if anyone around here is the antichrist, it’s him.

Update: They had the Diella thing give a press conference.

He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.

For reference, that’s the guy who wants Thiel to give him 40M to put a baskeball-player-sized titanium cross on the moon.

Sabine Hossenfelder claims she finally got cancelled, kind of - Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy cut ties with Sabine Hossenfelder.

Supposedly the MCMP thought publicly shitting on a paper for clicks on your very popular youtube channel was antideontological. Link goes to reddit post in case you don’t want to give her views.

In collaboration with cryptocurrency outfits Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum foundation, Google also produced an extension that would integrate the cryptocurrency-oriented x402 protocol, allowing for AI-driven purchasing from crypto wallets.

what could possibly go wrong

In either case, the goal is to maintain an auditable trail that can be reexamined in cases of fraud.

Which is a thing that you only need to worry about if you use these types of agents.

Which in any case you can’t, because

The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf and engage in complex real-time interactions with retailers’ AI agents.

Can’t see how this doesn’t defeat the purpose, if you have a mock data generator of sufficient fidelity you already have a well-defined mechanism to describe the data, shouldn’t you be using that instead of developing a new model to capture the characteristics of the model that creates those characteristics?

I feel that strip mall dojos where you were ostensibly taught some very mainstream belt-based martial art like karate or TKD (or straight up make-believe stuff like ninjutsu) but were essentially glorified daycare should figure somewhere in the history of the term.

190IQ is when you verb asymptote to avoid saying ‘almost’.

It’s possible someone specifically picked the highest IQ that wouldn’t need a second planet earth to make the statistics work.

Siskind did a review too, basically gives it the ‘their hearts in the right place but… [read AI2027 instead]’ treatment. Then they go at it a bit with Yud in the comments where Yud comes off as a bitter dick, but their actual disagreements are just filioque shit. Also they both seem to agree that a worldwide moratorium on AI research that will give us time to breed/genetically engineer superior brained humans to fix our shit is the way to go.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone/comment/154920454

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone/comment/154927504

Also notable that apparently Siskind thinks nuclear non-proliferation sorta worked because people talked it out and decided to be mature about it rather than being scared shitless of MAD, so AI non-proliferation by presumably appointing a rationalist Grand Inquisitor in charge of all human scientific progress is an obvious solution.

Nice. Here’s the bluesky account as well.

Some quality wordsmithing found in the wild: