Could also be RADICAL AI SAFETYISTS

my god they actually did it the absolute madlads

(seriously tho I believe this is to forestall any embarrasing subpeonas)

very gendered and heteronormative (and it admits it), but might be interesting?

Wired: Meet the Sad Wives of AI

A Scandal at the Center of the Economy

This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.

This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.

employer-of-record service companies

what fresh hell are these?

Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge, then fired leaders who objected, Colorado lawsuit alleges

Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.

The man has no concept of loyalty owed, only loyalty received.

HN is basically “this is a CIA plot to tank stonks” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418016

I think he’s out on a thin limb.

If there’s one thing people who espouse “reasonable pro-AI” views push, is that the US has to go ahead building chatbots because otherwise the Chinese will beat us.

In the current point in time, AI is under perceived attack by the Democrats (I doubt they’ll go against the lobbyists but w/e) and the US Right has realized that no-one really likes Big Tech - they’re convenient scapegoats for all sorts of things. Sure they want billionaires in charge but people like Sam Altman aren’t really their kinds of people.

Throwing the book at Jensen would help both sides.

This is such a weird story.

I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff

at least this a reading of

Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don’t apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:

1. if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
2. if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won’t have a datacenter near me

I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.

just bribe 'em, bro!

“How to be Rational: Use Drugs”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qYuy9Cr6BNpgjJjT/help-your-friends-get-adhd-and-depression-meds

you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vakRzGKXLknQNJ9M/stephen-martin-s-shortform?commentId=ec8LnnTjBMcow3C82

especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down).

Then there’s this gem

Data center inputs, unlike almost anything else are much more subsitutable than any other input, and can be built in places where humans don’t care to raise NIMBY concerns.

So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means

• power
• cooling
• construction / planning
• the actual fucking contents in the racks
• data

All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling.

Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services.

Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms.

These people are delusional.

They banked on Trump & co being reasonable competent at fascism and getting rid of meaningful democratic participation in the 2 years before the midterms. And if he’d had a bit more of a plan apart from building marble and gold monstrosities, he’d have gotten away with it, too!

Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like

This is such a great way of looking at it, thanks.

Of course, a lot of the creators of that future were themselves politically right-wing or libertarian. Think Heinlein.

XSLT is basically used for one thing - styline RSS feeds so they look like HTML

(yes I know the XSLT lovers point to data sources that went all in on XML in the early 2000s then never got the budget to update, but in the first approximation that’s the use case)

Seeing as RSS is basically as popular/well known as XML, I doubt this tantrum will move the needle in any way.

Mostly people are mad at Google, which is fine by me

wait oh god there’s more than just Lunduke???

LW and the more credulous parts of the general techsphere are going gaga over this

https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/

Is this the long foretold, mythical RSI???

RSI = recursive self-improvement, not repetitive strain injury

I am not a Proton customer. My impression is that they offer semi-secure/private email and VPN access.

What the fuck do they need GenAI for??