Just make sure you have a few missile turrets protecting the area if you’re playing against zerg. You don’t want your SCV that is building the SMR to get sniped by a flock of mutalisks.

In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.

This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here’s a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/

As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and … memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm “ran out of time calculating”. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that’s the one thing you’re supposed to know!

Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback’s ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it’s only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don’t know what to fucking say.

One of the core beliefs of rationalism is that Intelligence™ is the sole determinant of outcomes, overriding resource imbalances, structural factors, or even just plain old luck. For example, since Elon Musk is so rich, that must be because he is very Intelligent™, despite all of the demonstrably idiotic things he has said over the years. So, even in an artificial scenario like chess, they cannot accept the fact that no amount of Intelligence™ can make up for a large material imbalance between the players.

There was a sneer two years ago about this exact question. I can’t blame the rationalists though. The concept of using external sources outside of their bubble is quite unfamiliar to them.

The dumb strawman protagonist is called “Mr. Humman” and the ASI villain is called “Mr. Assi”. I don’t think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.

The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.

Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it’s like, “Look, it’s impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I’m sure things are gonna improve because Progress.”

I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.

I did not think anything could make me sympathetic to the authors who put 0.1pt white text in their papers so that any reviewer lazy enough to use an LLM would get prompt injected, but here we are.

AI research is going great. Researchers leave instructions in their papers to any LLM giving a review, telling them to only talk about the positives. These instructions are hidden using white text or a very small font. The point is that this exploits any human reviewer who decides to punt their job to ChatGPT.

My personal opinion is that ML research has become an extreme form of the publish or perish game. The most prestigious conference in ML (NeurIPS) accepted a whopping 4497 papers in 2024. But this is still very competitive, considering there were over 17000 submissions that year. The game for most ML researchers is to get as many publications as possible in these prestigious conferences in order to snag a high paying industry job.

Normally, you’d expect the process of reviewing a scientific paper to be careful, with editors assigning papers to people who are the most qualified to review them. However, with ML being such a swollen field, this isn’t really practical. Instead, anyone who submits a paper is also required to review other people’s submissions. You can imagine the conflicts of interest that can occur (and lazy reviewers who just make ChatGPT do it).