don't you see that all these cool people in tech are jumping off the bridge, aren't you curious to jump off too? you aren't? what's wrong with you https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/they-all-use-it

@cwebber I consider myself a late adopter, and I'm not really sure I have strong opinions on AI dev tooling, but the way I think about this personally is:

"Imagine being at a party, and you have a choice of hanging out in a room full of AI maximalists or a room full of AI detractors"

One of those rooms sounds like it'd be completely fucking intolerable

@hungryjoe @cwebber Obviously it's the room with the people I disagree with.

@Tertle950 @cwebber I don't know if I agree entirely with the people in either room

But in one of the rooms, I'd be considerably less worried that someone's going to try to talk to me about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter Fanfic

@hungryjoe @Tertle950 @cwebber which position on ai do i need to take to avoid hearing about harry potter fanfic

@trwnh The Harry Potter Fanfic guy is a "noted thought leader" in the "ChatGPT is going to evolve into the singularity" camp

I'm conflating him with the "AI maximalists" which he'd disagree with, but IMO "AGI is a serious concern" is still hype for LLMs, even if Yudkowsky himself would claim his viewpoint to be "AGI is a serious concern, so we should stop working on ChatGPT incase it becomes sentient and kills us"

@trwnh To an extent, I think "paying attention to these people is a mistake, because it only makes them more powerful"

But the idea that there's a guy out there who's main achievement is writing 660k words of Harry Potter fanfic, and Elon Musk and Sam Altman take this guy seriously, is very funny

@hungryjoe @trwnh The guy minmaxxed a fictional setting with poorly and often contradictory rules as if that hasn't been a solved problem for TTRPG players or speedrunners going back decades.

Those other guys are similarly impressed because they think that the VC scene, AI hype, women, or even reality myself work on similar principles. In some cases, they're not even wrong (see: the stock market). And so he looks prophetic and wise.

Speaking as a transfemme who read Methods of Rationality before cracking the first of many eggs: We're different because we internalize how there isn't and there has never been a Dungeon Master behind the curtain. And that makes for hella more fun room parties. And even better ones in VR~

Hope that helps!

@jaycie @hungryjoe based on this thread i have already learned too much and regret asking even laterally about avoiding harry potter fanfic