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I thought the plan was immediate violent revenge? Gaza has been under siege since 2007 and if it ever seemed likely that it was all part of a grand strategy that could some day end in peace, that time is long past.

vastly expands the pool of potential victims

I’m not brave enough at the moment to say it isn’t some kind of crime, but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.

Not sure if it’s from an alternate universe or from our own future, but somewhere there is a version of this article that’s like “Today, the market for Mastodon alternatives is a crowded one to say the least. There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open-source based Misskey, smaller startups like Pleroma, plus the Elon Musk-based product formerly known as Twitter.”

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13% may not sound like a lot, but it includes almost all of the 10% who weren’t complete idiots.

It is if you redefine AGI to mean the thing that’s already here, although to get away with that it helps if at the same time you overestimate what LLMs are capable of doing.

Is EVE Online still going? It appears to be. It’s a somewhat challenging game and very different than what you’re used to, but it really was fantastic for getting to meet good in-game friends way back when I played. Of course some of them would eventually betray you, take all your stuff, and leave your dead corpse floating in space, but even so it’s very much a team game that may be what you’re looking for if you happen to be into spaceships and/or spreadsheets.

Is this perhaps part of the reason for some big price increases in recent months? They were preparing to “freeze” the price there for a while so that the government can claim victory?

Professor Geist is basically right about such things as usual, but I hope for the sake of us all that he does save some of his strength for honest reporting on whatever happens next in this story and doesn’t burn himself out picking fights on fucking twitter.

You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month

I’d say it’s more likely to be the most wealthy users who will pay the $14, and it seems plausible that the most devoted facebook users might care less about avoiding the ads than people who are there only reluctantly. So maybe slightly closer to the middle of that 11% to 342% range.

That there’s a difference between transistor density and total compute capacity does seem crucial. We can and often do have more microprocessors in the world, and more automobiles, more coal mines, more injection-molded plastic, more batteries, more bombs, more of everything without any improvement in technology whatsoever. Just more of the same, mass-produced by the ever-expanding machine. If there does exist some curve that measures overall tech progress in a useful way, the curve which measures its applications and their effects is necessarily offset from it in time and need not follow its shape. It seems natural to expect our thrust into ecological overshoot to continue for some time after the big impulse that pushed us into it has begun to fade. Much like the “macabre whale analogy” from Scott Alexander there, in which we’re enjoying the results of a whalefall.

As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all, we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

On a more optimistic note I think history demonstrates that art, music, and love are not so easily done away with although I’m not so sure about philosophy. Scarcity is going to make a comeback, and the results will be as unpredictable as anything people imagine AGI might do if it does actually arrive some day. I suspect we should ideally aim to make some changes to what is normally thought of as “human nature” in order to avoid the worst outcomes, but that they need not be larger ones than those that have happened in the past. But who the hell knows really.

Yeah it’s the “tech curve” being exponential that I don’t see happening. The Haber-Bosch process (after the end of the 19th century, but only by a few years) was revolutionary, and a fine example of the kind of rapid increase in our ability to exploit the hell out of everything that hasn’t been happening so much lately. The increase in technologically-enabled power may have started looking exponential at a certain point, but I don’t believe it has continued like that all the way to the present. The gains today are more incremental, less momentous. The rise and fall of Moore’s law shows a similar pattern in microcosm: Great new invention, rapid improvement, exponential growth that people assume will last forever, then its limits are approached and further progress in that direction is slow and complicated. When I try to imagine how the total curve of technological power has gone I can’t avoid the impression that its rate of growth topped out somewhere mid 20th century at the latest.

Sure it’d be disastrous if we somehow kept up for any great length of time the exponential growth in energy use, production, and population even without fossil fuels, but the idea that this might actually happen starting from this level seems more like a techno-optimist fantasy than any kind of realistic scenario worth considering. Like some other ideas of the Consilience Project it seems to me as if it might be more relevant to some future post-collapse civilisation that needs to avoid making the same mistakes that will bring down ours.

I just don’t think that the “exponential tech curve” is all that exponential or all that relevant a factor compared to for example the pretty low-tech way in which we’re burning ungodly quantities of fossil fuels and using the energy thus produced to eat the whole planet. It’s not only AI that I think is over-hyped, it’s many of the things I saw when scanning through the video transcript. Finely-tuned supply chains, genetically modified crops, ridiculous financial system fuckery, and other such things are increasingly required to keep it all barely chugging along, but it seems to me that they and “Tech” in general are not the cause of or the solution to our problems unless you go back to technology and modes of social organization invented in the 19th century and before. Crooked Timber: “As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution.”

But then again a substantial part of my reaction was prompted by things I read on searxing the word “metacrisis”, so perhaps not entirely fair to this video.

I think this speaker and the people pushing the term “metacrisis” in general misunderstand humanity’s predicament in a way that leads them to rate too highly the potential of those AI systems that have been made so far (that we know of.) It’s interesting technology, but its potential threats are even more over-hyped lately than its potential benefits. We have better things to do than worry too much about either.

“Metacrisis” huh. As a name for the thing I like “the Long Emergency” better. AI in its currently-existing forms is important only in that it’s yet another refinement that can have some use in enhancing the efficiency of the systems we’ve been building up for the past few hundreds of years, but we are at the point where the diminishing returns from such novelties will no longer be effective in staving off disaster for any appreciable length of time. Large language models are already passé.

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Yeah I’ve been back there a few times to check, and the reddit I knew is most certainly dead. Its corpse will stumble around for a while animated by venture capital necromancy, but it’s not really a threat any more and will stop moving soon enough. Youtube still has much enshittification to go before it gets to that point.

Do you know how much good it does for climate change to build a lot of solar power and electric vehicles “while greenhouse gas emissions keep rising”? None. It does not help. The amount of climate change it prevents is zero. The atmosphere does not care that you’ve built a record amount of renewable energy capacity.

I mean obviously everyone here does know that, but it’s amazing how many journalists and politicians seem completely and stubbornly unaware of it.

Well if Garry Kasparov’s plan doesn’t work out, I’m sure there are quite a few people in Russia making their own “Russia after Putin” plans.