nosuchthing

Joined 12 years ago

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Comment · 8 months ago
This paper is an incredible read: TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines

https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.x...

  > "Researchers have called attention to the ways that the hype promoting psychedelics as miracle cures 
  replicates preceding claims about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants in prior decades. 
  As the drug historian David Herzberg articulated in conversation with UC Berkeley's The Microdose:

    There’s been an enormous amount of money invested in psychedelics as people hope that they 
    can be the real Prozac in the same way that Prozac hoped it would be the real Valium and 
    Valium would be the real barbiturates, which would be the real morphine. 
    There’s a long history of hoping that maybe this time, it’s not so complicated; 
    maybe there is a simple switch to change people without having to change any [other] aspect of their [lives].

  While others have noted similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications,
   the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and magico-religious aspirations that have no parallel 
   in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. I argue that this utopian discourse provides insight 
   into the ways that global financial and tech elites are instrumentalizing psychedelics as one tool 
   in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality. 
   This elite project reveals how medicalized psychedelics can potentially undermine the very prosocial and 
   pro-environmental outcomes that the field's funders insist psychedelics will promote. 
   To understand the envisioned role of psychedelics within this elite project, this paper analyzes a different 
   parallel hype, revealing correspondences between the psychedelic industry hype and the concurrent 
   hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), including the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT. 
   The presence of these parallels is understandable when one considers their underlying affinities, 
   like two blooms from one plant: the same Silicon Valley and venture capital forces are investing 
   enormous amounts of capital to develop both as cultivars in their own image, 
   selecting for desired traits that further the existing socioeconomic order.
Comment · 8 months ago
LLMs can't access the training data that's less than the statistically most common token, so they use a random jitter.

With that randomness comes statistically irrelevant results.

Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
It looks like most of Peter's projects are just simple API wrappers.

Peter's been running agents overnight 24/7 for almost a year using free tokens from his influencer payments to promote AI startups and multiple subscription accounts.

  Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ...  I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.

  ...  Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.
Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
either way there's a lot of money pumping the agentic hype train with not much to show for it other than Peter's blog edit history showing he's a paid influencer and even the little obscure AI startups are trying to pay ( https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2... ) for these sorts of promotional pump and dump style marketing efforts on social media.

In Peter's blog he mentions paying upwards of $1000's a month in subscription fees to run agentic tasks non-stop for months and it seems like no real software is coming out of it aside from pretty basic web gui interfaces for API plugins. is that what people are genuinely excited about?

Comment · 8 months ago
Can you elaborate on this more or point a link for some context?
Comment · 8 months ago
That's not actually research though. The LLM API is only requesting a few of the top search results from a search engine and then adding those web pages to its context window.

That might work for simple tasks, but it's easily susceptible to prompt injection attacks and there's no way to validate the quality if it's statistically novel enough and outside of the core training data.

Comment · 8 months ago
"Is curing patients a sustainable busines model?" - Goldman 2018

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/goldman-sachs-asks-in-bi...

Many of the biggest medical innovations have come from publicly funded university researchers, which then license or give away their findings to private businesses.

Comment · 8 months ago
LTO9 is only 18TB.

The LTO compression ratio is theoretical and most peoples data will be incompatible with native LTO compression method used.

Comment · 8 months ago
"The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber is a great, more recent alternative with a lot more context around the non-linear trajectory of history - the modern myths of linear progressive societal progress from savages, to agriculture, to cities and centralized technological futurism.

Graeber also explores the question what defines a society, and how at certain points some groups of people identified their culture through "schismogenesis" more so in oppositional context to against other group(s)

It's a massive book, but really refreshing and full of delightful little anecdotes and footnotes all through out.

Comment · 8 months ago
Manipulating the The Keynesian Beauty Contest is the metagame, especially after the era of /r/Wall-street bets swelled up. What do you think Jim Kramer gets paid to do, report facts?

By 2017 teenagers were running quantitative trading algorithms and semantic analysis trading bots they found from influencers and github. Around that time private subscription fee telegram and discord "whale" insider trading groups often had multiple levels of insider trading market manipulation running pump and dump schemes. Marks would pay to join the private chat group and at a certain time of day a ticket symbol would be released for "insiders" to buy before it's promoted in public channels. The outer circle was just providing liquidity for the deeper insiders to exit with easy profit.

Most VC gambits are not much different. Sell the news. Unleash the rumors.

Comment · 8 months ago
In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.

In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.

How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?

Comment · 8 months ago
upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.

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