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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Overhyped, like all Facebook models. An interesting and perhaps unnerving milestone in marrying LLMs to game agents, but it's narrowly specialized and it only works for blitz – for now.

As for your post.

Namely, if the goal is egregoric anti-proliferation, do not make it easier for more agents to develop egregoric systems. Do not try to create your own egregores. Do not reward the propagation of any egregores, regardless of their particular ordinal position in the chain of propagation (viz. recognize downstream grifters as loyal opposition and treat them as such). Dismantle the egregores that you host yourself.

Herd immunity against mimesis starts with you.

This is a loser's strategy. «Egregores» are not some autonomous living pests, for they dissolve in random noise without support, but a matter or engineering; and there is an entire industry dedicated to endowing you with an unauthentic Dasein. It can only be resisted on equal terms. If you don't play the game, you will be played, or swallowed whole by bit pieces of players. What you call egregores are tools of extrapolated agency, which begin with humans. Let us not forget this in the age of machines.

We’ve open-sourced the code and published a paper to help the wider AI community use CICERO to spur further progress in human-AI cooperation. You can also visit the CICERO website to learn more about the project and see the agent in action. Interested researchers can submit a proposal to the CICERO RFP to gain access to the data.

Thanks, Mark, Yann.

@HalloweenSnarry you once asked why I stan Zuckerberg. This is why: when they concoct man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, they hand it over much more often than their competitors. I am 99.7% sure those are feeble prototypes compared to some of the classified NSA/NCSC/Unit 8200 stuff, but hey, it's something to play with, at least.

By the same token:

EVA is the first open-sourced billion-scale vision foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of downstream tasks.

Thanks, CCP.

Out of interest, when did the term «egregores» enter the Motte’s common lexicon? Who popularised it?

Egregores were a rat-adjacent twitter term that seemed to jump to the LessWrong lexicon and moved out from there: see here and here for 2015, here for a popular fictional example from 2016, here or here (promoted at here) for a 2017 use, moving to the SSC's more mainstream ratpack by 2018.

I don't think it was common in 2014, since Meditations on Moloch nor its comments reference it. NRx played a role in popularizing it/being an example case, but like the thede/elthede stuff a lot of it was more insightful outside of their context. Probably a bunch of other references from that sphere that's been deleted/offlined since, but gfl finding anything from that era by Nydwracu or jokeocracy these days.

Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed, since I’d only seen it in occult circles topics, like “tulpa.”

What’s a “thede”? Now that I’ve mentioned it, is my phone going to get haunted?

Tulpa sometimes pops up in psychological (and as a result, ratsphere) contexts, though I'll admit the difference between that and occult ones can be blurry at best.

Thede is a formalization of "who are we doing this versus" concept, in the sense that the thede is a group that you would favor defending, and elthede is a group that you'd attack. It's distinguished from ingroup/outgroup in the recognition that these things are concentric, situational, and opposed: the hated rival school's football team is elthede to your football team until they make it to the championship, in which case it's more important that someone from your state beats the weirdos from Florida, which in turns falls by the wayside under an alien invasion. Like a lot of NRx-adjacent terms, it smuggles a lot in with its assumptions -- most seriously the belief that a coherent group needs someone Other to exist -- but the common usage watered down to the extent that didn't really survive.

Do you know if nydwracu is still around somewhere? He was fun.

They were haunting the tumblr ratsphere for a while, but I haven't seen much if anything under that name since 2016. They were going through a spasm of switching tumblr names on a pretty regular basis, though.

I googled to see if they'd done anything more recent - found nothing after 2016. last post were just some fanfiction and the last post of their blog saying they're done with politics

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