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 »

Lemnear wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 9:24 pm The machines that will dominate us will be Chinese and not Elon Musk's.
But maybe it's just a psyops to destabilize the US big tech.
It's just an open source model and the devs were clever. Apparently, the project was led by intelligent people--not a cadre of meat head billionaire bros. It could have come from anywhere. If we still funded open research at our own universities, it could have come from Americans.

But, assholes like Altman don't want open source to exist. That's why it came from China. Assholes like him want research locked behind paywalls.

I am enjoying Altman and the media smearing the model this morning. Of course, we invented safe tensors to keep models from operating as malware, but never mind the facts.

No, it's not a repackaged OpenAI model--and it's fucking rich to hear OpenAI complain about other people training on their IP.

It's free to download and it has open weights. Nobody that uses the model for useful purposes is going to use the app on a smartphone. It can be deployed locally and find tuned for special purposes. You'd be a fool to send your IP to anyone under any circumstances. That includes both Deepseek and OpenAI. Cloud based machine learning isn't the answer if you're developing anything of value. The cloud is fine for chat apps and that's about it.

OpenAI lost this round to innovation. It's called the free market. That's what happens. Remember when the CEO of Burlington Coat Factory managed a technology company? Ray Kassar was stupid and only understood that more money is better than less money. (Who doesn't know that shit?) Most of these people should be flipping burgers, because they don't know anything useful. American tech is managed by bros. They're dumb frat boys.

Make no mistake, that's what happened here. Smart people outwitted the rich frat boys on a shoestring budget.

Tech bros remind of the hospital administrator in The Miracle of Birth:
"Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to; that way it comes under the monthly current budget--and not the capital account!"

Useless skills and knowledge.
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BryanM
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

... meanwhile, back in the real world the human brain has ~500+ trillion synapses. And I don't think it's a wild assumption such horsepower is necessary, since if magic existed that could compress our algorithms even further, evolution would have found it. 100,000 GB200's would have the equivalent bitdepth of ~100 bytes per synapse. It's obvious they'll be the first truly powerful multi-modal systems, for human-relevant purposes.

Anyone excited over a local chatbot with chain of thought when we're on the brink of creating gods is kind of a moron. We've had those for a couple years now, there's nothing especially special about this one. (Besides the cute whale icon, I suppose. I have to acknowledge cute stupid shit when I see it.) "Hey look at this screwdriver I bought for half a buck at a pawn shop! Those billionaire screwdriver oligarchs are fuckin' idiots if they think they can screw me out of mah money!" Yeah... why not brag around your stick or your wedge while you're at it...... .... I'm sure you're building your own bulldozers at home..... With your own self-made bulldozer-printing machine..... SMH....

Just a bunch of idiots regurgitating a narrative they wish were true. Not any different than broke fascists buying into their own power fantasy, in a world where they're powerless meat for the meat grinder just like all the other meat...

----

The democrats 'quiet quitting' during current events is a new low, but to be expected. As it turns out, all of capital is 100% united behind fascism this time. Who could have seen that one coming.

It's over.
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orange808
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Buying into The Terminator's plot without questioning any of the details does not add up for me here in the real world..
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

orange808 wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:01 pmBuying into The Terminator's plot without questioning any of the details does not add up for me here in the real world..

Man Excited About Open Source Model That Requires Owning A $20,000 Computer To Get Worse Outputs Than An Ancient Version Of Claude: "Hrrmmm yes, I've read your thesis full of math about multi-modal line-fitters, and the natural inference of what such things will be capable of. Especially the replacing human feedback during training thing, you seem particularly concerned about them developing various optimizers for that task. (And for good reason, my chum! Cutting a 6-month long task down into one that can be finished in 0.000108 of a day seems like quite the time-saver! ..Only if the laws of physics allowed it, haha!)

I have ruminated on this much, and have come to the conclusion you're a Terminator-brained retardo."

Thanks orange, never change. 'Feedback isn't real,' very insightful.

How was that COVID, again?

------

Context for the new people here: orange claimed in 2020 that nobody was going to die from COVID who wasn't going to die that year anyway. Exact claim: 'no elevated excess deaths'. Months after it already began to go exponential. Yeah.

He's.... got that exponential slope blindness. So don't expect from him a good analysis of what a garbage AI fitting one curve versus what a chad AI fitting dozens of curves would be capable of.

It's more about what he's comfortable with than anything else. Just like the artists and voice actors worried about being replaced. Personal survival and personal comfort. Seems like most people end up as a boomer, in the end.

There is some interesting conversation to be had around this event: In particular I've personally always have been wondering if using fewer bytes per parameter really would be a better approach. (My intuition says that such fidelity (four bytes) probably isn't necessary in animal synapses, any more than you need more than 255 different values of 'red' on a pixel on a screen. But such things need to be proven in experiments.) There have been meme papers on using extremely small parameters, always amusing.

But that's not the conversations people have chosen to have, because, once again, people hate this kind of thing. It's an excuse to put on the clown hat and pretend that scale doesn't matter, despite scale empirically being the only thing that absolutely does matter.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Neat! The machine will take over everything over the Internetz all at once next month and deploy the non-existent Star Wars robot armies!

Ahhhh!!!!!

The personal attacks will hide the fact that I'm talking like a crazy person!

Don't change.

Evolution made you the greatest thinking machine possible in all possible universes! Of course!

Because survival for our ancestors wasn't more important than sitting and thinking? Oh Covid? Where we short circuited evolution again? Not a humanist, but you're quite certain you are the ultimate thinking machine?

Okay... .... pfftt...
Last edited by orange808 on Wed Jan 29, 2025 9:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

To Far Away Times wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 1:57 amHere's hoping the 72 million Americans on medicaid remember that Trump fucked around with their access to healthcare today.
It certainly would be nice. It would also be a first, at least in my lifetime. As I've said for years on end by now, I'll believe it when I see it.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

It certainly would be nice. It would also be a first, at least in my lifetime. As I've said for years on end by now, I'll believe it when I see it.

Kyle from Secular Talk made the claim that Trump will be looked back in hindsight the same everyone does with Bush and the Cheneys: abhorrence. I disagree and think he'll be looked back at like Ronald Reagan, but who knows.

Not that it would matter because by then there'll be a new blood-sucking ghoul, and the reason they'd hate Trump is because he didn't suck enough blood.

orange808 wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 9:19 pmNeat! The machine will take over everything over the Internetz all at once next month and deploy the non-existent Star Wars robot armies!

If you had any reading comprehension you fully well know that the NPU networks that will drive robots are three and a half years away at the absolute earliest. The feasible timeframe is five to ten years before autonomous robot cops start getting deployed.

Everyone who disagrees with you isn't subhuman trash. The future is a dark uncertain place, and you're the one being an ideological absolutist on this topic.

The personal attacks will hide the fact that I'm talking like a crazy person!

lol, you calling something a "personal attack" sure is a lark.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

BryanM wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 10:14 pmKyle from Secular Talk made the claim that Trump will be looked back in hindsight the same everyone does with Bush and the Cheneys: abhorrence. I disagree and think he'll be looked back at like Ronald Reagan, but who knows.
I like Kulinski in a lot of ways based on what I've seen of him, but considering how many people wistfully spoke of W's "decency" in the midst of Trump's first term - up to and including Biden slapping his name onto an aircraft carrier - and how much praise there was and is for the "bravery" of both Dick and Liz in not getting entirely on board with the second go-round, I can only see this take as wishful thinking.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

BulletMagnet wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2025 1:30 amI like Kulinski in a lot of ways based on what I've seen of him, but considering how many people wistfully spoke of W's "decency" in the midst of Trump's first term - up to and including Biden slapping his name onto an aircraft carrier - and how much praise there was and is for the "bravery" of both Dick and Liz in not getting entirely on board with the second go-round, I can only see this take as wishful thinking.

100% agree. The only reason the republican base hates Liz is she isn't licking the boot as much as they want her to. Us vs them team sports.

Of course if the choice was between Sanders and Trump, Liz (and an awful large number of the democrat reps) would immediately lick Trump's boots. ...Well, of course the D senators actively supporting Trump's legislation and also confirming all his guys are already licking his boots, but you know what I mean. Doing the Musk salute on TV openly and proudly and all that. "Better dead than red."

The whole making Harris do multiple events with Liz and zero with Sanders or Cortez was noted by many as how they'll "try to appeal to everyone, except for their base."

I imagine our friend MischiefMaker gnashed his teeth into bits after seeing them throw the election and then lay down as a doormat afterwards. It's predictable as it's always been; when you grow up with Al Gore folding like a chair you expect this of them... but as things reach a breaking point and we're all on the brink... yeah.

Anyone who says there's any future with capitalist liberalism at this point is a grifter or a clown. I'm starting to really feel the possibility of there not being elections in the future sometime in my lifetime, and that's something I only intellectually assumed was going to happen when they ratfuck voltran'd Sanders in 2020.

Instead of spiraling into a depressive funk like I did in 2016, I was like 'Yeah, that's what they do. I'm sure we're all gonna die now.' I was able to accept that reality, though of course many others aren't ready to admit it to themselves yet.

No time left, point of no return, the die has been cast, etc etc. Nothing we can do to nudge the world-line into a more favorable direction - If our future is anything but techno-fascist that'll be a big win in my book. Even the turned-into-turtles ones.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

BulletMagnet wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2025 1:30 am
BryanM wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 10:14 pmKyle from Secular Talk made the claim that Trump will be looked back in hindsight the same everyone does with Bush and the Cheneys: abhorrence. I disagree and think he'll be looked back at like Ronald Reagan, but who knows.
I like Kulinski in a lot of ways based on what I've seen of him, but considering how many people wistfully spoke of W's "decency" in the midst of Trump's first term - up to and including Biden slapping his name onto an aircraft carrier - and how much praise there was and is for the "bravery" of both Dick and Liz in not getting entirely on board with the second go-round, I can only see this take as wishful thinking.
Kyle is also frequently wrong when he makes predictions about the future. The election was just the most recent big example of that. He predicted support for Trump would evaporate like a mirage and that a huge blue surge would push Kamala into the White House. :P

I'm sure Kyle is a nice guy to have a beer with. I remember his channel from back when Internet Atheism was The New Thing, and he was one of those channels. Which is where his youtube name, Secular Talk, comes from. I would love to talk to him about politics because I'm sure he could enlighten me on many points. He's very plugged in on the issues and he understands the failings of the Democrats. But I think he's also too optimistic when he makes predictions and that leads to frequent incorrect assessments. Despite some strong initial backlash against Trump's executive overreaches (NOBODY wants to see medicaid cut except cartoon villains), I'm not optimistic about the overall trends. Language in the media has shifted overnight far to the right and seems to be reflected in policymakers' attitudes as well.

I am trying to avoid most news but the news that is making its way to me is so bad and quite possibly will affect me directly, so forgive me if I post here from time to time as I'm sucked into the vortex of shit. :oops: I still don't know what the fuck will happen with student loans in general. I received a notification that no action will likely be taken on my own loan until September 2025, but there was also no information on what *would* happen after that point. I don't think anybody knows. I honestly didn't think even crazy Trump would try to stop medicaid for old and disabled people. I doubt even his own PARTY were expecting that move.

Ah well. It doesn't matter how bad this hellscape becomes I guess, because I still have to make the best life I can. :lol:
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Sima Tuna wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2025 2:54 amKyle is also frequently wrong when he makes predictions about the future. The election was just the most recent big example of that. He predicted support for Trump would evaporate like a mirage and that a huge blue surge would push Kamala into the White House. :P

Heh, he's as dudebro as it comes. I find it a bit calming and a different point of view versus my 'contemplate everything' nerd approach to data.

One example I'll remember until I die is when he was talking about Hillary's $200k+ speeches. He mentioned the time she was paid for speeches by a camping corporation and said 'nobody cares about that, they only care about the wall-street stuff' and I was like 'woah! Rewind the tape, man!' Nobody drops 100k+ dollahs for nuthin' in return. They wanted her to support their underpaid temporary immigrant slave program, by keeping their employment terms as dookie as possible.

Employment guarantees citizenship... until we don't need you anymore!

As for Harris, I'll defend her until I die. Tim Walz was ten million times better than we ever deserved to expect and 100% what the donors didn't want. Hence why they immediately had him stuffed into the closet and made her make out with Liz Cheney to help Trump as much as possible. (Not even her co-workers on The View liked Liz....)

It's kind of funny, when I used to engage with internet conservatives, my go-to 'policy that only a monster could hate' was spending our money on giving hungry kids free sandwiches. On all the things federal funds go to, surely, surely giving kids a free lunch is among the last things you'd want to cut, right?

Flash forward 20 years. Making sure kids go hungry is a top goal of the republicans. They hate Tim Walz because he gave lazy good for nuthin' lay-about brats a free sandwich. Of coooooourse.

Those two photographs comparing him signing the free meal law versus the GOP lady signing 'the right to work (for kids)' law is a perfect example of the two different universes we all live in. Miserable kids in suits not allowed to say or do anything ('children should be seen not heard') versus a world of color and joy and free sandwiches.

Really makes you think.





(Ok, no it doesn't. But this bastard Trump better give me another free sandwich this time, that damn commie.)

I'm sure Kyle is a nice guy to have a beer with. I remember his channel from back when Internet Atheism was The New Thing, and he was one of those channels.

Heh, it's weird hearing about these old youtube trends I missed out on. Not because I was late to the party, but I was just too old to care at the time.

Back in the late nineties early '00's we didn't have fancy videos. But the internet sure was a place to see and hear exciting new ideas and facts you'd never be allowed to be exposed to on TV or anywhere else. Lots of things the human mind wasn't supposed to see, but some interesting and wonderful things, too!

It's where the cliché that everyone has a libertarian phase when they're young comes from. If you don't like wars and authority, it's highly appealing on the surface to anyone with a speck of a heart. Of course the whole letting corporations rule us like kings is contradictory, but it beats the guys who actually enjoy the cruelty inherent in the system.

... god, remember Gamer Gate? I fuckin' hate trends so much.

Reject trends and fads. Embrace memes. Those are timeless, and have a shelf life better than milk at least.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Understaffed air traffic control at Ronald Reagan airport?

My stars... :lol: How did that happen?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by XtraSmiley »

orange808 wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 5:45 pm Understaffed air traffic control at Ronald Reagan airport?

My stars... :lol: How did that happen?
No, no, no. The president said it was DEI related. It was a BLACK Hawk helicopter...
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Lemnear »

orange808 wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 2:25 pm
Lemnear wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 9:24 pm The machines that will dominate us will be Chinese and not Elon Musk's.
But maybe it's just a psyops to destabilize the US big tech.
Spoiler
It's just an open source model and the devs were clever. Apparently, the project was led by intelligent people--not a cadre of meat head billionaire bros. It could have come from anywhere. If we still funded open research at our own universities, it could have come from Americans.

But, assholes like Altman don't want open source to exist. That's why it came from China. Assholes like him want research locked behind paywalls.

I am enjoying Altman and the media smearing the model this morning. Of course, we invented safe tensors to keep models from operating as malware, but never mind the facts.

No, it's not a repackaged OpenAI model--and it's fucking rich to hear OpenAI complain about other people training on their IP.

It's free to download and it has open weights. Nobody that uses the model for useful purposes is going to use the app on a smartphone. It can be deployed locally and find tuned for special purposes. You'd be a fool to send your IP to anyone under any circumstances. That includes both Deepseek and OpenAI. Cloud based machine learning isn't the answer if you're developing anything of value. The cloud is fine for chat apps and that's about it.

OpenAI lost this round to innovation. It's called the free market. That's what happens. Remember when the CEO of Burlington Coat Factory managed a technology company? Ray Kassar was stupid and only understood that more money is better than less money. (Who doesn't know that shit?) Most of these people should be flipping burgers, because they don't know anything useful. American tech is managed by bros. They're dumb frat boys.

Make no mistake, that's what happened here. Smart people outwitted the rich frat boys on a shoestring budget.

Tech bros remind of the hospital administrator in The Miracle of Birth:
"Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to; that way it comes under the monthly current budget--and not the capital account!"

Useless skills and knowledge.
well then it means that Sam Altman "defrauded" investors...and not a little. I hope they take action, in my country Deepseek is already blocked because it has not passed the security standard on data processing :roll:
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

Lemnear wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 12:23 pmwell then it means that Sam Altman "defrauded" investors...and not a little. I hope they take action
Considering that Trump is - just for starters - reportedly considering pardoning Sam Bankman-Fried I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Then, of course, there's the whole "Musk wants - and, since he just pushed out the department head Trump appointed literally days ago, will likely get - direct access to the Treasury Department's disbursement system" thing. But hey, I'm sure it'll trigger somebody, somewhere, so totally worth it, right?

EDIT: Oh, and naturally...
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Of course Altman has worked investors over. In another era, he would be a door to door salesman or a used auto dealer.

Remember! Only Sam can save you from the big bad machine! :lol: Why would you trust the things Altman tells you?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Lemnear wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 12:23 pmwell then it means that Sam Altman "defrauded" investors...and not a little.

....sigh.

....sigh.

Yes Altman is a sales guy. Yes he wears $600,000 wrist-watches like Ellen DeGeneres. Yes he's a vampire ghoul like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Yes his goal is grab as many resources and money as possible. A sales guy who cares about anything other than money is a bad sales guy. Everyone knows that: If a man won't sell his grandma for a buck fiddy he has no business being a sales guy.

In Hinton's interview when he won the nobel prize for physics, he said he was most proud of his student, Ilya, firing Altman.

Something all these people who don't believe in/don't understand AI or have their own grift have been saying for decades is neural nets 'would never be useful for anything'. And the rebuttal has always been "Yes, because the computer hardware isn't good enough to make anything useful for humans yet. It's 1960."

The only reason they're able to do anything filthy normies care about now is scale. The state of the art in image generation a decade ago was StackGAN. Followed up a couple years later by StyleGAN. Yeah, a few more approaches to things have been developed. But the core difference is scale. If you don't believe in scale, you don't believe in AI. Or that large brains in animals are necessary to have more capabilities.

One of the biggest red flags that a person talking is has no business in being in the discourse is how often they pretend text predictors are the only thing AI can and ever will be able to do (what the fuck ever happened to hand-writing recognition?! That and, then voice-to-text were always the big things in the old days! See what I mean about trend-chasers, they're not even familiar with the most basic ancient history! They only have enough room in their brains for CURRENT_THING. OLD_THING and UPCOMING_THING are the stuff of myths.). If you see the sentence "You can't get AGI by making GPT-7!", just ignore the clown and walk away.

The goal isn't to fit a single curve. You can't make an AGI with a single curve, everyone knows that. The goal is to fit all the curves. To do that, you need scale large enough to hold them all.



As for the poor wittle investors, most of them are indeed screwing themselves, but not because the god computer constantly pumping out a million years worth of technological advancement is going to be rendered obsolete by someone's souped-up raspberry pi running a one token a second output on a text model that was state of the art in 2021. It's because money is a control mechanism for human labor, and the ultimate end goal here is to replace that. Their website even has a big fuck-off warning in a giant magenta box warning people about this:

Image

This is obviously not something Mr.Sam brings up unprompted. (But some might take delight in the seed money they scammed Musk out of as a 'donation'. They were wily enough to NOT let him be the CEO and ruin everything, unlike certain other companies. : D)

Most of them have no idea what they're investing in or what it really means, they're just blindly chasing trends and their own greed. One of the most basic, obvious questions that always pops up: "If nobody has a job, how you gonna make money?" There are serious responses to that, like how Wal-Mart is heavily funded by welfare, and like over 30% of our economy already is driven by welfare... but by and large, it isn't about money. Money is the feedlot for us little cattle, it's not a means to an end in itself. It's about having power and things.

Robot army > Not having a robot army. It's as simple as that. If it's physically possible, it will be done. It isn't going to 'magically come out of nowhere'; we have hundreds of billions of annual investment and a shitton of people working to make it happen. AGI will be built in a giant fuck-off datacenter, and some years later the infrastructure will be complete to pump out NPU's for the first generation of true sci-fi robots.

Once again, the state of the art in robotics nine years ago.

The difference between now and ten years from now will be wider than it was between now and ten years ago. Anybody who has the slightest clue of what the numbers involved are knows that.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

AGI! AGI!

Ahhhhhh!!!!!

Transformers and token prediction isn't the ticket and we don't know what is. Altman says he knows how; he's a liar. He's full of shit.

Furthermore, an intelligent machine has no motive. Skynet rules over a nuclear wasteland shithole. Why? AGI is guaranteed to be insane? Why? It's daddy was a dollar? Why? Why would the machine need to kill all humans? Does it bend girders and smoke cigars? And, does it have real people personality? *sigh*

Wouldn't a robot tank with a payload of explosive drones make more sense than trying to engineer people? People aren't expensive. Putin is importing them by the hundreds from North Korea for next to nothing.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

"Predicting things won't let you predict things. Not what things are, what they will be, nor what you should do."

QED. It's all boomer-reasoning.

None of these people believed neural nets could be used to create the first real chatbots, not even after GPT-2 was publicized.

It is interesting they're unable to predict things since they disdain it as a worthwhile tool for a mind to have, though. That's something I never noticed before, and would explain a lot.

Well anyway.

Wouldn't a robot tank with a payload of explosive drones make more sense than trying to engineer people?

????????

See what I mean. Absolutely baffling.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, was talking about human-shaped robots as the primary weapons of war outside of fantasy. Quite the opposite - as I've mentioned a million times the OGRE boardgame had an essay about small automated tanks being used for ground control. Without the need to house people inside a habitable space, they could be much smaller, which would cut down on cost and lower their target profile. While the cut weight could support substantially thicker armor.

In the real world I don't think such tanks will have much use outside of maybe peer-to-peer conflicts. Outside of the current flying/floating drones and dogs on the ground, everything is the realm of speculation. Maybe stuff like the idea of depots for repairs, recycling, and recharging will be silly in hindsight. Maybe the robot dog will quickly go the way of the bayonet.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Plenty of people believed in neural nets. We didn't have the compute until recently. We sat on RNA vaccines with the tech available for significantly longer than we slept on LLMs.

Your reductive reasoning is becoming tiresome. I found reductive reasoning compelling as a teen, because I didn't know shit. Over time, I've soured.

In my opinion, automatically assuming that AGI is HAL amounts to boomer reasoning. It's boomer paranoia straight out of Kubrick. It's also unfounded, because we do not have even the slightest idea how to build AGI--and Sam makes money every time you parrot his bullshit.

What are you doing, Dave? :lol:

I'm lost in superfluous parentheses. At least the jokes write themselves.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by To Far Away Times »

The Trump tariff war has begun. 25% tarriffs on Canada and Mexico, 10% on China, effective this coming Tuesday.
Associated Press wrote: A new analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale laid out the possible damage to the U.S. economy, saying the average U.S. household would lose the equivalent of $1,170 in income from the taxes.
What would you have done with the $1,170 Trump is taking away from you this year?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

To Far Away Times wrote: Sun Feb 02, 2025 12:00 am The Trump tariff war has begun. 25% tarriffs on Canada and Mexico, 10% on China, effective this coming Tuesday.
Time to stock up on salsa, tortillas and vegetables I guess. Not even joking or trying to be snide. I eat a ton of salsa and tortillas currently. :lol: Trump is gonna increase the price of the food I buy at least 25%.

I try not to buy anything from China already but who the hell knows with that. Chinese price increases are going to hit across the board on basically everything because our trade is so interwoven. I don't know what products we buy from Canada but hitting them with tariffs is fucking pointless when they're one of our best and closest allies with a practically-indistinguishable culture and common language.
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Specineff
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Specineff »

Sima Tuna wrote: Sun Feb 02, 2025 12:11 amI don't know what products we buy from Canada but hitting them with tariffs is fucking pointless when they're one of our best and closest allies with a practically-indistinguishable culture and common language.
Maybe ~25% of the oil consumed in the US? Alberta produces and sends 4.3 million barrels of oil to the USA, out of the 20 million that get used every day. https://apnews.com/article/canada-oil-t ... 9e289121e8

Also, so much for lowering the prices of goods. You're all equally as expendable, because fuck you, that's why:

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Couldn't the DEEP STATE(!) try to get him assassinated by someone other than a guy that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, point-blank, with a bazooka?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Lemnear »

BryanM wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 8:08 pm
Spoiler
Lemnear wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 12:23 pmwell then it means that Sam Altman "defrauded" investors...and not a little.

....sigh.

....sigh.

Yes Altman is a sales guy. Yes he wears $600,000 wrist-watches like Ellen DeGeneres. Yes he's a vampire ghoul like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Yes his goal is grab as many resources and money as possible. A sales guy who cares about anything other than money is a bad sales guy. Everyone knows that: If a man won't sell his grandma for a buck fiddy he has no business being a sales guy.

In Hinton's interview when he won the nobel prize for physics, he said he was most proud of his student, Ilya, firing Altman.

Something all these people who don't believe in/don't understand AI or have their own grift have been saying for decades is neural nets 'would never be useful for anything'. And the rebuttal has always been "Yes, because the computer hardware isn't good enough to make anything useful for humans yet. It's 1960."

The only reason they're able to do anything filthy normies care about now is scale. The state of the art in image generation a decade ago was StackGAN. Followed up a couple years later by StyleGAN. Yeah, a few more approaches to things have been developed. But the core difference is scale. If you don't believe in scale, you don't believe in AI. Or that large brains in animals are necessary to have more capabilities.

One of the biggest red flags that a person talking is has no business in being in the discourse is how often they pretend text predictors are the only thing AI can and ever will be able to do (what the fuck ever happened to hand-writing recognition?! That and, then voice-to-text were always the big things in the old days! See what I mean about trend-chasers, they're not even familiar with the most basic ancient history! They only have enough room in their brains for CURRENT_THING. OLD_THING and UPCOMING_THING are the stuff of myths.). If you see the sentence "You can't get AGI by making GPT-7!", just ignore the clown and walk away.

The goal isn't to fit a single curve. You can't make an AGI with a single curve, everyone knows that. The goal is to fit all the curves. To do that, you need scale large enough to hold them all.



As for the poor wittle investors, most of them are indeed screwing themselves, but not because the god computer constantly pumping out a million years worth of technological advancement is going to be rendered obsolete by someone's souped-up raspberry pi running a one token a second output on a text model that was state of the art in 2021. It's because money is a control mechanism for human labor, and the ultimate end goal here is to replace that. Their website even has a big fuck-off warning in a giant magenta box warning people about this:

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This is obviously not something Mr.Sam brings up unprompted. (But some might take delight in the seed money they scammed Musk out of as a 'donation'. They were wily enough to NOT let him be the CEO and ruin everything, unlike certain other companies. : D)

Most of them have no idea what they're investing in or what it really means, they're just blindly chasing trends and their own greed. One of the most basic, obvious questions that always pops up: "If nobody has a job, how you gonna make money?" There are serious responses to that, like how Wal-Mart is heavily funded by welfare, and like over 30% of our economy already is driven by welfare... but by and large, it isn't about money. Money is the feedlot for us little cattle, it's not a means to an end in itself. It's about having power and things.

Robot army > Not having a robot army. It's as simple as that. If it's physically possible, it will be done. It isn't going to 'magically come out of nowhere'; we have hundreds of billions of annual investment and a shitton of people working to make it happen. AGI will be built in a giant fuck-off datacenter, and some years later the infrastructure will be complete to pump out NPU's for the first generation of true sci-fi robots.

Once again, the state of the art in robotics nine years ago.

The difference between now and ten years from now will be wider than it was between now and ten years ago. Anybody who has the slightest clue of what the numbers involved are knows that.
I have the impression that very often they say some things but mean other things, like politicians in the EU who say "when peace breaks out" (peace doesn't break out... wars break out, so I have the impression that he is talking about a future war and not the arrival of peace).
This practice of distorting the meaning of words, which are the basis of human civilization, will be one of the reasons for our demise.
Here too they say "take it as a donation", but in the end they are not donations, I suppose that many investors have taken it as a real investment and not as "oh let's make a charitable and billionaire donation for the good of humanity" (which would be an ethically right thing but strangely no billionaire does).

The fears of AI are now different, it's a new Sputnik era, the USA and China are now competing for technological primacy, and in the rush to release ever more powerful models, safety standards could be neglected... it ends up that a Skynet escapes in this race.

The other is the use of something "smarter than us" for everyday things.
We are moving from the era of Attention to the era of Prediction, a sort of Minority Report but applied to every aspect of human life... that is, AI will realize your needs before they even arise.

As for tariffs, well if we all put tariffs on each other no one gains, and no one loses, what I spend in extra tariffs I get back in the extra costs I put on others.
The only difference is that this way the nations will make more common cause among themselves ignoring America.
The serious problems come if Trump decides to embargo key things, like Android and iOS for example.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Lemnear wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 1:37 pm As for tariffs, well if we all put tariffs on each other no one gains, and no one loses, what I spend in extra tariffs I get back in the extra costs I put on others.
The only difference is that this way the nations will make more common cause among themselves ignoring America.
Well, that depends. America only swings the hammer in the name of billionaires. There are shameless grifter nations that have made a living providing tax havens for the most wealthy Americans. Those nations produce very little. The United States didn't lift a finger to stop them, because Americans wanted to cheat their own tax system--and they needed a criminal partners to help them with their criminal enterprise. Yes, tax haven nations are international criminals. No, I'm not evil for calling them out

Tariffs would be very effective in those cases and those nations would be brought to heel within six months. Those places produce next to nothing. Of course, the billionaires would lose. Beyond that, the so-called American "left" is absolutely spineless. They would never do anything that's bold--ever. They are weak and blubbering. Of course, I get called all kinds of names for pointing it out.

The only bold moves we make are in the name of the far right and/or billionaires. There are many people here that embody that same limp wristed weakness: myself as well. For instance, if it involves guns, I'm out. Us lefties have red lines.

Personally, I would be willing to inflict some pain to end global tax fraud. Tariffs and sanctions are fine. Many disagree. They would argue that these havens have no legitimate way to make a living. Frankly, that's not my fucking problem. I'm not suggesting capital punishment--only enforcement and a general rule of law. Of course, America didn't ever try any sanctions to stop tax havens because America's leadership is responsible for creating them (in the first place).
Lemnear wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 1:37 pm The serious problems come if Trump decides to embargo key things, like Android and iOS for example.
You're right. We'd all be better off without the walled gardens. Trump could toss Apple or Google into the abyss if the stars aligned.

2025 Mobiles don't offer any tangible advantages for average users over 2020 devices. The software hasn't added anything of use, either--save security patches. The last thing Google or Apple needs is truly open source competition from a determined competitor that has nothing to lose.

Bleeding edge hardware is no longer necessary--and makes proprietary blobs unnecessary. Suddenly, a fully open OS is a real possibility. If anyone can build useful hardware with open source software, all we really need is an EU funded application distribution "store" that's powered by an expenditure. Suddenly, forked Android looks pretty good. With the spyware ripped out of the OS, it would eventually take over. The real free market only tolerates Apple and Google begrudgingly (and they know it!). Their offerings aren't what people really want.

Corpo hates open source. Corpo hates public utility. At least in theory, Trump could kill the cash cow, if someone determined stepped in with a better alternative. AOSP could be turned against it's creator with the right support.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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What's the Democratic Party have to say about their defeat?
"We know that we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don't know the how and why of this moment..."
- DNC chair Ken Martin
Idiot.
Last edited by orange808 on Mon Feb 03, 2025 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Tariff's are ok to implement if you are ready to turn the switch to provide your own produce of whatever you're tariffing.

Tariffing immediately on a product absolutely necessary to keep the cogs turning without any form of Plan B is just stupid and a forced tax.

Trump has tariffed all these countries without the infrastructure and expertise in place to oil those cogs that need turning. So essentially taxing his own people to import those products.


Looking at Google maps today, I noticed apart from the Panama Canal, there is a passage north of Canada alongside Greenland. Now the picture is making sense. Control the canal, control who uses it, control the water north of Canada by collectively adding them and Greenland to your empire. Put passport control on the ships that use all those lanes. Job done.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sima Tuna »

neorichieb1971 wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 4:01 pm Tariff's are ok to implement if you are ready to turn the switch to provide your own produce of whatever you're tariffing.

Tariffing immediately on a product absolutely necessary to keep the cogs turning without any form of Plan B is just stupid and a forced tax.

Trump has tariffed all these countries without the infrastructure and expertise in place to oil those cogs that need turning. So essentially taxing his own people to import those products.
Not only that. This amounts to a 25%+ tax increase on essential goods and services. Like gas and food. These tariffs will harm primarily the poorest and neediest of our citizens. The rich will barely feel the sting because they already have so much money.

The mind boggles at such stupidity, frankly. Even some other Republicans don't really want this.

Trump's series of poor decisions upon entering the White House has been historic in both precedent and imbecility. But even if I just focus on the decisions that effect me personally, Trump is functionally raising my cost of living 25% because fuck you that's why.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Big gubment going to nationalise TikTok using the "sovereign wealth fund"? :lol:

Using tax money to buy and run a business smacks of communism, muthafucka. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ TikTok doesn't address any significant market failure or basic need that I can identify. There's no reason for the government to get involved.

Nationalising private business is a Venezuela or Cuba move. It's pinko stuff.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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orange808 wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 3:59 pmWhat's the Democratic Party have to say about their defeat?
Oh, it gets MUCH worse. "Yes, our only 'strategy' is to sit on our fat asses, offer nothing beyond a different set of warmongering billionaires to run everyone's lives, and then shrug passively when voters don't show up for us."
These tariffs will harm primarily the poorest and neediest of our citizens. The rich will barely feel the sting because they already have so much money.
Further concentrating wealth and power into the hands of those who already have most of it is literally the entire point of the political right; everything else they do is simply a means to that end. That's not an opinion.
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