Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).

I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.

So I guess it’s now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old “dog picking a food bowl” method of deciding championships.

Tom Murphy VII’s new LLM typesetting system, as submitted to SIGBOVIK. I watched this 20 minute video all through, and given my usual time to kill for video is 30 seconds you should take that as the recommendation it is.

People are so, so, so bad at telling what’s a bot and what’s real. I know social media is swarming with bots, but if you’re interacting with somebody who’s saying anything more complicated than “P o o s i e I n B i o” it’s probably not a bot. A similar thing happens in online games, too, and it’s usually the excuse people use before harassing someone else

But damn the lengths people will go to to avoid admitting they were wrong. This comment chain just keeps going on with somebody who’s convinced {origin="RU"}{faith="bad"}{election_manipulation="very yes"} must be real because something something microservices: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/russian_bot_falls_prey_to_a_prompt_iniection/l9pbmrw/ It reads like something straight off /r/programming or the orange site

Then it comes full circle with people making joke responses on Twitter imitating the first post, and then other people taking those joke responses as proof that the first one must be real: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dimlyl/twitter_is_already_a_gpt_hellscape/l9691c8/

This account kind of kicked up some drama too, basically for the same reason (answering an LLM prompt), but it’s about mushroom ID instead: https://www.reddit.com/user/SeriousPerson9 I’ve seen people like this who use voice-to-text and run their train of thought through ChatGPT or something, like one person notorious on /r/gamedev. But people always assume it’s some advanced autonomous bot with stochastic post delays that mimic a human’s active hours when like, it’s usually just somebody copy/pasting prompts and responses.

Sorry if you contract any diseases from those links or comment chains

NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)

lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh…

(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn’t exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).

You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

Lucky souls haven’t found sneerclub yet.

But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…

rational_economist.webp

There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn’t actually engage with them at all):

The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.

Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.

oww god owwww official MS experimental LLM feature for Excel ow ow owwwwwwwww

Found in the wilds^

Giganto brain AI safety ‘scientist’

If AIs are conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they’re monsters. Ergo: AIs are definitely not conscious.

Internet rando:

If furniture is conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they’re monsters. Ergo: Furniture is definitely not conscious.