TechTakes

OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can't stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships

the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites -- AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men

An AI girlfriend that isn't going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?

I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.

And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is "real".

If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.

this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:

I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.

It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.

[…]

But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.

[…]

From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn't seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.

you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.

this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:

Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.

In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.

I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.

and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington

Creativity is a lie. You heard it here first.

Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

Because if not

for the record, im currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

MS carbon emissions up 30% due to spicy autocomplete

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/microsoft_co2_emissions/

good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective

a crossover sneer from the Nix Zulip:

This is an easy place to add a hook that goes through each message and asks a language model if the message violates any rules. Computers are about as good as humans at interpreting rules about tone and so on, and the biases come from the training data, so for any specific instance the decision is relatively impartial.

please for the love of fuck kick the fascists out of your community because they’ll never stop with this shit

I know this is like super low-hanging fruit, but Reddit’s singularity forum (AGI hype-optimists on crack) discuss the current chapter in the OpenAI telenovela and can’t decide whether Ilya and Jan Leike leaving is good, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk, or bad, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk.

Yep, there’s no scenario here where OpenAI is doing the right thing, if they thought they were the only ones who could save us they wouldn’t dismantle their alignment team, if AI is dangerous, they’re killing us all, if it’s not, they’re just greedy and/or trying to conquer the earth.

vs.

to be honest the whole concept of alignment sounds so fucked up. basically playing god but to create a being that is your lobotomized slave…. I just dont see how it can end well

Of course, we also have the Kurzweil fanboys chiming in:

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves. Use the tech to upgrade ourselves.

But don’t worry, there are silent voices of reasons in the comments, too:

Honestly feel like these clowns fabricate the drama in order to over hype themselves

Gee, maybe …

no ,,, they’re understating the drama in order to seem rational & worthy of investment ,, they’re serious that the world is ending ,, unfortunately they think they have more time than they do so they’re not helping very much really

Yeah, never mind. I think I might need to lobotomize myself now after reading that thread.

https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/please-dont-take-luminas-anticavity

Oops?

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that's not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn't seem to comprehend that I'm mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It's difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.