domain:city-journal.org
self_made_human
C'est la vie
20m ago
At this point, I don't even know what an AGI is. The word has just been semantically saturated for me.
What I do know, based on having followed the field since before GPT-2 days, and personally fucked around since GPT-3, is that for at least a year or so, SOTA LLMs have been smarter and more useful than the average person. Perhaps one might consider even the ancient GPT 3.5 to have met this (low) bar.
They can't write? Have you seen the quality of the average /r/WritingPrompts post?
They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?
They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?
The average human, when confronted with a problem outside their core domain of expertise, is dumb as rocks compared to an LLM.
I don't even know how I managed before LLMs were a thing. It hasn't been that long, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life without them. If cheap and easy access to them were to magically vanish, my willingness to pay to get back access would be rather high.
Ah, it's all too easy to forget how goddamn useful it can be to have access to an alien intelligence in one's pocket. Even if it's a spiky, inhuman form of intelligence.
On the topic of them being cheap/free, it's a damn shame that AI Studio is moving to API access only. Google was very flustered by the rise of ChatGPT and the failure of Bard, it was practically begging people to give Gemini a try instead. I was pleasantly surprised and impresses since the 1.5 Pro days, and I'm annoyed that their gambit has paid off, that demand even among normies and casual /r/ChatGPT users increased to the point that even a niche website meant for powerusers got saturated.
Well done! The very last paragraph is a patische from 5 different times I asked it to make a closing paragraph. Not even once did the actual output sound natural so I picked and chose different sentences until I got something that seemed better but yeah, each and every single word there came from an LLM. However I will say that just as Collage Art is considered Art by the Artist even though none of the pieces might be created by them, that last paragraph is still human because I did the curation and structuring.
Honestly I was hoping nobody would notice and then I'd spring it onto the unsuspecting populace of The Motte 3 days down the line...
The rest of the post is completely human generated by yours truly (artisanal tokens, so they say). If you think it's by Gemini 2.5 Pro I consider that to be a compliment as it's genuinely a better writer than I am. Failure to notice and remove the em dash is completely on me, ma faute.
There's a way in which this is true and there's a way in which this is not true.
The form of "Divine Providence" invoked by the founding fathers, and famed deist Thomas Jefferson in particular is not at all that which requires ritual or at least not in the sense that would be relevant here to the holiness of a place.
The God which protects the American project is the God from whom rights are derived, it is Nature's God, impersonal, far removed, non interventionist, the God that set the world in motion according to the laws that were meant to govern in his absence. Not YHVH, not Jupiter, nor even really Jesus Christ.
Natural law in the American sense isn't something that can only be obtained through specific ritual or revelation, but a permeating tendency of reality that one ought to align with.
If the people who made the United States truly believed that demonstrating on government property was not permissible for a regress of grievances, the history of Boston makes them all hypocrites and liars.
5434a
26m ago
I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked
This point has been gone over and over on Reddit and always circles back to some people admitting that no, they really don't have visual imagination.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
34m ago
So what can’t these systems do today? Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style. I fed Gemini 2.5 Pro a copy of every single comment I’ve ever made here and gave it the title of this post, then asked it to generate the rest of the text. I think I did this over 10 times and not a single one of those times did the result pass the rigorous QC process I apply to all writing published under the BurdensomeCount™ name (the highest standards are maintained and only the best output is deemed worthy for your eyes, dear reader)
And:
The 'general' in AGI was never about encompassing every niche human talent, but about a broad, powerful capability to reason, learn, and solve novel problems across domains—a test it passed when it saved me from a cultural faux pas I didn't even know I was about to make.
Em-dash spotted. Thought you could pull a fast one on me, eh? That paragraph is so LLM it hurts, and probably a good chunk of your entire comment is too.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
44m ago
Even if the DNC formally endorsed the decision, I think Harris and not the DNC chose Walz. I find Harris picking Walz as pushback against a underhand media campaign just as plausible as the DNC doing so.
functor
49m ago
One of the most interesting things about google's AI is their vertex studio. It allows you to use datasets, finetune models build services such as chatbots, supply chain services, industrial planning and medical services. The amazing thing is how easy these services are to use. No code is required and adanced services can be built by a noob in hours.
A lot of startups with inflated valuations have products that can be built in an afternoon with the right dataset. Instead of having an AI team, companies will be able to pay 300 dollars to someone on fiver to configure the same thing on vertex AI.
As for LLMs there fundamental flaw is that they don't store recent information and context well. A human mind is more of a flow of information and new informantion is consitently stored within the brain. LLMs don't really do memory and are poor at learning. They require millions of hours of training. A human can pick up new facts and skills much quicker and carry those facts and skills with him. LLMs are like a high skilled person who suffers from extreme short term memory damage.
For AGI/ASI to become real the neural networks will have to learn much faster and be able to learn on the fly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
57m ago
To be clear, I'm assuming that these people would have to compete against Vance running with a Trump endorsement.
I agree that Vance has the status of "most likely endorsee" now, but Trump is not known for sticking with decisions in the face of events. Trump could decide to endorse a dynastic successor, he could try to run for a third term (which Vance would have to discredit himself with the median voter by playing along with until Trump agreed the game was up). More likely, they could just have a falling out. Trump switching his endorsement to Rubio because Vance didn't clap loudly enough is totally in character.
My wild-ass guess probabilities, conditional on Trump not being dead or unconcealably senile by summer 2028 are:
- Trump doesn't make an unequivocal endorsement because he is still talking about running for a third term (either seriously or as an ego trip) or butthurt about his inability to run for a third term 25%
- Trump endorses a family member 10%
- Trump endorses Vance 30%
- Trump endorses Rubio or someone else with a similar profile 10%
- Trump endorses someone who isn't on the radar now 20%
- Trump does not make an endorsement and calls for a real primary 5%
I agree with you that if an apparently-compos mentis Trump endorses a non-family member then the Republican primary is basically sown up. DeSantisism is right-populist substance but without the reality-TV sideshows Trump generates, and there is no appetite for it among Red tribers in the country. I think this applies even if the endorsee is an obscure MAGA state legislator or a TV personality with no political experience. Even if Trump does endorse a family member, I think the MAGA vote is strong enough that the endorsee still has a >50% chance of winning a Republican primary.
As for Vance himself, I don't see him leaving a Senate seat to be VP for four years before going back into private life.
A significant part of the upside for Vance is the chance that he will become President because Trump (who will be 82 when he leaves office) dies or has a disqualifying medical event that can't be covered up leading to the 25th being invoked. This is a good enough shot at the White House that an ambitious politician would take it even if there was zero chance of a 2028 run.
Ive thought this too. If self-identified trans men really are men, theyre the type of man who worrys that his canthal tilt isnt enough - ie a loser, who we would consider at least as deficient in masculinity mentally as physically. Obviously the really masculine thing to do is to just be one of the boys.
And while youre right that theres some obvious reasons why men would be interested in those women, I also think there is something particular to it for nerds. We are a culture thats mostly male and at least used to believe in gender equality, and so have accumulated a lot of masculinely inspired but genderneutrally applied ideals. Jocks might like the convenice of a more masculine mentality, but they also like acting steretypically all girly. How do you act girly in accordance with nerd culture? Dimorphism exists for a reason, and I feel sometimes that this remains a mote in our eye, who now complain about other unnatural degeneracy.
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