Clancy’s Aufbau was actually much better. The main characters were far more compelling. Better world building in general.

the whole AI Herrenvolk Thoughocracy schtick annoys me way less these days - it's the intellectual equivalent of a clown in underpants slapping themself on the back, like, whatevs, have at it

their TOTAL IGNORANCE OF FOUNDATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE, on the other hand, DRIVES ME INTO WILD FITS OF RAGE

Tweet from Joscha Bach @Plinz "Al is the only academic field that has committed itself to studying the nature of intelligence." – Kristinn Thorisson, AGI2025

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The anti-AI takes on bluesky are honestly as puzzling and disconnected from reality as the e/acc and doomer takes on Twitter.

I know BlueSky is usually reflexively hostile to generative AI, regardless of use case or nuance (a reason why I post here less than other platforms), but I didn't realize it was also generally against autonomous vehicles until I posted about Waymo's latest (peer reviewed) safety statistics. Weird.

Not sure which is more clearly a millennial religion

The belief that existing technologies are just the heralds and forerunners of “AGI”

Or the belief that existing tech is a “bubble,” a fraudulent Babylon whose millions of deceived followers will melt away like snow when its falsehood is unmasked

As someone who still mostly posts there, I have to say this does sting a bit. Personally, I would say I’m more resigned to talking to the few mutuals who persist and maybe the algorithms than anything so post-apocalyptic as Kelsey seems to suggest. But I’m a small fry, at best 🤕.

Some people in academia give the name "positivism" or "empiricism" to just anything that involves counting anything at any point. And, like, I just feel like everyone needs to aim higher. Be more ambitious.

Interesting. It looks like the true believers and hypsters may feed the bubble on the way up, but it’s a different group that picks up the pieces during the retrenchment, when the technology diffuses. Of course, bikes aren’t a general purpose technology, so not clear how this might generalize.

I think I saw that there was a startup in YC’s latest batch with that exact pitch, but I may be wrong.

Wait, what? This is crazy. Democratizing access to financial markets isn’t always a good thing. And doing it on a platform designed to exploit dopamine hit seeking behavior seems doubly bad.

Completely agreed. A replication with an eye to boundary conditions or interaction terms is very different than one focused on external validity or a straight up replication. Are we seeking a phenomenological/measurement replication? An intervention outcome? A mechanism characterization? Etc etc.

Personally, I don’t think we can ever realistically do more than triangulate in an approximate and perspectival realist way across contexts and setups and populations. But that is a very different kind of thing than what the replicationists tend to promote/advocate.

Ahh, ok. Got it! Thank you. That definitely makes sense.

I haven’t read Chang yet, but I’m not sure I get what you mean when you say that the replications don’t themselves necessarily constitute a pragmatically coherent endeavor/unit of epistemic action (if I’m understanding what you are suggesting)?

dynamics and socially productive nature of bubbles in the context of GPTs, and the critical role of experimentation when it comes to realizing gains are being underplayed by the anti crowd. Along with the fact that AI doesn’t have to be human-like to underwrite considerable value.

My argument is mainly more that both sides are doing more than a little picking and choosing to make their preferred case, rather than saying both are equally bad. The hyperbolic claims that AGI is imminent aren’t well grounded. But the economic importance of general purpose technologies, the

Within finance, excel is mostly used as a tool to write fiction, so at least this use case remains intact.

The e/acc community gets a lot wrong when it comes to AI. But so does the anti-AI community that has sprung up in response to the technology.

Pieces like this are as guilty of factual, conceptual, and theoretical gerrymandering as the extreme boosterism we see in pieces like AI 2027, Situational Awareness, or Yudkowskiy’s fanfic Lovecraftian writings. There is a middle ground grounded in solid science wrt the tech and the economics of AI.

This article on how 95% of ai integration fails, *but not due to technical limitations,* reinforces how wildly transformative this tech is likely to be in my opinion. Radically rewriting processes at companies is hard! Most won't be able to do it!

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

Individuals with substance use disorders experience an increased urge to move to complex music Jan Stupacher https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2179-2508 stupacher@clin.au.dk, Benedetta Matarrelli, Danilo Cozzoli, +4 , and Elvira Brattico https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0676-6464 elvira.brattico@clin.au.dkAuthors Info & Affiliations Edited by Peter Strick, University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; received February 4, 2025; accepted March 25, 2025 May 12, 2025 122 (20) e2502656122 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502656122

"data: everything that happened in the 1990s"

I haven’t read it, but Rescher had a book on aporetics that might be relevant here? From my understanding, it’s about how we (normatively?) should make tradeoffs/decisions when multiple assumptions are in conflict. I don’t know if there is a general theory of assumption underwriting this though?

this is not meant as a hot take or a unique insight but it's remarkable how a lot of scientific discourse is about methods, data, and findings, whereas what really does most of the heavy lifting happens to be the assumptions

Inventing programming in 2025 is just the kind of bold visionary stuff we expect from SV thunkleaders.

"Our Ideas: We need more effective prompts/instructions to improve the agent's ability in using tools!"

ho-oooh-ly SHIT man, the stanford gang might. just. be. ON to something this time. like, a NEW SCIENCE of TELLING COMPUTERS WHAT TO DO WITH INSTRUCTIONS. incredible. I am fee-eeh-lin BLESSED

Psychically brutal time for those of us who believe in embodied skill developed through practice, appropriate expertise for the task, and situated knowledge as the proper basis for running a society, a government, an organization, etc