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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Can you imagine? A modern day oracle. Scientists would be lining up to ask questions about how the world worked and everything you said would be true.

    It would be great for just confirming things that science suspected were true. Like, all the rare particles they’re trying to find with the Large Hadron Collider. They could just ask the oracle and learn all the particles they were missing, along with all the important data about them.

    Best of all, if you couldn’t lie, and couldn’t be wrong (even if you didn’t know the answer) it could be used to “discover” things without ever having to go down blind alleys, or waste time with research that won’t bear fruit. For example, you could ask “is it possible for something like a spaceship to move faster than the speed of light?” If the answer is no, then you can write off working on that forever. If it’s yes, you could progressively ask questions to learn the theory you’d need to know to build a FTL ship. It could also finally put to bed whether time travel is possible, and how the paradoxes involved are resolved.

    If FTL travel is possible, you could just ask the oracle where all the various aliens are, making it really easy to contact them (plus the oracle can tell you if it’s unsafe to contact them).

    Also, since it was obviously possible to transform someone into an oracle, it should be possible to do that again. You can just ask the oracle the right questions needed to create a second, third, tenth, 1000th oracle. That way the one oracle isn’t always so busy, and if the first oracle dies, there are still many more.












  • Did it though? EFF says that the number of impressions their content received is why they left:

    Those [2018] tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month.

    Then

    Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

    But, I wonder what the real numbers actually are. Do we think Elon is honestly reporting real numbers to people? And, of the “impressions” that are real, how many of those are actually from bots rather than actual human users?

    IMO, one of the biggest tricks Elon has managed to pull with Twitter is to convince celebrities and brands that it’s still a thriving site full of other people, leading to them sticking around because supposedly no other site gets as much traffic.




  • President Camacho was actually a great president. He didn’t seem to be abusing the office for any kind of personal gain. He was an inspiring public speaker. He listened to the voters, he tried to find the smartest person and appoint him so that he’d solve the problems facing the USA, he let the genius try out his solution even though it seemed absurd, and only ordered him to be executed when it only made the situation worse. Also, once the problems were solved, he left office without any complaints.

    I watched it again recently, and the thing that really stood out for me was Camacho’s speeches compared to Trump’s. I think if they re-made Idiocracy today, they’d have to make Camacho sound a lot more stupid in those speeches. Trump has lowered the bar so much.


  • If Trump is still in charge when the bubble pops, he’ll do everything he can to bail them out. Altman knows how to flatter people, and he’s doing that constantly with Trump. A significant part of Trump’s base is silicon valley techbros who will lose their shirts if the bubble collapses. They had enough sway to get their guy installed as the VP. Getting a bailout will be easy for them. If they get poor, they won’t be able to fund the MAGA movement.

    Even if Trump isn’t in charge anymore. Businesses that have fired a lot of employees and replaced what they did with LLM slop will say their businesses will be ruined if the bubble suddenly pops, so they’ll frame it as the economy collapsing if the LLM bubble is allowed to pop. Not to mention they’ll claim it’s a national security matter because if American LLMs disappear the only ones left will be Chinese ones, and that would be a threat to national security. The fact that the military is extensively using LLMs in their bombing of Iran shows how integrated they now are into the way the military does things, and you can’t ask the military to just go back to how things were done 5 years ago!

    I expect that when the LLM bubble starts to pop, there will be enormous bailouts from the government, adding tens of trillions to the US debt. That’s a long-term thing and will be someone else’s problem.