I'd wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.

Dubai famously doesn't have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto tanker trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.

A rival gang of "AI" "researchers" dare to make fun of Big Yud's latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom

Leading to such hilarious howlers as

Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.

Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most German's agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.

rejecting Yudkowsky-Soares' arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)

ohai begging the question

LOL @ promptfondlers in comments

Nice time - here's a Swedish dude who constructed a 8m parabolic dish to do EME by hand

News item in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/byggde-atta-meter-parabol-for-att-prata-via-manen

Earth-Moon-Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication (bonus illustration obviously taken from a primary school science project) Edit malus for long passage in second section second para obviously originally written by a Nazi

I think we can all agree now that US Rationalists are basically all ex-Christians who are looking for the same thing but with the serial numbers filed off.

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

"tenant of white supremacy"

White Supremacy is the worst landlord.

As for the prospect that AI will enable business users to do more with fewer humans in the office or on the factory floor, the technology generates such frequent errors that users may need to add workers just to double-check the bots’ output.

And here we were worrying about being out of work...

I wish I could say "let them fight" but this is bad for the environment and bad for productive uses of energy so it's more a "whoever wins, we lose" situation.

Normal person: an LLM is trained on publicly available images of MRIs, most with tumors, so presenting an image of any MRI will naturally generate text related to brain tumor descriptions.

Brain-addled prompt fondlers: clearly this response proves Claude is more intelligent than any doctor.

I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.