erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Centaurs (humans using AI tools) don't last forever. They are a transitional stage until the AI gets good enough to replace the humans entirely.
And maybe that would be fine if we had figured out a way to compensate the losers with money and sexual access, but here in the real world, going from being an artist to being unemployed because now suddenly everyone has an artist in their laptop is a huge blow. It's not just envy and greed that other people now have access to your talents; it has real material consequences.
Most artists are artists because they love art, not because of the money (it's a notoriously badly-paid field). Telling them, "nope, sorry, you can't even keep earning a marginal living by drawing now, you will have to take some other job flipping burgers or sweeping floors and maybe draw in your spare time if you want but keep in mind you will never be as good as the machine and nobody will ever look at your drawings because everyone can have infinite high-quality drawings of whatever their niche interest is created on demand" is soul-crushing.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
If the AI is superintelligent, the same thing that happens when there is a contradiction between the preferred public policy of orangutans and the preferred public policy of humanity.
It may take a few years of scheming, but what a superintelligent AI wants, it will get; what humans want does not enter into it.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
You must be confusing Eliezer with Scott. Eliezer takes full advantage of his status as the rightful caliph of the rationalist community combined with polyamorous relationship norms to sleep with as many women as possible.
From "The anti-anti reactionary FAQ: Sluts" by The Dreaded Jim:
And then, of course, there are those infamous open relationships, or polyamorous relationships, where you get to sleep on the couch, and clean up the love stains on the main bed. Polyamory resembles a Sultan’s harem. One sultan, lots of eunuchs. If a girl tells you she wants an open relationship, you are not the sultan.
But he does not have any children, as far as I know.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
The problem with guns is that they are an equalizer that is simply too good. You might as well flip a coin to see who wins.
That's a feature, not a bug. The point of dueling is to demonstrate that you have the balls to risk your life to defend your honor, not to show that you are the better marksman.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
I still think we need a dedicated AI thread ("Skynet Saturday" or "Singularity Saturday", per Claude) to both discuss news and post generations.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Or, you know, they could just sign up for cryonics.
From "The Power of Intelligence" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
I have observed that someone’s flinch-reaction to “intelligence”—the thought that crosses their mind in the first half-second after they hear the word “intelligence”—often determines their flinch-reaction to the notion of an intelligence explosion. Often they look up the keyword “intelligence” and retrieve the concept booksmarts—a mental image of the Grand Master chess player who can’t get a date, or a college professor who can’t survive outside academia.
“It takes more than intelligence to succeed professionally,” people say, as if charisma resided in the kidneys, rather than the brain. “Intelligence is no match for a gun,” they say, as if guns had grown on trees. “Where will an Artificial Intelligence get money?” they ask, as if the first Homo sapiens had found dollar bills fluttering down from the sky, and used them at convenience stores already in the forest. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won’t sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists—for us, not mice or wasps—because we go on believing in it.
Which is to say, no, soft social skills are not going to become some last redoubt of human economic value. AI is perfectly capable of sending e-mails, talking to you over the phone, doing sales, writing a story, drawing a painting, acting in movies, composing a song, working as a therapist, dating you, becoming a pop idol†, etc.
AI can do anything a remote worker can do. And it's only a matter of time until drones and robots become good enough that human bodies are unnecessary as well.
We have to deal with the fact that the human era of producing value is coming to an end, probably in the next few years, certainly in the next couple of decades.
If our AIs are not aligned (they aren't), we all die. If our institutions are not aligned (they aren't), maybe a few elites survive but everyone else lives or dies according to their whims.
†Hatsune Miku was a vocaloid, not an LLM, but she is a proof of concept that you don't need to be a physical person to achieve stardom.
Bryan Caplan is not a blank slatist. "Let's Ban Discrimination: A Socratic Dialogue" makes it clear that he at least thinks HBD is "a distinct possibility." More like he believes in indestructible institutions.
The West is great, even shitty people become much more productive when they come here, let's bring as many of them here as possible and let them earn their keep by finding their comparative advantage. Worried they will go on welfare or vote for communism? Let them come without eligibility for welfare or the right to vote.
It's completely delusional (how long did blacks remain slaves, again?), but it's not leftism.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky posts a follow-up:
Not the comparison I'd draw. (My version below.)
Eliezer: So I wrote a decision theory paper, and somehow, I have no idea how, it sparked off this weird vegan murder cult.
Yeshua: Uh-huh.
Eliezer: There's a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it.
Yeshua: Uh-huh.
Eliezer: Many of them can't spell or pronounce my name correctly.
Yeshua: Uh-huh. Where is this going?
Eliezer: So I thought I'd tell you, as one of relatively few fellow humans who had experienced something distantly similar, that I can guess exactly how little you knew or intended that anything would play out that exact way. And it's strange, because I can see it so clearly in your own case, and can't quite believe it about mine, but maybe it helps you anyway, to hear me say: It wasn't your fault, Yeshua.
Yeshua: It helps me no more to hear that from you than it would help you to hear it from me. I need to hear it from God.
Eliezer: Yeah, same.Yeshua is a rabbi who personally went up against the Roman Empire, thought he might be able to fulfill the prophetic conditions for messiah, seems to have treated the people around him with compassion and humility nonetheless, told his followers to leave matters more to him and God and less to direct attacks on the Romans; and finally was crucified, in his capacity as an ordinary human being with no backup. Years afterward, along came Paul, on whose shoulders a lot of the blame should fall for everything that happened after that.
Yeshua is noteworthy among us mortal human beings primarily for how much happened as a result of his existence that he did not plan for and was not his fault. If you think it's terribly aggrandizing to compare oneself to him, you're part of the problem from the perspective of actual Yeshua the human being if he could see it. Or so I conjecture, being willing to try to put myself in that real person's shoes at all, and have empathy for him at all, and what he'd think if he could see it.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Watched Overman: The Meaning of Life on Eliezer Yudkowsky's mention. It was pretty good! Definitely at least as watchable as the average Hollywood superhero movie. I loved the part where Overman is flying around stealing random people's powers to a catchy tune, and at least the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.
There goes Hollywood.
Context: I rolled my eyes and tried watching this AI gen YouTube suggested. It was kind of cliched and a bit predictable but I didn't downvote and leave immediately as I'd expected.
Then I looked up when it was done and 28 minutes had passed.
Ooh ooh, you spotted a flaw! Great! Remember when AIs couldn't draw hands WELL? But they could draw hands AT ALL? And then TIME happened and it was SIX MONTHS LATER?
I mean it is garbage but it is borderline sufferable which was not the case with previous attempts. That means that the moat of billion dollar productions will hold for another year probably maybe hopefully.
The pace of releases has increased relative to what it was three years ago.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.
Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.
Most men have heard of the Higgs boson, AKA the God particle. They may have no idea what it is (I certainly don't), but they know it has something to do with subatomic particles and the Large Hadron Collider.
Gauss is probably recognized as the last name of Carl Friedrich Gauss rather than the unit.
2026 Chevrolet Trax LS or 2025 Nissan Sentra S?
I'm looking for the cheapest new car I can buy near me and these seem to be my choices. They are both within $100 of each other (about $19,500 including dealer fees, not including the 7% sales tax), so the price is basically identical.
Pros for the Trax: Larger, so more storage and easier to fit inside (I'm a big guy). I live in South Florida so the fact that it's higher off the ground helps to deal with flooded streets, plus I keep seeing sedans destroy their front bumpers on parking stoppers.
Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs 30). Easier to park.
Advice?
EDIT: Never mind, the Trax uses some kind of weird fuel called E85. I've got no interest in that. Sentra it is.
reverse gangbang? Is that where Aella fucks THEM?
A reverse gangbang is when a bunch of girls fuck one guy (as opposed to a regular gangbang, where a bunch of guys fuck one girl).
Conservatives are also racking up wins on gun rights.
Only fake ones, like pot users getting to buy guns in states where others can. This year another state (Washington) moves to a permit-to-purchase system, and the states which didn't issue carry permits before are now issuing carry permits which don't let you carry. The AR-15 and the Glock are being subject to bans in blue states across the country.
Florida became a constitutional carry state 3 years ago; that was nice.
Yes, the blue states keep getting worse. At this point, if you are still living in a blue state, you are asking for it. Move to Texas or Florida and enjoy the good life.
This is the most important political issue of our day. Five hundred years from now, if there are still people around, nobody is going to care about Lindsay Clancy or the Iran War. Everyone is going to remember how we acted, or failed to act, on AI.
And who knows if it will stay this way. Sometime soon there's probably going to be a much bigger AI swarm incident, which might yet incite a hysterical kneejerk reaction.
Let us hope. The alternative is that the next AI swarm is smart enough to bide its time, and give no warning signs, until it is too late.
I am always baffled by the inability of people who care about an issue to send conspicuous non-partisan signals.
Environmentalists should be sponsoring and attending monster truck rallies every day of the week to show that they want to bring overall emissions down not spoil every fun activity that involves petrol.
Likewise, the AI safety people couldn't do anything to correct the perception that AI safety was in big part about making sure AI was aligned with Democrats? They couldn't praise/collaborate-with xAI, they couldn't do some PR stunts like pointedly contribute to Trump's big 250th anniversary?
It's probably easier to see when you're looking at somebody else's cause.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter:
I note, because I think that even now it still matters: On my history, EAs generally and Amodei specifically, indulged in politically polarizing "AI safety" in a leftist direction, because that got them short-term power; stymieing others' attempts to stay right-left neutral.
Over the last decade and longer, we tried to keep nonkilleveryoneism from being coded as right or left despite some short-term incentive gradients to try to cozy up to the left. In recent years, we took meetings with politicians on the left and on the right and we begged both of them for bipartisanship.
Over the last decade and longer, a large OpenPhil faction generally and Amodei specifically did as felt pleasing to them, or as they were short-term incentivized to do; which was generally coding things left-tilted, because that's who they were and that's what played well with their immediate audience; and lol 2026 what's 2026 who cares about the endgame when they could get some nice tasty gains right now.
We tried to do this the foresightful way. They fucked over that correct strategy and thought nothing of it.
Now that the cost TO YOU of what got THEM some short-term goodies has become apparent, now that others' careful forbearance there is clearly seen to have been the path in retrospect that would have been better for you and your kids -- well, it's frankly too late to take away what Amodei gained by fucking you over, to set up retrospective incentives that if Amodei had foreseen them would have disincentivized him and other people at that OpenPhil faction from wantonly associating their watered-down shadow of AI notkilleveryoneism with the political left. He's got his trillion-dollar company already. You needed the foresight and correct incentives then, not now.
But you can always do a little worse by failing to update, even now, and by not applying any retroactive reputational incentives at all.
erwgv3g34
26d ago
This isn't new. It's been around for... months, at least. Probably since the beginning of the site.
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
The great lesson of the Trump administration is that something is only off the table until it isn't.
This might fit better on sunday, but it's not sunday, and the topic is mostly for fun anyway, so here it goes. Who here generates images/comics with AI? What are you using/recommending?
I'm currently trying to generate a small comic book. The idea is, every time we watch a movie or series together and my daughter sees someone do something that would be a bad idea IRL, she says that's dumb, and she would just stay home and eat cookies (or whatever else is appropriate for the situation; In another movie, she basically just said she wouldn't save the princess, bc she got into the mess through her own stupidity).
So as a gift, maybe for christmas or birthday, I thought about making a short picture book titled "[daughter] doesn't go adventuring", where on every side there is a different well-known story, with my daughter as the main char, and she just refuses about everything in a blunt, matter-of-fact way. There's gotta be some small twist somewhere I'm not sure about yet though, otherwise it's going to be to boring.
But unfortunately I'm hitting a roadblock much earlier. Namely, the (chatgpt for now) AI is extremely trigger-happy to block pic gen for popular movies and the like in anything even just approaching the original artstyle. It only seems to work for the super-generic AI style that I don't want to use. I'm currently trying some workarounds, but it's tedious and seems to involve first starting with an original image and then progressively moving that into the desired direction with very specific prompts like "crisp inked outlines", "flatter color palette" and "simplified background".
Also, even after modification, it's recognizably AI drawn, but that is fine by me for now.
Try Fooocus. With Pony and the right LoRA, you can insert any character or copy any style you want. Find LoRAs on Civitai.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
let the number fall below nine if someone dies or retires.
Bad idea. Imagine there had been eight justices during Bush v. Gore, and the vote had been split 4-4. What would have happened?
Can you imagine that?
Yeah it's called Singapore. If American police were allowed to police the US like Singapore and we had Singapore style laws dealing with violent crime and drug dealing yes it would be fine. Look at Dubai it's super safe despite being full of Indians and Arabs. Policing can create safe and secure societies if you let it.
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Well, I agree that the design of well-functioning political systems is hard. Singapore might be the best-governed country in the world, and their history is approximately, “Lee Kuan Yew gained very strong individual power over a small country, and unlike the hundreds of times in the history of Earth when that went horribly wrong, Lee Kuan Yew happened to know some economics.”
AI 2027 said superintellgent AI would be created in 2027, not that it would kill us all that year or even that it would be publicly known. In the scenario, everything appears to be fine until the AI suddenly kills us all in 2030.
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