Ah yes, the Soma problem. I can't think of another premise of the transhumanist not-faith that can be so viscerally upsetting when wrong.
The decision theory stuff itself ought to be called out more for playing pretty fast and loose with reality to begin with. "If you have a supercomputer that perfectly simulates blah blah blah" is such a fundamentally bad premise because once you presume such a thing exists you're committing to the same basic metaphysical problems that you would if you replaced the computer with God. In particular I think it commits you to hard determinism at which point there's no sense arguing about what the right action is because the answer was set in stone not just before you entered the room but when the initial state of the universe was set up. Like, there's a version of this where the question is meaningful in which case the premise is impossible, and a version where we accept the premise as given and render the question pointless. Why are you doing decision theory in a hypothetical world where nobody really makes decisions?
Or we could acknowledge that yudkowskian decision theory is just singularity apologetics and accept the impossible elements of the premise on faith.
So two thoughts:
Per Saltman's comments the improvised incendiary bounced off the side of the house rather than breaking and spreading the gas on the house proper. Apparently if you want the bottle to break the way you intend you gotta really just whang that thing because glass bottles are sturdier than you'd think.
One thing I find ironic about his referencing the New Yorker article on him was that part of my takeaway from that article was how mundane he is, individually. Like, he's a snake, but not in any way that isn't pretty standard once you start getting that level of wealth and power. He credibly pretended to be a proper AI cultist for the critihype, and then as the rubber started hitting the road he pivoted towards the direction that gave him and the company more money, even if it meant sacrificing the values that it turns out a lot of other people really cared about (however dumb I might think they are). That's shitty, but it's shitty in the most boring way that so many things are in the rot economy, and it's not like even if they had managed to kill Altman himself there wouldn't be another bunch of enterprising sociopaths ready to move into the same position. That profile is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why even if you are a hardcore AI doom cultist you shouldn't focus your ire on the man himself, because he's just not that special.
Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.
the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men
You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.
However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.
And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.
Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?
I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn't that they aren't effective enough at choosing causes; they're supporting exactly what they want to, whether it's saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.
I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is "Just Asking Questions."
The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you're asking helps me trust that it's worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for "so much for the tolerant left" bullshit.
Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.
And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.
Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.
Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.
Ukraine wasn't able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.
Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it's weird that you don't seem to understand that.
I got as far as "he says crypto is bad but also didn't make any money in crypto!" before I couldn't go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.
I will back up soyweiser here by saying that at least in modern Christianity you run into the latter a hell of a lot less often. I don't know that most of them have done a lot of theological introspection to try and reconcile the usual contradictions you get from trying to use bronze-age source material dealing in absolutes, but when push comes to shove I think most of them lean towards believing that the choice to be a decent person is real and matters.