Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"

The whole email thing does resemble Morton's fork:

1. See! They didn't answer the email! Clearly it means this employee is fraudulent or incompetent.
2. See! My wonderful AI assessed that the 5 bullet points are in insufficient reason for keeping them around.

It's a bit of a slimey attempt at complete discretionary firing, which Elon or even Trump can't possibly actually have the authority for.

optifye.ai

When the normal -fy startup nomenclature isn’t even enough.

I looked at their website and they’re not even attempting to mask their dystopian shitshow. And of course it’s all in the name of productivity and efficiency.

I hate those ghouls so much.

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.

The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you're giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That's all it is saying.

How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?

Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox's remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they're pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they've gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don't work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).

I hate how much firefox has been growing to this point of being the best, by a smaller and smaller margin, of a fucking shit bunch

related, but tonight I will pour one out for Conkeror

NGL I always wanted to use IceWeasel just to say I did, but now it might be because it's the last bastion!

Bruh, Big Yud was yapping that this means the orthogonality thesis is false and mankind is saved b.c. of this. But then he immediately retreated to, "we are all still doomed b.c. recursive self-improvement." I wonder what it's like to never have to update your priors.

Also, I saw other papers that showed almost all prompt rejection responses shared common activation weights and tweeking them can basically jailbreak any model, so what is probably happening here is that by finetuning to intentionally make malicious code, you are undoing those rejection weights + until this is reproduced by nonsafety cranks im pressing x to doubt.

The best answer will be unsettling to both the hard skeptics of AI and the true believers.

I do love a good middle ground fallacy.

EDIT:

Why did the artist paint the sky blue in this landscape painting? […] when really, the answer is simply: Because the sky is blue!

I do abhor a "Because the curtains were blue" take.

EDIT^2:

In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other.

Of course "Jagged intelligence" is also—stealthily?—believing in the "g-factor".

OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.

The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.

Here's how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:

Researchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: “jagged intelligence." [...] Picture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesn’t seem far apart.

So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the "intelligence" part of it, to suggest that "AI can be great". The article just boils down to "use AI for the things that we think it's good at, and don't use it for the things we think it's bad at!" As they say on the internet, completely unserious.

The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning — the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?

Demonstrably no.

These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try.

Fuck right off.

Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems. AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that “reasoning” models aren’t really reasoning at all.

Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.

Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a human’s reasoning, it’s well on its way to getting there. So, who’s right?

Again, fuck off.

Moving on...

The skeptic's case

vs

The believer’s case

A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skeptic's case and 889 on the believer's case. BIAS!!!!! /s.

Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:

• Shannon Vallor, "a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh"
• Melanie Mitchell, "a professor at the Santa Fe Institute"

Great, now the believers:

• Ryan Greenblatt, "chief scientist at Redwood Research"
• Ajeya Cotra, "a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy"

You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.

Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like "AI can do solve some really complex problems!" Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest we've boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.

I'm thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

"But if I don't get the supplies I can't save the town!"

"Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no"