That was a good read.

Corey doc wrote:

It’s not “unethical” to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That’s just “a search engine”

Equivocating what LLMs do and what goes into LLM web scraping with “a search engine” is messed up. His article that he links about scraping is mostly about how badly copyright works and how analysing trade-secret-walled data can be beneficial both to consumers and science but occasionally bad for citizen privacy, which you’ll recognize as mostly irrelevant to the concerns people tend to have against LLM training data providers ddosing the fuck out of everything, and all the rest of the stuff tante does a good job of explaining.

Corey also provides this anecdote:

As a group of human-rights defending forensic statisticians, HRDAG has always relied on cutting edge mathematics in its analysis. With its Colombia project, HRDAG used a large language model to assign probabilities for responsibility for each killing documented in the databases it analyzed.

That is, HRDAG was able to rigorously and legibly say, “This killing has an X% probability of having been carried out by a right-wing militia, a Y% probability of having been carried out by the FARC, and a Z% probability of being unrelated to the civil war.”

The use of large language models — produced from vast corpuses of scraped data — to produce accurate, thorough and comprehensible accounts of the hidden crimes that accompany war and conflict is still in its infancy. But already, these techniques are changing the way we hold criminals to account and bring justice to their victims.

Scraping to make large language models is good, actually.

what the actual shit

edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?

Also the web scraping article is from 2023 but CD linked it in the recent pluralistic post so I assume his views haven’t changed.

Timnit briefly weighs in about being included in the doc, apparently she regrets it and says the filmmakers “sprinkle some [AI skeptics] in like chocolate chips to perform ethics”.

She also calls Yud a eugenicist cult leader with nothing to show for.

Also code helper tools don’t even work like that, there’s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it’s supposed to be doing at any given time.

Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn’t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.

I mean, they mostly don’t have a problem with AI instances inheriting the earth as long as they’re sufficiently rationalist.

Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.

This isn’t about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.

Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for “an AGI economy”:

“for the AGI parasite to overcome to regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host”

The Rationalists!

OpenClaw guy got hired by OpenAI

My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use.

Maybe he’ll get to stick it in whatever John Ives designs, eventually.

I mean the vibe is pretty spot on, I’ll give them that, and the premise of someone making fashy noises in an anarchist squat and getting summarily thrown out on his ass is perfectly believable, but the protagonist seems like an obvious a parody character and I think his belief that everyone he meets should adhere to the NAP is meant as a running gag.

Also, I’d take issue with the unspoken premise that this would be an Exarcheia thing, getting your ass beat by anarchists who clocked you as a fascist (and vice versa) is a panhellenic phenomenon. Fascist here meaning less someone who likes Tucker Carlson and toothbrush mustaches, and more someone who is an organized member of a heavily nationalist sportball fan club and/or whatever is currently filling the void that Golden Dawn left but isn’t making the news.

Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.

I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.

Makes sense, given the embarrassing lengths he went to not hurt the bot’s feelings in that thread.

Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

Nice to see the top comment being about how such excess concentration of wealth is kind of bullshit actually.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3ucp8y/i_was_beat_up_by_left_anarchists_in_greece/

I remember yelling “you’re breaking the NAP” and things like that. “Stop initiating force against me.”

Beats Yud’s fan fiction any day of the week.

what is with the “uhm actually its ephebophilia and not pedophilia” thing?

It means sexual crimes are OK as long as there are no kindergartners involved.

It’s also sea-lioning, because it assumes that unless you have, on you, at all times, documented receipts about what ‘as young as 14’ means, maybe you are just out to bad mouth noted philantrhopist and patron of the sciences J. E. Epstein and the people who liked having him around.

“Diligence is costly in executive attention” – EY when explaining why they didn’t read Epstein’s wikipedia to find out if he’s a convicted pedo.

the Models Will Improve

I tell people that this is code for RAM and storage will cost 10x by this time next year when this comes up. Highly recommended.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.

Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try and pull a reverse star wars on the US and make them burn up an even more horrendous amount of capital to keep up with nothing.

China plans space‑based AI data centres, challenging Musk’s SpaceX ambitions (reuters)

Not really. It’s a narrative that took hold early on to explain where the hell he got all that money without being connected to a visible business, and why he got a slap on the wrist the first time he was found guilty of pimping minors and being a child molester.

It’s certainly looking more and more like it was mostly a case of strong class solidarity among the ultra rich than him having had to force the issue.

It feels more like a toy project that snowballed fueled by ideology and get-rich-quick schemes.