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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

like if anyone had halfway-plausible "grey goo" nanotech that could do anything that looked like computation, that might be worrying. a locally viable self-reproducing platform that can make another one of itself from a pile of dirt, even if it's like, special dirt, that might scare me a little bit. but an overlord hive-mind that requires an uninterrupted global high-purity helium supply chain just to make ONE more of itself is supposed to be a threat?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

put ME on CNN and MSNBC, you cowards.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115076275195904439

I've written about this before and I will probably do it again. but I don't know what else to do but repeat myself when allegedly serious, internationally-renowned academic experts and influential public intellectuals are just going out there and saying stuff that would get you laughed out of a late night freshman dorm room conversation about philosophy

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

doomers might look at my rant here and think, "but wait, once it's self-sustaining, even a little, it's TOO LATE, it's already out of control!!!" and to that I say: no. not even close. look the evolution of *any* business. managing resource flows is really hard. there is an off-ramp every single day

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

if, in order to achieve your out-of-control doomsday robot scenario, a trillion dollars worth of human effort must be expended annually, and if any of it stops for even a moment than the whole thing implodes and grinds to a halt, _you can stop worrying_ that it is "the machines" which dominate us

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

we are not even remotely close to a single LLM meaningfully constructing even a portion of the pipeline to train another LLM. you can sort of argue around the edges that maybe under certain synthetic conditions this is borderline possible now, but on the "singularity" progress bar, that is 0.5%

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

in order to be a singularity candidate, an AI would need to achieve vertical integration from silicon fabrication through logistics and integration, into operating systems and applications, with tight whole-system feedback from the robotics to the shipping to the power generation and back

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

it is so mind-meltingly frustrating to see people think that we are close to a "singularity" with current AI technology. here's a hint about when you could worry about a disruption so big that it might, even momentarily, *appear* to be a singularity:

a single corporation turning a profit even once

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

resources run out. processes hit bottlenecks. optimizations reach physical limits. perpetual motion machines are impossible for reasons that are pretty well understood

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Heading back to the US from two weeks in Korea, and I'm struck by how rational this policy response is. Western democracies are not showering themselves in glory by comparison:

https://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/policies/view?articleId=290296

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I will be here!

RE: https://www.threads.com/@latimesfob/post/DW-UDLuFE5p

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Dear the people trying to suggest this is somehow a MAGA conspiracy or otherwise trying to defend Swalwell in the comments here: Go be fucking trash somewhere else, thanks

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mcc wrote:

I was using a GUI graphics editor today and thinking about all the ways it could be better. I can think of so many ways the software we use could be different, so many ways our software could be better. Instead of working on that I suspect I'll spend the rest of my autonomous life as a developer desperately bailing out water, trying to create a little pool of programs I can use without having fake "AI" in it

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Well? IS the moon haunted?

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ljwrites@writeout.ink ("Author-ized L.J.") wrote:

The existence of participants implies the existence of particiskirts

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Okay who does not like Dolly Parton and how unhappy would you have to be in life to be that person

https://consequence.net/2026/04/dolly-parton-is-the-most-popular-person-in-america-new-poll-finds/

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
minterpunct@gamemaking.social ("Sleepius Raccoonus") wrote:

Stop denying the inevitable: AGI will be realized once we have quantum computers, quantum computers will be efficient as soon as we have the fusion reactors to power them, and fusion power will be economically viable as soon as AGI figures out how to do it. All these technologies are at most 10 years away, so just keep giving us money for the next 20 years, and 30 years from now you'll be reaping the rewards

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lespreuh ("Lëspreüh") wrote:

Little nightmares

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

The funniest possible outcome is, of course, a three-way tie.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

Wow! This set from YAGODY kicked butt!

https://www.kexp.org/podcasts/live-on-kexp/2026/3/10/yagody/

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

The Fediverse has the opportunity to do something hilarious here

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
miketheman@hachyderm.io ("Mike Fiedler, Code Gardener") wrote:

Any time I see something like this in a #Python REPL, I can't help but smile for two reasons:

1. Yes, yes I did forget.
2. I know some of the folks who worked so hard to make that message do exactly what I want it to do. Thanks to Pablo, @ambv, and so many others!

#OpenSource

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

"Hmm, I work in tech. I should answer this like I'm extremely neurotic to score high in Attention To Detail, because that's obviously important to leadership."

a few months pass

Management: "Hey, you thinking of taking any PTO? You've been working a lot and we don't want to burn you out"

Me: "Oops"

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

The funniest thing to me is when companies bring in these business psychologist types to give everyone personality tests that are unintentionally really obvious how to game to get a result that the company wants

And then they'te all surprised-pikachu.jpg when everyone does that

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

Do you have impostor syndrome?

Spy vs Spy mofo

Boosted by jwz:
mattedgar@social.coop ("Matt Edgar") wrote:

Fun new game for art gallery visits: find all the portraits that could be valid UK passport photos

Boosted by jwz:
VeroniqueB99 ("Vee") wrote:

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
yaah@hachyderm.io wrote:

Welp, I got laid off. RIP futurewei OSS rust team.

If you know anyone hiring systems engineers lmk.