TechTakes

It appears that many of you have been hiding full blown hardout sneers from SneerClub, and I am baffled as to why

There isn't really a suitable awful.systems sub to put it in, but I thought I'd note here that Stonetoss got doxxed thoroughly just to increase the general good cheer and bonhomie

So today I learned there are people who call themselves superforcasters®. Neat!

The superforecasters® have had a melding of the minds and determined that covid-19 was 75% likely to not be a lab leak. Nifty! This is useless to me!

Looking at the website of these people with good enough judgement to call themselves "Good Judgement", you can learn that 100% of superforecasters® agree that there will be less than 100 deaths from H5N1 this year. I don't know much about H5N1 but I guess that makes sense given that it's been around since 1996 and would need a mutation to be contagious among humans.

I found one of the superforecaster®-trainee discussion topics where they reveal some of the secrets to their (super)forecasting(®)-trainee instincts

I have used "Copilot" LLM AI to point me in the right direction. And to the point of the LLM they have been trained not to give a response about conflict as they say they are trying to permote peace instead of war using the LLM.

Riveting!

Let's go next to find out how to give up our individuality and become a certified superforecaster® hive brain.

To minimize the chance that outstanding accuracy resulted from luck rather than skill, we limited eligibility for GJP superforecaster status to those forecasters who participated in at least 50 forecasting questions during a tournament “season.”

Fans of certain shonen anime may recognize this technique as Kodoku -- a deadly poison created by putting a bunch of insects in a jar until only one remains:

100 species of insects were collected, the larger ones were snakes, the smaller ones were lice, Place them inside, let them eat each other, and keep what is left of the last species. If it is a snake, it is a serpent, if it is a louse, it is a louse. Do this and kill a person.

"But what's the catch Saturn"? I can hear you say. "Surely this is somehow a grift nerds find or a way to fleece money out of governments".

Nonono you've got the completely wrong idea. Good Judgement offers a 100$ Superforecasting Fundamentals course out of the goodness of their heart I'm sure! I mean after all if they spread Superforecasting to the world then their Hari-Seldon-Esque hivemind would lose it's competitive edge so they must not be profit motivated.

Anyway if you work for the UK they want to hear from you:

If you are a UK government entity interested in our services, contact us today.

Maybe they have superforecasted the fall of the british empire.

And to end this, because I can never resist web design sneer.

Dear programmers: if you apply the CSS word-break: break-all; to the string "Privacy Policy" it may end up rendered as "Pr[newline]ivacy Policy" which unfortunately looks pretty unprofessional :(

I grabbed a book on the fermi paradox from the university library and it turned out to be full of Bolstrom and Sandberg x-risk stuff. I can’t even enjoy nerd things anymore.

My first mini sneer. Hope it fits the criteria.

I frequent some (very AI-critical) art spaces, and every now and then we get some trolls who act like literal anime villains, complete with evil plans and revenge plots, but unfortunately without cool villain laughs.

I always wonder if those bozos all were stuffed into a trashcan by a gang of delinquent artists in high school, judging from the absolute hate-boner they seem to have.

I've deliberately not been talking about it online to aid in keeping it from their knowledge as long as possible.

Not sure if he knows that not all artists live in caves and make cave paintings. And even those who do probably have a smart phone with them, for better or worse. So I’m afraid his nefarious plan doesn’t quite work out.

I knew it would scare the anti-Al shitless, because it completely bypasses scraping, datasets […].

Shaking in my chair over here, but I still don’t understand how this negates the needs for scraping and datasets. Just because I can attach a reference image to my prompt doesn’t mean the waifu generator can suddenly operate without training data.

I foresee a full-on tantrum when this becomes commonly known.

I mean, it’s not like Midjourney put out a big-ass announcement for that feature or anything. It’s totally a secret that only an elite circle knows about.

I just found out that there are Dominican Republic supremacists? Like, the latest thing on xitter is making the DR out to be Caucasian Haiti. It's some especial pol-brained nonsense about how the DR is successful because it's a white country, even though they're all very clearly AT LEAST lightskinned? It's an arguement about a country that only works if you've never seen the country or its people.

This one dude in particular namesearchs Haiti and spams the replies with as many white(ish) Dominicans as he can, along with the typical rants and graphs and then if he gets dunked in the quotes or the replies he just ritual posts the same 5 tiktoks of the same lightskinned Dominicans and says that all the darkskins are just Haitians. The worst part is that it works. His posting completely smothers any tweet disagreeing because he's paying Elon 58 dominican pesos a month to LARP as measurehead on pay to win 4chan.

I learned about this because someone dragged a copy to aella’s birthday orgy and it showed up in one of the photos, but the rationalists have a cards against humanity clone and it looks godawful

no regerts - from the SomethingAwful meme stock lols thread

Unsure if this meets even the lowest bar for this thread but I was jumpscared by Aella while browsing Reddit

I found this article last week about AI bullshit written in 1985 by Tom Athanasiou and published in the, also new to me, Processed World zine.

The world of artificial intelligence can be divided up a lot of different ways, but the most obvious split is between researchers interested in being god and researchers interested in being rich. The members of the first group, the AI "scientists,'' lend the discipline its special charm. They want to study intelligence, both human and "pure'' by simulating it on machines. But it's the ethos of the second group, the "engineers,'' that dominates today's AI establishment. It's their accomplishments that have allowed AI to shed its reputation as a "scientific con game'' (Business Week) and to become as it was recently described in Fortune magazine, the "biggest technology craze since genetic engineering.''

The engineers like to bask in the reflected glory of the AI scientists, but they tend to be practical men, well-schooled in the priorities of economic society. They too worship at the church of machine intelligence, but only on Sundays. During the week, they work the rich lodes of "expert systems'' technology, building systems without claims to consciousness, but able to simulate human skills in economically significant, knowledge-based occupations (The AI market is now expected to reach $2.8 billion by 1990. AI stocks are growing at an annual rate of 30@5).

https://processedworld.com/Issues/issue13/i13mindgames.htm

All Processed World issues on archive.org https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Processed+World+Collective%22&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22

and the official Processed World site with html archive https://processedworld.com

Aella is #1 education substack

Here that car seat post I was talking about

The best sneer is from the comments imo

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle here. It would be political malpractice to liberalize these safety rules. The first child who dies or is critically injured after eliminating the post two year old requirements is a political disaster for whoever changed the rules