throwyawayyyy

6 ms·

1.
by throwyawayyyy 6d ago
Not everyone who isn't wearing pants is playing bagpipes, but almost everyone who is playing bagpipes isn't wearing pants.
2.
by throwyawayyyy 8d ago
I mean, nuclear weapons _plus_ rogue AI is a) the stuff of quite a bit of science fiction and b) not nearly science-fiction enough these days.
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by throwyawayyyy 8d ago
I can't say it doesn't make sense. Who still loves Facebook? Older people. Who loves chatbots? Old people too. Not _just_ old people of course, but this genuinely might be the first new tech I've seen which has been so easily
4.
by throwyawayyyy 9d ago
Why hasn't AI already solved the chip shortage? I guess we need to spend more on AI. More money to the AI barons so they can solve cancer and also employment.
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by throwyawayyyy 12d ago
Who'd have thought a Meta exec would be arrogant enough to assume they can get away with this (!!). /s
6.
by throwyawayyyy 12d ago
Lots of "performance review boilerplate, I don't want to say anything _bad_ about this person but there's nothing particularly good I can say" energy there. Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting: &quo
7.
by throwyawayyyy 19d ago
Skipping past the implication that the author believes that the only things that matter are the things he personally cares about, he doesn't seem to realise that we use the word "subjective" to mean two different things. We u
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by throwyawayyyy 24d ago
I initially thought, but why would you want a "webcam whose activity LED I can switch off while it records"? But then I think I got the point: why would one want a webcam which _could be hacked_ so that its activity LED didn'
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by throwyawayyyy 24d ago
AI companies: give us money, think of all the jobs will be able to destroy and whose value we will somehow manage to capture! General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.] AI companies: don't worry a
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by throwyawayyyy 26d ago
And imagine the staggering power that already gives OpenAI et al. Hundreds of millions of people _doing whatever they suggest_.
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by throwyawayyyy 26d ago
As an example: my employer doesn't require that I learn how to communicate well. It requires that I already learned to do so.
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by throwyawayyyy 26d ago
Exactly. And what is a job interview but an exam?
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by throwyawayyyy 26d ago
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart. Just t
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by throwyawayyyy 26d ago
This is kind of damning, isn't it? "Similar or slightly higher" for spending the _same time_ means it's not, in fact, helping. At the same time as being extremely damaging to a significant number of students who, of cour
15.
by throwyawayyyy 29d ago
I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worke
16.
by throwyawayyyy 2mo ago
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden
17.
by throwyawayyyy 2mo ago
I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we ha
18.
by throwyawayyyy 2mo ago
I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must
19.
by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
It's the Silicon Valley circular-reasoning meritocracy in action: those with the billions deserve to have the billions because they have managed to get the billions. Every extra dollar only goes to prove how little they need to listen
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by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
Kind of serious question: in tech circles is the Manhattan project generally seen as a _good_ thing, these days? Why use it as the example and not, say, Apollo? "We're working really hard so we can build things with the power to k
21.
by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
Hmm, also saying the scale is 0 to 5 is... something. In my experience, which was a while ago, no one cares about SEV 3, and I only ever saw SEV 4 used as a placeholder or TODO list. Never came across a SEV 5 in the world. It's really
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by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
I'm sure it's about power. I am also sure that having that much wealth, that little accountability, being surrounded by people who've a vested interest in telling you you're a genius, would make anyone go a little insane
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by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.
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by throwyawayyyy 3mo ago
I mean, if Japan is the world's future, isn't that kind of... good? It's not the first place I think of when I think of a failing country.
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by throwyawayyyy 4mo ago
One solution is not to advance anything of course. I'm not even joking, is there going to be a successor to React? I suspect not, with the vast amount of training data for React now, it's going to look silly to move to something e
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by throwyawayyyy 4mo ago
The Stasi had one informant per 6.5 people. We're moving to a world in which everyone can have their own personal informant. I really don't think I am being hyperbolic here.
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by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
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by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to be a single cell? I can easily believe there
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by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
One question I am genuinely wondering about is whether a self-driving car _is_ cheaper than a human driver, once all of the externalities are priced in. In SF right now a Waymo is typically priced a little under an Uber (actually quite a bi
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by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying

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