Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Iran War. When.

2021
3
5%
2022-2025
20
31%
2026-2030
8
12%
2031-2040
5
8%
2041-2050
0
No votes
Never
29
45%
 
Total votes: 65

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orange808
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

ChurchOfSolipsism wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:12 am
BryanM wrote: Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:05 pm
I facepalm every time someone who chokes someone to death gets off scott free because 'they didn't know' that humans have to breathe to live.
DId that homeless dude die because he couldn't breathe or did his brain give up because it didn't get any fresh blood? Anyone who does BJJ knows that if you're in a rear naked choke, it's not the breathing that is the problem.
Maybe we can agree that pinning someone down with your knee on their upper chest, back, neck, or head is attempted murder, because it is.
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orange808
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Not even John Hickley Jr was charged with the "T" word. Interesting timing for this particular "-ism" to show up in court, given the situation. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ I see a garden variety shooting in the streets of New York. What could be more American than a nutjob shooting people in New York?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

I guess you'll all be thrilled to hear the initial round of polling on the 2028 democratic primaries is out. And that they bear out my coronation observation: Kamala Harris leads the pack with ~30%+. (lol, remember when Mischief thought there was 0% chance that Biden would win the nom, and I was like 'nah dog, it's his turn. People don't decide, the TV decides!')

30% pieces of shit that might as well be voting in favor of Hitler. 'We didn't lose hard enough the first time! We gotta LOSE HARDER!'

Anything to not have to give anyone healthcare, I guess.

In news that matters, Google's Veo 2 is a clear step above the previous generation of video generators. The previous gen already giving us bangers like delightful I, Robot memes. What'll be possible with the systems ~10 times GPT4 scale at the end of 25 or 26 should be pretty nuts; gestalt multi modal systems... crude, proto-AGI.

The Wright brothers being unable to get a bit in their local paper, and only going viral many many years after their first flights really comes to mind. It takes meat a long time to notice things....

In John Brown news, remember how they deployed a whole squadron of an army, with canons pointed at the platform, and a rope made from slave labor cotton to hang one (1) old man? I guess it's farcical to believe modern John Brown has any hope of surviving this. Guy's gonna get assassinated by our kings, even if he doesn't get the death penalty. You gotta be realistic about these things.

A massive gap between the people whose brains have been marinated by TV all their lives versus those marinated by the internet and having the ladder pulled out in front of them, tho.

It is nice the South Koreans bullied their dudes into impeachment, though. It's another thing entirely whether they convict or not, but it's nice at least a couple populations on the planet have their shit together a little bit. Still have faith that our forthcoming administration of rapists and dog killers will show'em how it's supposed to work, though.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

AOC, Berndog and Elizabeth Warren need to triple team up and make a third party with Blackjack and hookers.
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orange808
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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A successful third party can't have any recorded bits that suggest open borders or abolishing police. AOC is out. I'm against that shit anyway. Most people are.

I'm also done with being associated with people that look like circus freaks. Realistically, we are talking about 1% of the population. That's not enough to win. Successful trans people I know are practically indistinguishable from other people of their chosen gender. They hold professional jobs and most of their coworkers don't even know. That's how you do that. They also don't show up at places looking ridiculous with teddy bears.

Need a big tent and culture wars are poison.

A third party would need to talk about health care and money: almost exclusively. Shame people that talk about transgender sports. "Do you honestly think little league is a bigger issue than health care for Americans? Well, talk to the Democrat, here. That's her wheelhouse. I'm here to talk about helping Americans with real grown up problems." Points at Democrat on stage at debate and shrugs. That's how you do it.

Sorry. Can't win if the Republican has "woke" ammo. You quietly govern with liberal policies after you win--and always say you allow the attorney general to enforce the laws. Blame the laws and then do nothing to pass conservative laws.

You definitely don't showboat on anything that they call woke. Defer trans sports issues to local governments and individual sports leagues. Stay out of that shit.

Ultimately, a third party needs a public and private position. It's the only way to win. No culture wars shit. Drop the culture wars and point at the Democrat as a scapegoat if the Republican brings it up.
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BryanM
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

I hope all of you who thought I was being silly or comedic when I talked about us all being put into 'elon cubes' feel ashamed now that the man's president of the United States of Everything. Look who's laughing now.

... it's Satan. Satan's laughing, I'm just trying to ignore this whole thing the best I can.

Tokimeki puzzle game sure is tough.

Sima Tuna wrote: Fri Dec 20, 2024 7:50 pm AOC, Berndog and Elizabeth Warren need to triple team up and make a third party with Blackjack and hookers.

Eh, maybe subtract Warren from this fantasy football team. She's an 80's republican through and through, just one that has enough of a braincell to know you have to pretend to care about people a little bit or you'll get to a point where you start getting people who want to shoot CEO's and shareholders on the streets. You might vaguely recall that time when she acted as capital's goon and lied about Bernie saying 'a woman could never be president' despite him being one of the people begging her to run in 2016 so he wouldn't have to, and then refusing to shake his hand at the end of the debate.

At least she was one of the few in the senate to symbolically vote against genocide... of course, a protest vote in a minority position doesn't tell you anything about how they'd vote when it could make a real difference. Villain rotation and all that. (Hey, at least Joe Manchin's gone now. There are some silver linings in this doomed world.)

Fetterman explaining after his stroke he felt 'the progressivism leaving his body' is some kind of lul. 'My reactionary conservatism is the result of brain damage' sure is a thing to say out loud : /
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by To Far Away Times »

You can definitely feel there's an undercurrent of people who just want change. There's the people that voted Bernie and then Trump.There's Luigi becoming a national hero for executing that UHC CEO.

A politician wanting status quo in the healthcare industry should be enough to sink a political career. I wonder if someone finds a way to capitalize on it. Perhaps a single issue party that would implement something like Britain's NHS could work?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

To Far Away Times wrote: Mon Dec 23, 2024 6:52 pm You can definitely feel there's an undercurrent of people who just want change. There's the people that voted Bernie and then Trump.There's Luigi becoming a national hero for executing that UHC CEO.
People who voted Obama twice in the Hope he would Change something. Then they voted Bernie. Then Trump.

When do we all collectively realize this system is broken and we'll never get a candidate for President (or any other office) who really wants to fix our country's deeply ingrained problems? People are frustrated. Luigi did what a lot of people wish they could do but dare not. He didn't change the system but he did stop one asshole from being an asshole by killing him. If it's okay for the US to kill terrorists with drone strikes then why can't we drone strike health insurance CEOs? Surely the Grand Scale of Evil swings as far in their direction as for Muhammad Muhammad in Nowhereistan?
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Osirus
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Osirus »

Sima Tuna wrote: Mon Dec 23, 2024 6:55 pm
To Far Away Times wrote: Mon Dec 23, 2024 6:52 pm You can definitely feel there's an undercurrent of people who just want change. There's the people that voted Bernie and then Trump.There's Luigi becoming a national hero for executing that UHC CEO.
People who voted Obama twice in the Hope he would Change something. Then they voted Bernie. Then Trump.

When do we all collectively realize this system is broken and we'll never get a candidate for President (or any other office) who really wants to fix our country's deeply ingrained problems? People are frustrated. Luigi did what a lot of people wish they could do but dare not. He didn't change the system but he did stop one asshole from being an asshole by killing him. If it's okay for the US to kill terrorists with drone strikes then why can't we drone strike health insurance CEOs? Surely the Grand Scale of Evil swings as far in their direction as for Muhammad Muhammad in Nowhereistan?
Disgusting and reprehensible.
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BryanM
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Yeah, I agree. It is pretty disgusting and reprehensible that we have for-profit health insurance, for-profit prisons, and for-profit wars. Insane and unacceptable, even. Just these massive systems designed to throw human lives into a blender for no fuckin' reason besides being evil.

The Vietnam blender sure was a fuckin' scene. All those kids murdered and turned into murderers, and for what? There's a Baskin Robbins in Hanoi. We still captured the territory on the little Risk map. They just have slightly better healthcare than they would have had if our puppet government had stayed, whoopiedoo. Sure was worth killing one to three million people over.

Kind of a fig leaf we got rid of for-profit fire departments, after we got tired of them burning people's homes down.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BryanM wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 4:15 am Yeah, I agree. It is pretty disgusting and reprehensible that we have for-profit health insurance, for-profit prisons, and for-profit wars. Insane and unacceptable, even. Just these massive systems designed to throw human lives into a blender for no fuckin' reason besides being evil.

The Vietnam blender sure was a fuckin' scene. All those kids murdered and turned into murderers, and for what? There's a Baskin Robbins in Hanoi. We still captured the territory on the little Risk map. They just have slightly better healthcare than they would have had if our puppet government had stayed, whoopiedoo. Sure was worth killing one to three million people over.

Kind of a fig leaf we got rid of for-profit fire departments, after we got tired of them burning people's homes down.
Well said.

As soon as a profit motive is included, ethics get tossed out the window.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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To Far Away Times wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 7:03 pmAs soon as a profit motive is included, ethics get tossed out the window.
...and monumental opportunities are missed, as well; I can't even count how many times I've read about some potentially revolutionary technology or the like that could solve myriad, widespread problems that concludes "...but it hasn't been widely adopted because it isn't profitable". It boggles the mind to wonder how different a course the species might have charted if it had more decisively determined that certain fundamental things are simply too important to be left to the whims of avarice.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BryanM wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 4:15 am The Vietnam blender sure was a fuckin' scene. All those kids murdered and turned into murderers, and for what?
The real kicker is Kent State. Even after the war and kids getting gunned down for standing in a public place, the BABY BOOMERS learned absolutely nothing.

War is over, if you want it.

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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Good news everyone!

I stopped being Sir Chokes-a-lot and finally stopped choking all the time on the last boss in Puzzle-dama.

Good lord is the game not gentle - you work really hard, use dozens of continues to finally fight the last boss and win the heart of the man of your dreams.... and you get slapped down and forced to watch them get together from behind a tree while the rest of your life goes straight into the shitter. Just absolutely brutal.

This is on the 'easy' difficulty, mind you. Normal has the pieces drop in .5 seconds, and there's no 'infinite spin' bs here. 4 or 5 button presses at max. It's to the point I'm not sure if it's supposed to really be that way...

One thing I find infinitely amusing about this franchise is how the protagonist has no face. In the original game he does come across as an affable doofus, but in the Puzzle-dama good endings he has a shadow in place of his eyes. So there's a cutesy photo of the heroine and her guy watering a houseplant together, but there's an undercurrent of dissonance because of those shadowy eyes.

Ah, the 90's sure were a pure and innocent time, were they not?


Anyway, next order of magnitude systems should be online mid-next year. (The rumor that they'll have 100k GB200's versus the ~25k A100's of GPT-4 is slightly terrifying.) Google is trolling people by saying that quantum computation suggests that we live in a multiverse. Entertaining times ahead.

I sure hope it doesn't all go up in nuclear hellfire.

orange808 wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2024 2:45 amThe real kicker is Kent State.

Yeah, it's wonderful that the powers that be's response to unrest isn't to make things better so people would be less pissed off, but to crack down and isolate everyone from each other. When someone else does such things, its tyranny. But when we do it, it's 'keeping the peace'. Transparent bullshit.

They're so fuckin' mad tiktok and social media exists, I swear. Listen to the Democratic strategists on the Pod if you want to feel angry today.

BulletMagnet wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 7:09 pm...and monumental opportunities are missed, as well; I can't even count how many times I've read about some potentially revolutionary technology or the like that could solve myriad, widespread problems that concludes "...but it hasn't been widely adopted because it isn't profitable".

Yeah, I talk about these warped incentives a lot. The Budd Company folding because the traincars they made were too good. The shitty new OS that only makes things worse that the tech guys keep releasing every single week. How the Oakridge thorium experiment could have postponed one of our apocalypses by generations (now in development in China.).

On the other hand, The Human Brain Project was an utter disaster. Dozens of competing interests trying to get their grubby hands on the funding. No clear objectives. If all they had aspired to do was make a virtual mouse brain+body, they could have gotten there by now... maybe it was a bit premature considering the hardware at the time.

The only reason anything advances at all is huge nerds wanting to change the world for the better.

If Greg Fahy's company ends up having the first significant longevity treatment, it would be so stupid. 'Growth hormone and maybe some filtered animal plasma' isn't exactly some kind of novel, ingenious invention here.

The thymus choosing to shrivel up and die right after puberty is one of the most obvious causes of death. Having a functioning immune system isn't just important for external threats like bacteria, but also dealing with cancer before it can really get going.

Anyway, most things lead to nothing even with funding and incentives. (Hence why capital prefers someone else foot the bill. Computing is a weird alien beast where consistent progress for so long has been virtually guaranteed.) A lot of people didn't think solid state batteries would ever be a real thing, but yet here we are.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Ha! Musk already told Trumpland to fuck off.

And, they aren't even sworn in yet. Ha.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

For some reason I don't see a lot of people pissing and shitting themselves at the words "100k GB200". Honestly I understand - it's way too huge for our stupid animal brains to really grasp and come to terms with. I'm not curled up in a ball in the corner shitting and pissing myself, though intellectually I'm aware that would be the correct and rational thing a sane person should be doing.

I suppose I've internalized some religious cope that everything will be fine. Sure maybe 99.99999% of the time everything goes horribly for humanity, but I can't observe those timelines since I wouldn't exist. Maybe I really do have stupid creepy metaphysical plot armor. Yeah!

Guys... I really thought there would be one more order of scaling before it came to this. Before the end of the world came. I even was thinking of updating the poll for it, and reality is like 'lol you got around seven months before it begins, buddy'.

Sometimes life comes at you like an A-train.

Solid state batteries

One community that just absolutely loathes solid state batteries are electric car enthusiasts, weirdly enough.

Check out this reddit thread.

The hatred seems to revolve mainly around their attitude that electric cars are 'good enough' exactly as they are (they are not), and someone's attacking a symbol they hold sacred. Someone's trying to upset their apple cart.

And they're mad at... an incremental upgrade. Batteries that can hold about twice as much energy. That can operate in colder temperatures. That can be charged more quickly. That won't ever randomly explode.

Yeah.

You know what else might upset a lot of people's apple carts? A bunch of giant corporations building their own machine god and crushing everything else underneath them.

It might take a few years for them to really get going, but yeah. By 2026, we might really be living in a post-human civilization. It'd just take the stupid meat a while to actually realize it and update its world model.

I think often of how our brains get programmed in our youth, and only a few things ever get changed in them. The boomers still thinking it's the 1960's is an easy example of stagnant minds. BulletMagnet seemed to have a world model informed by his religious family (I hope I'm remembering that right), hence a bias toward leaning to thinking that people are too cruel and there's too many of them, you can't win an election with a politics of kindness. (No matter how much I might have pointed to charts showing younger people being motivated by a Sanders-type platform - it's hard for the animal part of us to feel things from cold data.)

Yann LeCun is a man I've been feeling some sympathy for recently, even if he's been a pretentious egotistical blowhard in the discourse. His timeline has been updated to 'maybe around 2029', which is what the rest of us thought might be possible a couple years ago.

During his career, computers weren't very powerful so neural nets were amusing toys and experiments, at best. He doesn't really feel how important hardware scaling is in his guts, despite the evidence constantly dancing right in front of his face. He wants to believe that humans are still the most important part of the equation.

Most of us here grew up during the golden age of game consoles, where every few years the hardware got dramatically better in a way you could see with your eyes and hear with your ears. We're more primed to understand and embrace change than any other generation that came before us.

And brothers (and sister), we still are not ready.

---

Once again, the old Mother Jones gif:

Image

Right on the dot. 2025.

And in hindsight, another prophetic thing about this gif is that ~2015 was when we started to see some meaningful outputs, like StyleGAN and GPT-1. This old OpenAI article was something I found very impressive and knew it was very important at the time. Even as much on the trolley as I've been, I drastically underestimated how important.

Intelligence trains intelligence. The more domain optimizers you create, the more domain optimizers you can train. The more domain optimizers you train, the more varieties of them you can create. It's a feedback loop, where you start with absolutely nothing in the beginning, it slowly starts to grow, and then suddenly it explodes. You go from having nothing, to having way too much. Just like in the gif of the lake.

(Simple things like Chat GPT had to satisfy two reward functions: The word predictor that understood grammar and how words are supposed to work. And humans rating its outputs, by hitting it with a stick. From that, it constrained the latent space it had to target and they managed to produce chat bots that could actually chat for the first time in history. Think about what it means to have 200 modules of the same size as GPT-4 each having to satisfy four or five different different metrics pressuring their weights into specific shapes. You can't possibly train such a thing with human feedback, there aren't enough people in the world to do so. It largely trains itself, satisfying whatever few meager meta-metrics the humans demand of it.)

I'd like to believe I've learned from my past mistakes, my past incorrect predictions. Things are going to accelerate. Hard.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BryanM wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 5:06 amBulletMagnet seemed to have a world model informed by his religious family (I hope I'm remembering that right), hence a bias toward leaning to thinking that people are too cruel and there's too many of them, you can't win an election with a politics of kindness.
You recall correctly that I was raised in a high-control religious group with a decidedly "God's going to kill off pretty much everyone except us" outlook, and while I certainly can't deny that said upbringing isn't going to continue to affect me for the rest of my life, I'm honestly not convinced that it has that much pull on my political inclinations, for two main reasons: 1) Another facet of this group was an all-but-total ban on secular political participation of any kind, so while my perspective on certain things has certainly been affected by my early life my politics developed later and at least somewhat independently, and 2) In order to separate myself from the group at all it was necessary to reject, among numerous other things, the dogma of apocalyptic exceptionalism, and along with it the barely-underlying justification of "obviously all of them deserve it", especially to lean left as far as I do on most subjects.

That all being said, you certainly wouldn't dispute the notion that a significant portion of the electorate absolutely does vote primarily in the name of pure, boiling spite: just in case Trump's first victory wasn't enough on its own to convince anyone of that, after offering 99 percent of his supporters nothing but spite during his first term he doubled down on it and was just elected again, by an improved margin. I should clarify that I don't think this portion of voters is an outright majority, but rather that practically nobody with any power to wield is willing to offer a true, vigorous alternative to the politics of yeeaahhhh fuck yooouuu yeeeahhh for everyone else to rally behind; I'm sure I've quoted the poem in this thread before, but the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

For whatever it's worth, there's no way for me, let alone anyone else, to know just how much of my perspective is still influenced by something I chose to walk away from half a lifetime ago, but I like to think my outlook isn't completely ruled by long-faded vibes.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BulletMagnet wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 9:55 pmjust in case Trump's first victory wasn't enough on its own to convince anyone of that, after offering 99 percent of his supporters nothing but spite during his first term he doubled down on it and was just elected again, by an improved margin.

Yeah, Trump is the perfect GOP candidate. Rich people love him because he gives them free stuff. Poor people love him because doing harm to their out-groups gives them the illusion of having power or social status.

Like Hasan points out, there's no real conflict between MAGA and capitalists, it's just a preference for and against decorum. The suffering is the point, but the liberal doesn't want to think themselves as cruel. The fash love it tho, since it's the only thing that gives them any of the reward chemicals in their brains.

Even a gentle place like Norway is like ~20 to 30% Nazi, it's the human condition. The people who prefer good things can't buy them if nobody's allowed to sell them.

While on the flipside, the Democrats and their voters are completely mis-aligned. Democrats want to accept huge bribes and throw elections (lots of free money without having to do anything! Everyone's greatest dream, eh..), while their voters would like to suffer slightly less. They're completely wrong for each other, and the faster they get a divorce the better off we would have been.

But now it doesn't matter at all because a few giant computers are going to steamroll everything and create a new world.

There's reasons I felt very, very strongly about Sanders. And why I really, really preferred it if Harris would have won. There was a time limit on regime change, and humanity failed it. The movie Elysium is an example of one of the absolute best futures we might have from here on out.

The machine god looms nigh, and Donald Trump is president. The only consolation is his is the perfect face for the end of the world..

but I like to think my outlook isn't completely ruled by long-faded vibes.

I mostly mean ropes and pulleys stuff. The kind of world model we have built in our heads, how we think things work, the things we feel are important. It's much more insidious and hard to be aware of than obvious things like one's stance on if trans people should be allowed to pee or not.

I know most people here don't understand and don't believe in the AI stuff, it's just alien and far-fetched to them. Like a 90's parent being exposed to an episode of Pokemon and feeling nothing but fear and disgust.

It's so far outside the context of our day to day lives. It's going to hit people like a meteor from the sky.

This kind of stuff is something you'd see in a dystopic sci-fi movie.

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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

BryanM wrote: Wed Jan 01, 2025 10:50 amI mostly mean ropes and pulleys stuff. The kind of world model we have built in our heads, how we think things work, the things we feel are important. It's much more insidious and hard to be aware of than obvious things like one's stance on if trans people should be allowed to pee or not.
Yeah, but if your larger worldview doesn't inform your politics, what does?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BryanM wrote: Wed Jan 01, 2025 10:50 am I know most people here don't understand and don't believe in the AI stuff, it's just alien and far-fetched to them. Like a 90's parent being exposed to an episode of Pokemon and feeling nothing but fear and disgust.

It's so far outside the context of our day to day lives. It's going to hit people like a meteor from the sky.
I'll bite.

Is this because I don't believe AI is conscious? At this point, that seems like a philosophical footnote, anyhow.

I assure you, as I sit here working through this uneasy marriage between Cirq and Tensorflow, that I'm fully aware of the possibilities of the future--even as there are no proven speed ups for large models, practical use cases, profits, or even accurate hardware to fully utilize any design we might attempt.

I see it clearly. We just need to keep it open source--and hope it cuts both ways.

I'm not convinced speed ups for interference are necessarily the goal. Goal seeking algorithms that introduce better inference and capabilities at reasonable cost is the carrot. Certain to not only take jobs, but redefine our definition of the word impossible.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Fuck me, that Cybertruck suicide fire guy's qanon manifesto... I'm so glad I'll never believe in imaginary bullshit that hard.

Imagine what lives these people could have led if they had found hentai or video games or hentai video games to feel fulfilled instead of their xenophobic stories.

Just imagine being brain-dead enough to believe there is such a thing as a 'globalist'. Like, as if there's people who wake up in the morning and say to themselves 'Wow, I'm gonna global so hard today.'

orange808 wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 6:44 pmI see it clearly. We just need to keep it open source--and hope it cuts both ways.

Case in point: believing in open source.

The corpos will take it all in the end. Anything learned from the hobbyist sector will simply be gobbled up and absorbed by them, like so many, many other things. All the things, really.

Goal seeking algorithms that introduce better inference and capabilities at reasonable cost is the carrot. Certain to not only take jobs, but redefine our definition of the word impossible.

Consumer grade products that could turn a profit ("profit", like there's even gonna still be money in fifty years...) have always banked on having hardware that consumed much less energy. The robots of the future running on NPU's (those would be like the mechanical brains in Ghost In The Shell for the normos here. I bank on ya'alls weebery to be familiar with this reference) are not going to run inference on their entire reality a million+ times faster than humans. They'll run inference on part of it at a much much slower clock speed - closer to animal level performance than the machine performance we expect of modern mainstream computers.

That's always been the chicken and the egg - you can't build such a thing until you have such a thing built. It's obvious at this point these will be a post "god computer" thing - it would take multiple generations to build androids that way bottom-up. Faster to drain some lakes to power a data center and figure it out in simulation+remotely piloted drones for the post-simulation fine-tuning.

I was hyperventilating when I thought the datacenters coming online this year could have >200x the memory (aka, parameters) of GPT-4. I was being silly and didn't take the time to comb things through. It's only going to be in the neighborhood of around 80x the size.

"Only".

Man... just from looking at the numbers, I was freaking out before I saw a lot of the AI researchers at Google/OpenAI were recently saying similar things to what I was thinking out loud. Everyone's timelines are melting away.

At any rate, capital is doing its best to make this a reality. If they don't have a gestalt multi-domain model that's a significant step up from the derpy word predictors this time next year, you can crow about it then and bully me relentlessly.


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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

BryanM wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 10:41 am Case in point: believing in open source.

The corpos will take it all in the end. Anything learned from the hobbyist sector will simply be gobbled up and absorbed by them, like so many, many other things. All the things, really.
That's an easy litmus test for right wing people. They never understand or acknowledge that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. It might be the easiest conversation you can have with another person to understand their views, although a lot of people are tactful and hide their true beliefs.

Of course, when they iterate on existing work (and absolutely everyone does), it's all patent and trademark protected. They are the fucking headwaters of all fucking things. :lol:

No contradictions there, right? Fuck.

.......

And, how much did our robber barons really innovate? Shit like Google entering the search race late. They didn't invent a new idea at all. All they did was a bait and switch. "We aren't cluttered like Excite! Oh, the competition is gone? Look, we're cluttered up to shit, just like Excite! Data harvesting? Well, no competition... so, fuck you!"

They got the investments and built the biggest machine, but it wasn't a new idea. It wasn't their idea.

Android is an iteration of Danger's OS, by the way. Different business model. Local processing instead of the WebTV inspired Danger backend. Still an iteration of the OS.

Fuckers. Show up late and spend until you make it. Afterwards, act like you had the idea.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

orange808 wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 8:47 pmThey never understand or acknowledge that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Ah, they do understand it's easier to club someone over the head and steal their shit. Very.... very results/reward oriented those people, not so much about the wonder or the journey.

I was mulling over the mysterious gang-sign word "globalist" yesterday.... that word they use to dance around the words "capitalist" and "Jewish". No one wakes up in the morning and goes "I'ma gonna global things so hard today", they're all just capitalists trying to optimize their utility function. (Their utility function is that they own all the things and have all the power.)

In a very real sense our empire does rule most of the world already... so what's their problem, exactly? Are they so symbol-minded they need us to annex the other countries officially? Do all the grey regions on the map that are firmly under our boot have to swear allegiance to our flag in their schools? Even if their parliaments already do?

I don't know. I think part of it is wanting to be able to feel like they personally have conquered some land, when the Risk board is already solved. Maybe there's this post-hoc reasoning where they deny reality outright: "How can we have conquered the world, if I, personally, don't feel like a king, huh?!"

Like I said, they'd feel far more fulfilled if they discovered video games exist.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

The thing about "Globalist" is there are a lot of different things people mean when they say that. Everybody has a different view of what a globalist is. Yeah, some of them are racist but some are not.

I've talked about globalism and it's always in the same breath as crony capitalism. There's no difference in my mind between "Globalist" and "Crony Capitalist." Unless we're talking about cosmopolitanism, like some dude who has citizenship across 15 countries or some shit. World traveler type stuff. But most people don't mean that when they're talking about globalism. Globalism is an evil megacorp using slave labor to build a cheap, shitty product and then export it to sell in a prosperous, first-world nation for a premium price. To me, that's peak globalism.

Now yeah, there are a lot of people who will dogwhistle jews behind terms like "bankers," or "globalists." Whatever. But we all know what the real problem is in our society because the people who are causing the problem aren't even subtle about it. The billionaires who stomp on everyone else don't give a fuck who knows they're doing it. It's not an issue of ethnicity or nationality because billionaires don't have any loyalty to any tribe except their own wealth. A black billionaire would stomp your head the same as a white one or jewish one or anything else. Now, it just so happened that the health insurance CEO that Pizza-Pasta Assassino took down was white. But if he had been black or latino, what would it have changed? The news media would have spun it different but a health insurance CEO would still be a shitty human being. You don't get to that position without being a certain way.

Globalism, to me, is more like a toxic mindset. It's a zero-sum worldview where you're just trying to hoard all the shit for yourself and take away from what anybody else can get. You don't just want all the money in America, or all the money in Taiwan. Nah, if you're a real globalist then you want all the money in the entire world. And fuck what anybody else wants.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

BryanM wrote: Tue Jan 07, 2025 1:07 pmAre they so symbol-minded they need us to annex the other countries officially? Do all the grey regions on the map that are firmly under our boot have to swear allegiance to our flag in their schools? Even if their parliaments already do?
Yes.

Meanwhile, conservative wunderkind Javier Milei is apparently planning to change Argentina's workday to 12 hours, eliminate overtime, and allow workers to be paid in company scrip instead of money. Buckle up.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Sima Tuna wrote: Tue Jan 07, 2025 1:21 pmBut we all know what the real problem is in our society because the people who are causing the problem aren't even subtle about it.

Well, the people we would consider to be sentient do. The people who voted for Elon Musk and his minion Donald... not so much.

Like 99.9999% of the time you see someone online use the word 'globalist' they're just showing their ideology with their in-group jargon that was almost never used until their priests in their media circles started using it all the time.

The ideology that billionaires are 100% a-ok and good. They just need to be 'the right kind' of billionaire. No, not the kind that wants to give a raise or healthcare to normal people. That's the bad kind of billionaire.

... somehow.

So yeah, the symbolic components of race and religion are all it's about for normos, only academic weirdos use the word in any other sense.

...

The Wallstreet Journal still talkin' about Bernie's three shitty houses like that's anywhere in the ballpark of these guys' 20 mansions. Time is a flat circle.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Lemnear »

So Trump wants to make the rest of the world hate Americans? From his speech that was clear, America is the new enemy of the world :roll:.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Lemnear wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:49 am So Trump wants to make the rest of the world hate Americans? From his speech that was clear, America is the new enemy of the world :roll:.
Panama canal - Is there proof the Chinese are running it?

Greenland - What is the threat? What is the gain of owning it?

Canada - A country just minding their own business, not bothering anyone.

In all 3 cases, they are countries that could leverage better lives for Americans on paper, but the damage that would be done on the world stage to the USA would be irreversible. Even after Trump, nobody would trust the USA. I fear that the USA is taking a leaf out of Putin's book, that instead of attacking your enemy you attack your neighbours. From what I have seen China's uprising in the world was done with rules that the USA put in place at the time. Constantly stating they are an enemy is kind of rich from the USA when China could have only gotten that powerful by such rules.

The problem with the world right now is that greed is now the factor on which quality of life is now measured. USA should not be $36T in debt due to leveraging every known way to man to keep taxes low.

Ultimately I always say some nice words would not go a miss these days. Nice words are getting rare. If the rhetoric of whats been said on news and social media is anything to go by, you wonder how much deeper it goes behind closed doors.


Meanwhile I feel for the people of LA right now, having to leave their homes due to wild fires in the area.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Lord British »

neorichieb1971 wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:16 pm
Lemnear wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:49 am So Trump wants to make the rest of the world hate Americans? From his speech that was clear, America is the new enemy of the world :roll:.
Greenland - What is the threat? What is the gain of owning it?

Canada - A country just minding their own business, not bothering anyone.
Remove your brain for a sec, Trump is all about size. If he were Putin he'd choose Kazakhstan over Ukraine because it looks bigger on a map.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Lord British wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:36 pm
neorichieb1971 wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:16 pm
Lemnear wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:49 am So Trump wants to make the rest of the world hate Americans? From his speech that was clear, America is the new enemy of the world :roll:.
Greenland - What is the threat? What is the gain of owning it?

Canada - A country just minding their own business, not bothering anyone.
Remove your brain for a sec, Trump is all about size. If he were Putin he'd choose Kazakhstan over Ukraine because it looks bigger on a map.
I think Trump wants to be one of those Presidents that gets remembered for something other than having a big ego. He knows 4 years isn't that much time so he started the rhetoric early.

I wonder if the voters are ok with this direction. I Cannot see any of this moving forward without a lot of death involved.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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