I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Is this some fascist RETVRN nonsense then? 🤔
This is his rationale:
(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.)
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
What I don’t get is the dwindling numbers.
Mozilla do not operate a pervasive network of internet monopolies that can relentlessly push for Firefox adoption and sabotage compatibility of other browsers. If Mozilla had any sense, they might dedicate some more budget to advocating antitrust and campaigning other counter-monopolistic policies, but instead… they want to make the corners rounder. And flip back and forth on supporting a compact layout, while deliberating over whether they need more AI or even more AI.
How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD?
Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.
Strangely, ‘model welfare’ always takes priority to ‘human welfare’
There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here.
Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author:
Firefox’s new redesign is—at least to me—a welcome one. It no longer looks like a browser from 2015.
What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?
Moaning about missing features from a nonprofit, and volunteer project doesn’t look good.
Mozilla Corporation, whose CEO was paid six million dollars last year, and 6.9 million in 2022, is a nonprofit volunteer project?
I’m sorry but you’d have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours
Blink, the engine developed by the Chromium project? What a fascinating and important distinction.
I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)
Well now I’m very confused. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly special about ‘töten’, and its object is accusative. So why should it be dative in this… uh, case?
I think this perplexes us because we’re tying ourselves in knots trying to rephrase it that it might be deemed more ‘mature’. But that is missing the point: bringing up the concerns of the users at all is just a fundamentally immature remark.
We, the developers, are the adults in the room, and we want to slop it. So fuck off.
So that’s a “yes”
Also, are the very powerful and sophisticated tools in the room with us now?
I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196
Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n?
Community: no you should not do a fascism
Techbro: woah this got heated, locked
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.