Dave Kasten

those people are not smart

My favorite thing is it’s always discussed in terms of one single pieróg. He should try asking for a varenyk next time and see if it changes anything.

Yeah, I don't understand how anyone could look at what LLMs are doing and call it "cold reading." In cold reading you're adjusting your replies from vague to narrow as you gain more information about someone. But you can go to ChatGPT, give it a VERY specific request, and it answers correctly.

Look, these tools are amazing in lots of ways. But if you’re gonna pitch and sell or foist them on the world by saying “This is your PhD level genius expert buddy you can ask things in natural language”, don’t get all pissy when it comically bombs tasks people reasonably think of as trivial.

"it's just semi-randomly parroting existing text that it's seen before" is not a great explanation of LLMs or the human mind in general but it sure does capture the replies to any post about AI on here

ok, but Claude does write code for me and it's great

if you make controversial claims, you see people promote this social media consensus epistemology CONSTANTLY: "everyone knows you're wrong, everyone knows you're stupid, everyone disagrees and hates you for saying this."

Instagram post from the nsgov Instagram account. Black and red text reads “STAY OUT OF THE WOODS”; the foreground is a black silhouette of trees

obsessed with this vague notice from the government of Nova Scotia. Like it’s definitely about the new fire restrictions, but it also looks like a poster you’d find yellowed and curled on the bulletin board of a diner in a town where locals won’t talk about their missing kids

This action dishonors the American people.

This is very confusing to me because the number one case for communism in my eyes is that you get to run the economy by working in Gosplan and looking at graphs and doing linear algebra.

lmao that's all chips?

one hundred million dollars worth of datacenter is about the size of one to four large Manhattan city blocks and is generally sited on the cheapest rural real estate with good power and water access.

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

weird though. I was told that AI was going to use a billion gallons of freshwater and increase electricity use by 30%. but here, samA just released an open-source model that performs well and can be run locally on a laptop.

almost as if that whole noise was all bullshit, or something. who can say.

Huh? The fact that we can't produce current missile models fast enough is absolutely an issue recognized on both sides of the aisle, and a bunch of Biden admin effort was focused on trying to figure out how to address this, too

This is a disturbing thing for parents to do, though I can't understand their grief. This is the least realistic and persuasive this technology will ever be, and we should think hard before we let journalists try to convince us this is something our society should endorse.

One of the tenets of my own personal socialism is that capital will always work in its own interests, and seeing that assumption fail in such a spectacularly illogical direction is breaking my brain in a way I just did not anticipate. I simply don't know how to adjust my priors for this.

i didn't include it in the essay but i will mention it in the book – i had a discussion with an aging marxist philosophy professor who said straight to my face "what could activists possibly get out of a service like signal?" 😱😱😱

the sense of agency thing is so fucking true. maybe my biggest frustration with the broader left is just how conservative and helpless and backward-looking it is. there's almost no vision that isn't basically just 1960s back to the land, marx/lenin fundamentalism, or (on the lib end) "Be europe."

yes part of what motivated me to write this was going to local stuff and people being like "omg we can get 1% of the vote" and me being like "i know multiple people who were responsible for tech projects that have helped bring about revolution in the 2010s lmfao"

Anyway, for me, the vision is something like this: America should be a society that works to fulfill the promise of democracy — we should have the agency to live at our own direction. Not as victims of circumstance or under the thumb of the wealthy and powerful. Our lives are our own.

On a kind of similar, more normative ‘big picture’ ideal overview: you are a citizen. You are not a subject or serf. You are also not a consumer or customer. You are a citizen. That comes with meaningful obligations to you, and meaningful obligations from you.

A shockingly large part of it is literally because Idris Elba campaigns personally against knife crime

what possible justification could they have?

The reason I got an ad blocker and now hate that Chrome disabled ublock origin isn't any kind of of political stance, it's that the ads are so fucking annoying and intrusive that removing them is a quality of life improvement.

so if anyone does not recognize the name, this is probably the most famous living mathematician on earth. you basically fund his group to pay salaries and random shit like MRI machines becomes several times more efficient, like magic.

"Hyper-gentrification is internationally recognized as an act of genocide" is one of those sentences that appears grammatically correct without having any sort of sense content.

This is why I will never actually get into David Roberts or his work. The man is an irredeemable doomer. It pervades everything he does. A guy who is ready to just lay down and die--as he himself admits right here!--it not someone worth listening to on any other topic.

Sure, AGI can output lots of short term videos that have very OCRable text, sounds great to me