I specifically wont pretend to be interested. You’ll notice that I’m not - that’s why I wont ask in the first place.

The nature of my job is that I often listen to people tell me their life story while I’m replacing their kitchen faucet. It’s not that I can’t do small talk - I just find most of the topics incredibly uninteresting. Like I said earlier, I know how to play the game, I just find it mind-numbingly boring.

This goes both ways, though. I’m acutely aware that most people aren’t interested in the things I’m most passionate about, so I don’t bring those up either. But when I do meet someone with similar interests, I could talk for hours. Those conversations are rarely about people or events - mostly about ideas.

I don’t feel like it makes much difference whether the person is close to me or not. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to these people, but a huge part of the topics people generally small talk about are the kinds of mundane things I have almost zero interest in discussing. For example, if something interesting happened to you over the weekend, I assume you’re just going to tell me about it - I would. But I sometimes feel like people expect me to ask about those things, and when I see others do it, I’m often a bit skeptical about whether they’re actually interested or just going through the motions. Thus this thread.

Yeah, but this is what troubles me. It’s not that I don’t know what’s expected of me in these situations - I know how to play the game. I’m just not interested in it.

I do try to think about whether there’s anything even remotely interesting about what’s happened to them, and if so, I’ll ask about that. But in many cases, there’s not. Unless their vacation was to a place like North Korea, the most interesting part to me is what kind of plane they flew on and whether they found the baggage carousel mesmerizing.

you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right?

He actually is. Everyday astronaut has done several interviews with him and the dude knows about rockets and engineering.

If SpaceX landing and reusing rockets is not impressive to you then what is?

I don’t recognize your authority

Duct tape comes in variety of colors.

Did you mean to say can’t?

A big number of instances don’t federate with lemmynsfw though, so there’s a lot of users who don’t see the messages of the users from that instance.

In my experience (hexbear and .ml instances excluded) the majority of trolls I encounter seems to be from either infosec.pub or blahaj.zone

There’s not a single mention of LLMs in my post. Not one.

There’s not a single mention of LLM’s in my entire post. The argument I’m making there isn’t even mine. I heard it from Sam Harris way before LLMs were even a thing.

But I wasn’t talking about LLMs

I didn’t say we need to improve on what we have. We just need to keep making better technology which we will keep doing unless we destroy ourselves first.

I get what you’re saying but to me, that still just sounds like a timescale issue. I can’t think of a scenario where we’ve improved something so much that there’s just absolutely nothing we could improve on further. With AI we only need to reach the point of making it have human-level cognitive capabilities and from there on it can improve itself.

You seem to be talking about LLMs now and I’m not. LLMs being a dead end is perfectly compatible with what I just said. We’ll just try a different approach next then. Even the fact of realising they’re a dead end is yet another step towards AGI.

Then you need to give me an explanation for why it’s a dead end

A chess engine is intelligent in one thing: playing chess. That narrow intelligence doesn’t translate to any other skill, even if it’s sometimes superhuman at that one task, like a calculator.

Humans, on the other hand, are generally intelligent. We can perform a variety of cognitive tasks that are unrelated to each other, with our only limitations being the physical ones of our “meat computer.”

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the artificial version of human cognitive capabilities, but without the brain’s limitations. It should be noted that AGI is not synonymous with AI. AGI is a type of AI, but not all AI is generally intelligent. The next step from AGI would be Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which would not only be generally intelligent but also superhumanly so. This is what the “AI doomers” are concerned about.

His car*

And he succeeded. I wouldn’t have ever heard of them if it wasn’t for this incident.