All of peak.singularity's Comments + Replies

Thanks !

It's kind of funny that DALL-E 2 is so amazing, and at the same time both DuckDuckGo and Google fail to find the above (and/or a related reddit thread) when prompted with :

dall-e "do androids dream of electric sheep"

but succeed with :

dall-e "androids dreaming of electric sheep"

EDIT : Never mind, it was not only my failure of thinking things through about what DALL-E accepts best, but also about how search engines work - DDG (but not google !) gives me the following as the 10th result when using the quote-less query :

dall-e do androids dream of elec

... (read more)
4gwern
Yes, I thought I had seen one already, so I went searching. "Electric sheep" on Twitter was useless, even after filtering by media and blocking/muting a bunch of accounts, so I fell back to androids dream of electric sheep dall-e in Google, which turned up that link; I noticed that Google also provides 2 Twitter accounts, confirming that a relevant tweet existed & was being liked/reshared (even if you can't actually find it when you click on those accounts!), and was worth looking for in that Reddit thread. Curiously, Google Images also falls to find it, and regular google is very sensitive to search query wording - shorter seems to be better, but not consistently... I suspect the problem is that Sam-sama was replying to tweets without any text, just the sampled image, and so it's hard for any automated systems to figure out that the tweet he is replying to is 'the label' - for reasons of scale, I wouldn't be surprised if each tweet is being processed by Google in isolation and so solving this instance is near-impossible. The hit is just barely on the edge of relevance and highly unstable. (Of course, our discussion here should help fix that within the next few index refreshes!)

Awesome !

I'm however surprised that nobody seems to have tried the prompt :

"Do androids dream of electric sheep ?"

Not even with DALL-E 1 ?!

P.S.: The picture for this article (also used for Dick's book) looked promising, but seems like it was a "mere" "weird" human that painted it ?
https://www.fondazionesinapsi.it/orione/ma-gli-androidi-sognano-pecore-elettriche/ (it)

P.P.S.: At least one journalist (or more likely, her editor) had the same (again, pretty obvious) idea for an article title about AI, but even though it mentions DALL-E (1), they didn't think o... (read more)

4gwern
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511734532776476672

Well, Pulp & Golden Age sci-fi was "discredited" by us actually landing a probe on Venus and realizing that it was not a likely place to find a lush jungle...
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-worlds-that-never-were/

Meanwhile SneerClub is a bit too current to LessWrong for that parallel to work ?

The above author has followed through on his project of resurrecting classic science fiction, "Vintage Worlds" is already on its 3rd volume :

https://www.solarsystemheritage.com/anthology-project-2017.html

Well, when reading this :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Less Wrong & SSC => ACX clearly seem to me to be much closer to the empiricist side than the rationalist one ?

Wow, this was quite a surprise seeing your post here, and finding out that you've been reading Less Wrong for all of these years !

(On the other hand, probably not, an English speaker with similar intellectual tendencies and Silicon Valley tropism would probably have quickly found about it, my case not being very typical ?)

I hope that you are well ?

4Eric Raymond
To be fair, I haven't followed Less Wrong all that closely over the years. It's more that I've known some of the key people for a while, notably Eliezer himself and Scott Alexander.

Heh, this reminds me of last week's jab from John Michael Greer :
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/

(And if it seems paradoxical to you that a Druid who prays to pagan deities and practices ceremonial magic should be saying [that the universe doesn't care about your feelings] in response to the behavior of people who by and large consider themselves practical-minded rationalists, trust me, the irony has not escaped my attention either. Thank you, and we now return to this week’s regularly scheduled post.)

As for me, I've been really into transhuma... (read more)

Why do you think that "relativism is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy" ?
(BTW, I hate the way the word is used, "relative" doesn't mean "equal" !)

From what I see, LW actually started out focused on Truth as the core value, but then since the community is pretty smart, it figured out that this way led to relativism and/or nihilism (?) and pretty bad outcomes :
https://samzdat.com/2018/03/07/everything-is-going-according-to-plan/

So, a strategic change of direction has been attempted towards "Winning" as the core value.

Did I get that right ?

Plato was not a "20th Century "Platonist"" ?
https://samzdat.com/2018/01/26/platonism-without-plato/

"Puzzle-playing" reminds me of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions :
https://samzdat.com/2018/05/19/science-under-high-modernism/

So, that's just academia for you, except it might be worse in the Philosophy department, for all the reasons that you outline ?

As long as it's not with a bulldozer...
https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9moire-9aa3b6b3de04