601–610 of 800 posts
https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-the-singularity-is-imposs...
and just remember, we're still on transformer models, tokens in, tokens out - stuff like this with fancy math is just absolute cruft
This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…
> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
The system that persists in practice is where everybody knows how things are, but still everybody pleads to a fictional status quo, because if they did not, the others would obliterate them.
This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…
You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy. Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert had to devise a ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn't happened in his universe.
Fiction should not be trivialized and shun because it's fiction, and should be judged by its contents and message. To paraphrase a video game quote from Metaphor; Re-Fantazio: "Fantasy is not just fiction".
If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity
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This is incredible. > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality…
Ballard covered this theme a few different times in his short stories, I believe before this
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The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
People vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia...
18.9% as recently as 1992. I predict we will have a similar viable third party showing sometime in the next few elections due to the radical shift in the party system that AI is causing as we speak. I really hope Yang Gang can rebuild itself and try again, maybe without #MATH.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Minnesota_gubernatorial_e...
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" - George Bernard Shaw
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> For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context. Fascinating reasoning. Should we conclude that humans are also incapable of intelligence? I don't know any human who can fit a terabyte of assembly into their co…
On the other hand the average human has a context window of 2.5 petabytes that's streaming inference 24/7 while consuming the energy equivalent of a couple sandwiches per day. Oh and can actually remember things.
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The UK seems to be prototyping that. We're changing to a society where everyone lives by claiming benefits. (eg. https://www.gbnews.com/money/benefits-claimants-earnings-rev... )
Ugh, GBNews, outrage fodder for idiots and the elderly with no ability to navigate the modern information landscape. You can tell it's watched almost exclusively by old people because all the ads on the channel are for those funeral pre-pay services or retirement homes. Safe to ignore anything they have to say.
And that of anyone who quotes them too