Katie > Recent Status Updates

Look at R.F. Kuang go, just smashing all grad student neuroses into one character, Alice is terrifying lol

This one is a doozy.

This book is going to do me in. Sam Altman - “It feels to me like we just stumbled upon a new fact of nature, or science, or whatever you want to call it. Which is like, we can create, you can - I don’t believe this literally, but it’s like a spiritual point. Intelligence is just this emergent property of matter. And that’s, like, a rule of physics or something.”

These people are exhausting. “Brockman was a whole other story. He had recently admitted to her that he had tried to fire her during the development of GPT 4. She was technically his manager, and used to write Brockman’s performance reviews, but it always created so much drama that she stopped.”

There are indeed many AI technologies… that can accelerate sustainability. But rarely are they ever generative AI technologies. What you need for climate are supervised learning models, or anomaly detection models, or statistical time series models… generative AI has a disproportionately large carbon footprint, with very little in terms of positive stuff for the environment.

In ominous news, when AI image generation removes pornography from its training set it gets notably worse at drawing women and people of color

In response to Ilya Sutskever’s assertion that large neural networks were (as of 2022) slightly conscious - “in the same way that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta”

“The Washington Post found that while 63% of US food stamp recipients are white, every single generated picture of a person using social services was not. Bloomberg similarly found that women showed up in only 3% of generated images for judges and 7% of images of doctors, despite making up 32% and 39% respectively of those professions in America.”

“What you’re saying is, OpenAI is making a huge gamble that you will successfully reach beneficial AGI to counteract global warming, before the act of doing so might exacerbate it?”
Greg Brockman: “I wouldn’t go too far down that rabbit hole… We are on a ramp of AG progres and I think society is actually getting benefit from it. The day we announced the deal, market cap went up by $10b.”

Depression is not a rational disease category; like a cough, it is a symptom with symptoms.

[When asked if mental health outreach to those under the poverty line could be funded by Congress if it were demonstrably proven that it benefitted all Americans socially and economically]: “If you’re asking whether we can expect much change simply because that change would serve everyone’s advantage in both economic and human terms,” said [Senator] Domenici, “I regret to tell you the answer is no.”

“It is often said that depression is a thing to which a leisured class falls prey in a developed society; in fact, it is a thing that a certain class has the luxury of articulating and addressing.”

Like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, and she would have got at the truth of things

Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of the people she had never met; being laid out like mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches

She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.

This is a WILD RIDE so far

Officially in hate-reading territory

Of course the only Muslim in this book is the evil villain :|

This book has an odd disdain toward emotion, especially women with emotions.

Am I supposed to be on board with this terrible Ayn Randian dad?

"Confucius never taught people to study Confucius." --Li Zhi

Early highlights: Beleriand was Broseliand, the Noldor were called Gnomes, the role of Sauron was played by a giant talking cat (?). Thank god for first drafts.

He simply replaced all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on earth, evolved through media and technology, and perfected in space.

“It was thanks to his parents that Gaius ended up with the embarrassing nickname Caligula, by which he is now better known. They had taken him as a young child on military campaigns and dressed him up in a miniature soldier’s uniform, including some trademark miniature army boots (caligae in Latin).”

And [he looked] into the heart - that monstrous heart which beat forever, turning the astounded universe, commanding the stars to flee away before the sun's red sandal, bidding the moon to wax and wane, and disappear, and come again; with a silver net holding back the sea, and out of mysteries abysmal, recreating, each day, the earth.

And he looked at her, full of gratitude and a sudden, wild conjecture: he has been real for her, she had watched him, and prayed for him during all those years when she, for him, had been nothing but a shadow.

“It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”

These many forms of educational persuasion have been predicated on the false construction of the race problem: the idea that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, which lead to racist policies. In fact, self interest leads to racist policies, which lead to racist ideas leading to all the ignorance and hate.