piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.

This is fundamental to his approach. He believes that technology is inherently liberatory as long as it’s in the hands of the consumer.

even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.

It’s not that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the one thing he’s most consistently cared about for most of his career as an activist. He’s willing to put up with anything else if it circumvents copyright. And that’s why he’s been consistently pushed, I reckon, despite his nominal hostility towards the hands that feed the media ecosystem he flourishes in.

One of my superiors at work calls it “he.”

When someone says they can do this, I try to say ‘ok, well can you do it right now to show me?’ and so far the answer has always been deflection.

Did he?

Yeah!

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534

I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter’s powerword:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00824072.pdf

The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to “have a brainstorm” on “forbidden research” (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there’s a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes

Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman

It’s unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach’s last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.

I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it’s back in 2016, a year before ‘intellectual dark web’ was coined and that whole ball got rolling.

Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?

people who think ‘it kinda works’ is the standard to aim for

I swear that this is a form of AI psychosis or something because the attitude is suddenly ubiquitous among the AI obsessed.

Wasn’t he on YouTube trying to convince people that Nuclear Energy is Fine Actually? Figures.

Looks like cypherpunk slop

but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system

Urbit moment

You can’t take TSMC by force. Any fighting there would trash the fabs, and anyway you need imported equipment to keep it running. So if China did invade Taiwan and wreck it, there’d be little point in trying to take it back.

I genuinely wonder how I’m gonna be a programmer long term because the industry has been so thoroughly infested with this nonsense.

“They might as well be Latvians” is a straight out of Arrested Development.

Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!

This is a necessary component of his imagined AGI monster. Good thing it’s bullshit.

Why would anyone name a browser after Ronald Reagan’s wife anyway

Since this is the solo version, strawmasturbating

Re fame, he ends up on the orange site often enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scottaaronson.com

Wonder if people karma farm there…

Only things that a hidden camera can do.

This is a massive loss. At this point we need specific legislation. Insane to grant fair use to a for-profit copier that provides no benefit to the owner of the copied item and competes with it in the market. I cannot overstate how shitty this is.

He doesn’t believe in Germ theory. He’s utterly deranged. The grift is alternative medicine, but I don’t know if he really understands that it’s a grift. His bosses surely do, but they just want to inflict as much punishment on institutions as possible.