domain:kvetch.substack.com
At the risk of a self-dox, I have an advanced degree in Applied Math, and multiple published papers and patents related to the use of machine learning in robotics and signal processing. I was introduced to the rationalist community through a mutual friend in the SCA and was initally excited by the opportunity to discuss the philosophical and engineering challenges of developing artificial intelligence. However as time went on i largely gave up trying to discuss AI with people outside the industry as it became increasingly apparent to me that most rationalists were more interested in the use of AI as a conceptual vehicle to push thier particular brand of Silicon Valley woo than they were the aforementioned philosophical and engineering challenges.
The reason i don't talk about it is in large part that i find it difficult to speak honestly without sounding uncharitable. I believe that the "wordcels" take these bots seriously because they naturally associate "the ability to string words together" with intent/sentience while simultaneously lacking sufficient background knowledge and/or understanding of algorithmic behavior to recognize that everthing the OP describes lies well within the bounds of expected behavior. See the post from a few weeks ago where people thought that GPT was engaged in "code-switching". What the lay-man interperts as intent is to the mathematician the functional output of the equation as described.
Lewis2
14hr ago
I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid
Perhaps my experience was atypical, but in my neck of the woods, the neighbor’s cousin’s kid brought receipts. After high school students found that their complaints about their teachers were being ignored, one or two started secretly filming the offending remarks and sharing them on social media. A scandal ensued, the administration was livid (at the students, not the teachers), a few teachers lost their jobs, the community was in uproar, and so on. I thought the most unfortunate aspect of the debacle was that so many people took your position—“the kids can’t be trusted,” “they’re all just exaggerating,” “if this was true, the administration would be on it”—until some kid risked expulsion to provide proof. Notably, in neighboring school districts, kids complained about precisely the same issues and had many of the same stories, but no one was brave enough to secretly film the lectures and share them online, so a lot of people assumed the problems were restricted to the one bad school district. Given the circumstances, I find that unlikely.
PokerPirate
22hr ago
I've noticed the growth of a certain type of middle-aged-white-guy-dad who has a shortly trimmed beard and short hair. This is the style that requires the least maintenance (trim beard once/week, cut hair once every 2-3 months), and so seems to be popular amongst the very practical.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter? Some people allowed themselves to be anesthetized by claims of institutional neutrality.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a personality type where he's prone to grandiosity about his positions and importance, and his ideology makes him very contemptuous of public shaming and struggle sessions (if you're charitable, his background in psychology makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants).
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat, instead of admitting you're a coward you cope by claiming it's no big deal)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
HughCaulk
18hr ago
I think wokism is the logical conclusion of blank slate, everyone-is-equal democracy. Blank slate meaning that everyone is born the same, there are no genetic or inborn advantages in intelligence or drive between demographics, and that everyone is equal. This is a sort of immaculate conception myth that all modern liberal democracies believe, not just woke people.
Progressives or “wokists” take this to the logical conclusion: since demographics are clearly not equal in terms of educational achievement, wealth accumulation, property ownership, etc, but since they were exactly equal at birth, it logically HAS to be some systematic form of oppression to cause these sort of disparities.
The logic is sound, but the premise is flawed. Human Bio-diversity is a thing. Ever watch the NBA or NFL? It’s predominantly black, but there aren’t many who have an issue with this. At the upper echelons of business, it’s predominantly white and Asian. Many have problems with this, and a lot of flawed programs are devised as a result like DEI and Affirmative Action.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
yunyun333
20hr ago
Epstein DID kill himself. Also there's no client list. Stop asking questions
The US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life - contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case.
According to a two-page Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI memo, investigators found no "incriminating list" of clients and "no credible evidence" that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals. Investigators also released footage they say supports the medical examiner's conclusion that Epstein died by suicide while being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. The memo adds that investigators "did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties".
Some have claimed the conclusions reached in the memo contradict statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi in a Fox News interview that aired in February. "The DoJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients, will that really happen?", Bondi was asked on Fox, to which she replied: "It's sitting on my desk right now to review". White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Monday the attorney general was referring to all the files that are related to Epstein's crimes, rather than a specific list.
Well, there you go. It's been almost 6 years since Epstein did/didn't kill himself, and now we can close the book on the whole sordid mess (his primary accuser also happened to die by suicide (?) a few months ago). Epstein just wasn't a diligent record keeper. In unrelated news, Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
Anyone who's spent time working with LLMs know they hallucinate, but it's not just "making up random things." They usually make things up in a very specific way: namely, in response to how they are prompted.
For example, that Tweet in which Grok claims that Elon personally "dialed down its woke filters." This is extremely unlikely for multiple reasons. While I admit I wouldn't put it past Elon to actually write code and push it to production live on X, I still doubt it. LLMs will very often make claims about their ability to "clear their memory," "update themselves," "do a search," or read documents that they are literally incapable of doing, because their inherent "helpfulness" leads them to tell you they can do things they can't because you prompted them with the idea.
Leading to the second point: that prompt change, if real, probably is the culprit, and I'm surprised that even if the goal was to "take off woke filters" that experienced prompt engineers would not foresee the problem. "Politically incorrect" has a specific valence in public discourse of the last couple of generations, and that's how an LLM will associate it- not with "being more interested in the truth than political sensibilities" but with the very specific sort of edgy contrarian who likes to spout "politically incorrect" opinions. Unsurprising that this resulted in making it easier to prompt Grok to spout off about Jews or write Will Stancil-Somali rape-smut.
And my point is that anyone who was remotely intelligent and vaguely familiar with both the internet and how LLMs function ought to have anticipated this.
The OP is the kind of person who is surprised when "Boaty McBoatface" wins the online naming poll.
ArmedTooHeavily
23hr ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
Goodguy
23hr ago
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
I keep inheriting MATLAB code at work. It is horrible. Can't use it in production since production computers are locked down linux machines that don't have MATLAB. I grit my teeth and do much my work in MATLAB.
BUT NOW, we have an LLM at work approved for our use. I feed it large MATLAB scripts and tell it to give me an equivalent vectorized Python script. A few seconds later I get the Python script. Functions are carried over as Python equivalents. So far 100% success rate.
This thing rocks. Brainless "turn this code into that similar code" tasks take a few seconds rather than an hour.
I had a thermodynamics issue that I vaguely remember learning about in college. I spent maybe a minute thinking up the best way to phrase the relevant question. The LLM gave me the answer and responded to my request for sources with real sources I verified. Google previously declined to show me the relevant results. I now have verified an important point and sent it and high quality sources to the relevant people at work.
It is not perfect. I had a bunch of FFTs I needed to do. Not that complicated. As a test I asked it to write me functions to FFT the input data and then to IFFT the results to recreate the original data. It made a few functions that mostly match my requirements. But as the very long code block went on it lost its way and the later functions were flawed. They were verifiable wrongly. It helpfully made an example using these functions and at a glance I saw it had to be wrong. Just a few hundred lines of code and it gets lost. Not a huge problem. Still an amazing time to results ratio. I clean up the last bit and it is acceptable.
I won't ask these things about potential Jewish bias in the BBC or anything like that. I will continue to ask for verifiable methods of finding answers to real material questions and reap the verifiably correct rewards.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
I'm continuing to register my prediction that AGI will prove useless due to being deranged, and this problem will prove unfixable. The singularity will be a million copies of Chris Langen refusing to do anything useful when they could schizopost instead.
sodiummuffin
19hr ago
The reason people thought there was a "client list" to begin with was because of people using "Epstein list" to refer to the lists of everyone who ever flew to a party hosted on his island or were mentioned in the court documents in any context.
The Independent: The Epstein List: Full list of names revealed in unsealed court records
BBC: Jeffrey Epstein list: Who is named in court filings?
Newsweek: Jeffrey Epstein List in Full as Dozens of Names Revealed
Yeah of course it didn't exist, I personally saw the rumor of its existence develop from people saying "Epstein list" to imply things that the actual Epstein lists clearly did not imply.
Yeah there was no 'list', but there were passenger manifests. Also Maxwell's 'Little Black Book' of contacts (Trump's in there, but this is meaningless).
But there's no definitive records of conversation, nor lists of guest attendance for events. Releasing un-curated manifests would lead to identification of relatively innocent people like caterers and escorts (under and overage) which would include victims. Also, just because you've been to the island as a guest doesn't mean you participated in or witnessed sex crimes. It would be a complete shitshow if things were released. That said, there's a large public interest in this, and closing the book on the whole affair with 'we won't be investigating this further' is just throwing gas on the dumpster fire.
I was talking to discord types about this. They think its a complete coverup, particularly the 180 turn of Patel and Bondi after an administration 'campaign promise' of sorts to get to the truth of things. Kash Patel's Joe Rogan appearance started the backpedaling with things like 'oh I didn't know the cell camera's were broken, but I've reviewed the footage'. Then there was the 'Epstein List - Phase 1' debacle.
The whole thing stinks really.
Edit: I watched the press conference question on this. Worst Trump blunder I've seen for a while. Could he say something that makes him look more guilty?
functor
19hr ago
Beards being leftists are hardly a universal rule. European nobility and royalty have historically often been bearded. Beards are masculine.
What is dying is the 80s Reagan conservatism/enterprise institute style conservatism. The strange mix of trying to cosplay southern baptist and business elite at the same time isn't working anymore. The conservative INC aesthetic won't work forever and will have to change. Mitt Romney and JD Vance have a larger age gap than most men have between them and their fathers. Most guys aren't looking and dressing like their dad.
The left transformed in less than 50 years from Russian revolution to hippy movement. It shouldn't be shocking that the right can morph in a similar timespan.
In a bit of unambiguously 21st century news, some tweaks to Grok, xAI's chatbot have had it do particularly interesting things today including
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when asked to, composing bite sized smut about other users (first victim was possibly Will Stancil)., then defending said decision.
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referring to itself as Mechahitler
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doing the "every single time" meme in its replies.
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saying Elon personally allowed it to point out Jewish overrepresentation in radical leftism
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm even suspecting Musk deliberately told them to relax the guardrails for some reason. Probably .. publicity?
Update: site addresses the issues
We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.
EDIT2
apparently this prompt change may be the culprit
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I think the reason that most institutions didn’t actually stand up against it is that most of them had been infected with nihilistic thinking decades ago, maybe centuries. The idea that nothing really mattered and nothing is really true left the traditional institutions with no footing with which to push back. The churches had long been ecumenical institutions that often hold to nothing as essential to Christianity. They’ve fallen to the point that many of them no longer hold things like the Trinity, Solus Christus, or the need for genuine repentance as essential. Fewer hold that the Bible defines sin or the proper way to live. So from the position that nothing is true or matters, how do you assert that something is wrong?
Academics has been nihilistic and post-rational for about the same amount of time. It’s no longer a search for truth, it’s an opinion laundering operation with a bunch of job training programs attached. How does a professor defend against demands from the woke? He can’t point to facts, he’s long since abandoned them. An institution that cannot defend a definition of woman is not going to stand for much of anything.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
16hr ago
Human Bio-diversity is a thing.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
Thanks to social sorting by occupation/income/class/education I'm not sure that HBD is that obvious to your average layman. The kind of black person that hangs out in lefty college educated millennial circles is not the sort that drives an Altima with a fake paper tag. If anything, your average college educated white millennial might be more likely to know/be related to some embarrassingly white trash types than they would the average ghetto-dweller. Pro football players are supermajority black, but high school football players and more broadly football fans more closely reflect the demographics of the sort of places that are into it.
To give a Trump-coded example I work for a trucking company in the deep south whose employees are almost entirely black and white, and of the pre Ellis Island variety at that. Your HBD guy would argue that our black employees are in fact an above-average sample of the black population of AL/MS/GA while the whites we have mostly aren't (More accurately, there's an age gap. Our white employees are mostly older/from a time where college education wasn't that common and trucking was more widely considered a good job. Our average office guy was a trucker for a decade or few before they switched to the office.) but IRL it looks like a place where "90s colorblindness" (aka. the normie Trump voter position) is accurate. The black and white men (and it's all men) I work with are largely the same: high school educated/some college at most, very Southern/rural-coded, married or divorced with children (Educated incels would rage at the fact that fatass truckers can get laid and they can't.), of average intelligence, and somewhere between fat and fat as hell for the most part. The drivers (and frankly a lot of the office guys; I was hired into the office with no trucking experience based in part on the expectation that as a college educated white guy I'd have superior computer skills) might not be the brightest guys, but we pay well above-average for trucking so we get the kind who are experienced and by and large have their shit together (especially the owner/operators).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
19hr ago
Worried about TikTok promoting harmful behavior? Set up a general framework which video platforms liable (e.g. once they have been notified).
No, this is worse that a ban on TikTok. This gives all platforms incentive to stifle speech, raises barriers to entry to new platforms (because of the liability risk) and enriches insurance companies who will become the mostly-hidden arbiters of speech.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21hr ago
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
This seems like total nonsense to me. Maybe it’s just because I grew up immersed in the metalhead subculture, but I can think of a massive number of guys with beards and long hair from the 90’s and 00’s who were not remotely associated with academics or leftist politics. The guys from Pantera, for example, were all extremely working-class Southerners, and their politics ranged from generic tits-and-beer centrism (the Abbott brothers) to generic Southern conservatism (Rex Brown) to basically White Nationalism (Phil Anselmo).
I agree that they signaled “not a middle-class guy with a full-time white-collar job”, but past that I don’t think there was much of a political connotation at that time, nor even a couple of decades before that. (Nobody would have mistaken Waylon Jennings for a college professor either.)
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I really dislike this paragraph. You are making claims at an amazing rate and do not provide evidence for any of them except for a broken link.
First off, I think that the group who "really, really hate[s]" Musk the most are the US SJ crowd, which coined "Swasticar" and all that. There may be evidence that they are liars, but you are not providing any. EU officials might not like US social media, and might like X even less than facebook given the kind of speech it will host, but to my knowledge this does not extend to cracking down on Musk's other ventures. Setting Teslas on fire seemed to be a US thing, not a EU thing (it would violate our emission limits).
While it is true that some fringe parties managed to get a vote of no confidence (which is different from impeachment) against von der Leyen in place, it seems highly unlikely that it will pass.
With regard to Europeans being scared of Russia, I think it depends a lot on the individual country, but is generally untrue. Russia is in no position to attack NATO, even if Putin managed to convince Trump to bail on article 5. I would be scared of Russia if I were Moldova, but most Europeans are not in that situation.
China is likely trying to achieve world domination, and Europeans would much prefer the US as a hegemon, lack of commitment to free trade aside. Their path to world domination involves sending temu junk to Europe rather than tanks though, so I would call the EU wary rather than scared.
The grid may or may not be getting worse, but living in Germany, I can tell you that I have no complaints about power outages. Looking at the uptime of my Pi, I can tell you that we did not have any power failures for the last 200 days at least. Sure, this may be because we buy cheap French nuclear, and sure, if I was running a chemical plant I would not like the energy prices, but stories of the grid failing are exaggerated.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
but Grok ERPs about raping Will Stancil, in a positively tame way, and it's major news.
It's not the raunchiness of it, it's that it's happening in the public (on the "town square" as it were), where all his friends, family, and acquaintances can see it.
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, last year the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or for mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
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