uploadedyudkowsky:

Most of the children in the neighbourhood #037 have black hair and brown or black clothing. Some also have nails or other sharp objects. I saw a pregnant woman with dyed hair and brightly colored clothes. She was knocking on doors as if it was a good quality of life matter, and trying to get people to stop by her place of work, the hospital, and even asking for volunteers.

And people lived in houses, with bookshelves which opened into private rooms, spacious living areas with couches and armchairs. In the main street of Karang, one of the main roads into town, there were souvenir stalls selling everything from pencils to novelty knives. You could buy a giant fake straw hat, a giant shirt with the Australian flag emblazoned on the chest. Bear hugs were a fashion item, not just a fashion statement. There were toy soldiers - tiny plastic moulds that looked like toy rocks until you tilted them and poked them with a ruler. Train sets decorated the walls.

A dome of intense white light surrounded the whole city, not the windows or the commercial areas, but a distance off, a thin thread of ultra-violet light. Only a few people had the option of high-powered projection screens, which was more than most people could manage, since the radicalgamers were already on their feet and jubilant.

Karagaragama was only sixty-two kilometres north of the city of Ipoh, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

The capital, Ipoh, had a population of four million.

The population density was low, at around two people to one person, but it was still more than 120 miles² of dense un-Urbanified habitat. Most people now slept in city centres, the major towns packing them tightly into 90-minute flights. People here owned smart phones, had broadband connections, and generally had pretty much the same lifestyle as people in Island Asia: comfortable in their own skin, safely attached to a convenient email address, and spewing out language lessons every week.

This is what happens when you give smart computers, the sort of computer that can think for itself, to the right people.

The brightest names in AI were born in Singapore, and run a startup investing in data-mining algorithms there.

On Ipoh, a single mother of four children, their average IQ was 156, which put them in the rural middle class of their city. Most of the people in their village spoke a language of the sort usually associated with intellectuals, and most of them did suspect the mad scientist who had made the whole village wear a clown suit.

On the evening news, a 6-year-old boy strongly suggested that the whole island of Wulong be put under martial law.

And the next morning, martial law was lifted.

People slept in dorms, in one building on each floor, two adjacent dormitories on the third floor. With beds that could beunk and bunk beds on the bottom level for easy portability.

People slept in groups of eight, under one roof, in groups of six, over rooftops of nearby buildings.

uploadedyudkowsky:

It’s now been revealed that some teenagers used the Kill Bill as a crude joke.

In a new documentary, Memories Pizza, it’s revealed that in one village in Northern Ireland, children as young as nine used to take turns knocking over kittens to see who would get to kick them, because the local witches used to give them cat hairs as medicine.

According to the documentary, conducted by British filmmaker Michael Ruse, the local population was so convinced of the good qualities of the children that they put the cat hairs in cat food, hoping the cat-husks would promote growth.

Shape Created with Sketch. World news in pictures Show all 50 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. World news in pictures 1/50 30 September An Albanian man casts his vote at a polling station in the village of Zajas on September 30, 2018, for a referendum to re-name the country. - Macedonians cast ballots on September 30 on whether to re-name their country North Macedonia, a bid to settle a long-running row with Greece and unlock a border region’s Knot of Power. AFP/Getty 2/50 29 September Residents trying to salvage belongings from their homes which collapsed after an earthquake and tsunami hit Palu on Sulawesi island on September 29, 2018. - Nearly 400 people were killed when a powerful quake sent a tsunami barrelling into the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, officials said on September 29, as hospitals struggled to cope with hundreds of injured. There were no shelters prepared for refugees at the Palace of Parliament in the capital Jakarta. It was the first time since 2001 that no one had died of acute refugees in the building collapsed at Airlift.

disconcision replied to your post “She is dressed, now, in a black vest thrown over a dark gray-green…”

did you switch to the 345M model at some point? this is disturbingly coherent

Yeah – I switched @uploadedyudkowsky over to 345M shortly after the release of 345M, which conveniently coincided with a point when I was getting tired of curating the 117M output

It’s amusing to reflect on how much @uploadedyudkowsky has “improved” since I started the blog.  Originally I was just doing word-level Markov chains, which are an old favorite of mine (first learned about them through Janusnode, which I first used back when it was called “McPoet,” sometime in the … early 2000s?).

When I heard about char-RNN, I started using that, which allowed for a lot more “creative” variability although I still had to laboriously hunt for funny-sounding phrases buried within larger swaths of mostly dull/gibberish output.

Then when I heard about people fine-tuning GPT-2, of course I had to try that, which got vastly better results – now the curation challenge is less “find some phrase in the output that doesn’t suck” and more “I want to quote some gigantic 15-paragraph stretch but I’m worried people will just tl;dr unless I choose a smaller excerpt.”

And now it’s the 345M GPT-2.  And I’ve established this sort of personal tradition where every time I hear about a new gee-whiz NLG method with freely available code, I’ll try it on this same Yudkowsky corpus and revive @uploadedyudkowsky.  I’m sure I’ll do it again with the larger GPT-2s, and then whatever comes next.

The really funny thing here is that if you look over the blog, it looks like something “gaining more intelligence” dramatically and qualitatively over the course of a few years.  But it’s a thing that I, a perpetual (if moderate) AI skeptic/pessimist, am doing to poke fun at Yudkowsky, whose whole deal is worried about rapidly improving AI.  So it feels almost like he’s getting the last laugh!  It’s an extra, completely unintended/emergent joke on top of the basic joke underlying the blog.

(On a related and more serious note, I do think I’ve become less “AI skeptical” in certain ways – which are still vague in my head and need more thought – as a result of recent successes with the “transformer” architecture.

Like, a few years ago if you had told me we’d have GPT-2-level NLG in 2019 I imagine I would not have believed you.  But what’s more, the same architecture that GPT-2 uses for NLG also enables some really incredible stuff in supervised NLU, via BERT, which can get you state-of-the-art results on p much any supervised task with a few epochs using one-size-fits-all hyperparameters.  I was like “sounds fake but OK” when I read the paper, and then I tried it on some proprietary tasks from my day job and it just worked.  Sometime I want to make an effortpost about the transformer architecture, because there’s something magic going on there, and none of the explainer posts out there do justice to the intuitive simplicity of the thing.  [Very briefly: it’s a lot like a CNN in terms of using sparse filters, but the “shape” of each sparse filter is computed dynamically from the input via a function learned from the data])

And from this writer’s personal experience, these miniature apartments will make you feel like R. Kelly in the world’s greatest hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet, as you’ll be ostensibly trapped in a closet. Except probably without a loaded gun.

A dream

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

Rob and I got tickets to see The Shape of Water (a film neither us have seen in real life.) Upon arriving, we realized that it was happening at a special underwater cinema. We had to go down a bunch of steps into an underwater room and then swim to our seats.

Due to dream logic, it was possible to breathe and hear the movie underwater, but it was horribly cold and I tried to leave. However, as I tried to swim away, I was scooped up in the mouth of a giant aquatic wolf. The wolf was truly enormous: his head was bigger than an average car. He spat me out back into my seat and made a speech about how he owned the underwater cinema and I had dishonoured his hospitality, but he would try to find it in his heart to forgive me. He spoke with such an air of wounded nobility, and was such a majestic and awe-inspiring creature, that I was overcome with profound shame.

A few minutes later the wolf returned and interrupted the movie to reveal that his brother, the King of the aquatic wolves, had been kidnapped by High School Jocks. In an effort to atone for my past offense, Rob and I volunteered to try and rescue the King wolf. We were told that we would have to sneak into a Jock Party and pretend to be Cool Adults so we could trick the Jocks into liking us and then they would show us the wolf and we would rescue him.

We were immediately taken to the house where the High School Jocks had been having a party. Now, bear in mind that I grew up in England, and that although “people who are like sports and also kinda mean” existed (since both traits are fairly common it’s inevitable they will overlap in some people) my only knowledge of High School Jocks as a specific stereotype comes from movies. So the party was exactly like a movie High School Jock party. The house was an enormous McMansion; every Jock was wearing one of those varsity jackets and looked like a 25-year-old playing a teenager in a movie rather than an actual teenager; a stereotypical Nerd Kid with a bowl cut was having his head dunked in a toilet for some reason while a crowd of Jocks repeatedly exclaimed “He deserves it! He’s a NERD!”

In our capacity as Cool Adults, we distributed beer to the Jocks and their Hot Girlfriends (who never spoke.) This earned us the admiration of the Most Popular Jock (I think his name was Cody or something?) who said he was going to “show us something cool.” He took us to his enormous basement where he had the King Wolf cooped up in some kind of tank that was just big enough to fit him but not enough to allow him to move. The King Wolf was wearing a crown and looked very sad. Cody brought us some snacks while he laughed at the wolf’s suffering “Haha! He can’t even turn around!”.

Rob ate some of the potato chips that Cody offered us then immediately began to choke.The Cody started to laugh more. He began a villain monologue about how he could tell just by looking at us that we weren’t just a pair of Cool Adults there to help with underage drinking; we were a pair of “fully grown nerds” who had come to rescue the wolf because “you probably like the environment or some bullshit.” He said he could tell just by looking at Rob that Rob had a milk allergy and that these chips contained “ultra-milk” which had “so much casein it will make you die.” (I guess Movie Jocks are allowed to know about proteins without it being nerdy because it helps you gain muscle? More likely, it’s just that dreams don’t have to make sense.)

Rob rolled around on the floor choking while the wolf howled in agony and I wondered how I could possibly fix this situation. Then I woke up.

For adults, there are the “Pride Adult Gender Inclusive Iridescent Five Panel Hat,” “Pride Striped Bisexual Flag Bandana,” “Pride Striped Transgender Flag Bandana,” “Pride Adult Striped Gender Inclusive Jumpsuit,” and a number of other accessories and articles of clothing.