It’s probably half the training set, considering it’s based on scraped web and of all the web, there is the most web of internet atheist debating. Acres and acres of such web.

How much do I need to smoke to get in this level of naval gazing?

e-commerce is better than the moon landing

Most reasonable PG fans

I still don’t think cortical electrodes should even be described as a direct interface. A direct interface would speak action potential and connect to your spinal cord, like Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix. I do not see a lot of people lining up to test what would probably entail having your brainstem dissected!

The Nostradamus play.

The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness.

I’m picturing the VR dildo-suit from Upload.

I’ve been disappointed to see Doctrow’s reaction to the AI industry, to say the least. He’s spent so much time relentlessly campaigning against intellectual property that he apparently cannot imagine anything worse than intellectual property winning anything ever. I don’t think he’s a big picture guy, I think the internet just really likes him because at the end of the day he was popular on slashdot and he tells people that piracy is awesome.

That is correct, it was called TheSchisim.

Aren’t prediction markets an attempt to turn insider trading into a productive part of society (or whatever the libertarians who love prediction markets conceptualize as society.)

after party at Curtis Yarvin’s house

One sentence horror story.

In fact, didn’t they make this movie, “Get Out” right?

Sort of an aside, but let’s soap box about why the Lab Leak theory is a thing:

What I don’t get about lableak enthusiasts is why they insist that it’s not just a lab leak, but also a lab leak of an other than natural virus. Hell, if you wanted to try and fit the facts but still explain the spooky coincidence, envision a just-so scenario where someone caught (proto) covid while collecting samples in a cave, went back to work at the lab, infected everyone while buying groceries at the market.

Nobody makes up a story like that! It’s always a credibility-straining cover-up paired with claims about an engineered virus that don’t fit the facts. That makes me think they don’t care about the facts at all, and instead just really want to be able to blame something-anything-besides their own countrys’ ineffectual responses to the virus for the death and mayhem.

Lab leak is a slight of hand, but don’t be fooled; how patient zero happened isn’t relevant for the purposes of evaluating how a certain very popular right wing someone managed to fall down flat the one time he was actually called upon to act as a leader.

I’ll remember that next time a TREACLES tires to explain how something that totally discredits rationalists has nothing to do with EA.

Ok, I’ve spent way too much time on this, but read the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section. As some of the comments point out, it could be written about Kat’s own reaction to the earlier article.

Whenever I see that they’re updating their opinions I imagine that’s where the micro dosing comes in.

Fooling EAs is a lot easier and less risky than fooling the IRS.

This is a 60 minute post. Nobody proofread this. They’re hoping few people will read the whole thing, and they’re probably right.

Think of how many souls could have been saved if you didn’t waste the church’s time investigating all those abusive priests! Truly the investigators are sinners on a staggering scale!

It almost reads as a threat… ‘don’t stop our gravy train, or we’ll lash out and reveal what we know!’

I wish you were joking but they literally say this in the post:

At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on [investigating us]. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it’s just that they aren’t, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. […]

Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.

Also this:

Have you ever made a social gaff? Does the idea of somebody exclusively looking for and publishing negative things about you make you feel uneasy? Terrified?

(spooky hands)

I actually played this game with some of my friends to see how easy it was. I tried to say only true things but in a way that made them look like villains. It was terrifyingly easy. Even for one of my oldest friends, who is one of the more universally-liked EAs, I could make him sound like a terrifying creep.

📸 🤨

I could do this for any EA org. I know of so many conflicts in EA that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace on, it would explode in a similar fashion.

🤔