blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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Welp, time to start the thread with fresh Awful for everyone to regret:

r/phenotypes

Here's a start:

Given their enormous environmental cost and their foundation upon exploited labor, justifying the use of Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications is an uphill task. Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit, climbing that hill has no merit.

Man, now I'm bummed that I don't have a cult trying to distribute translations of my Daria fic in which Jane becomes Hell Priest of the Cenobites.

I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.

Zoom and enhance!

alignment-pill

The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.

[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty

When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong

"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:

Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.

In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.

Today's news....

internally at Meta:

-trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger

-enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people's existence

-tampons removed from men's restrooms

-DEI programs shuttered

-Kaplan briefed top conservative influencers the night before policy changes were announced

My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:

You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ

(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)

Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.

xcancel link, since nitter.net is kaput.

New diet villain just dropped. Believe or disbelieve this specific one, "fat" or even "polyunsaturated fat" increasingly looks like a failure as a natural category. Only finer-grained concepts like "linoleic acid" are useful for carving reality at the joints.

Reply:

This systematic review and meta-analysis doesn't seem to indicate that linoleic acid is unusually bad for all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease events.

https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD011094.pub4

Yud writes back:

And is there another meta-analysis showing the opposite? I kinda just don't trust those anymore, unless somebody I trust vouches for the meta-analysis.

Ah, yes, the argumentum ad other-sources-must-exist-somewhere-um.

Ah, here's the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.

Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.

"What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"

su;dr

(saw URL; didn't read)

You don't even have to be well-known to get crank attention. Post anything with "quantum" in the title on the arXiv and they'll find your e-mail.

Source: this is one of the few times when I can say "trust me, bro" and be entirely sincere about it

"Listen to the flowers. They will tell you sweet secrets."

eyelid twitches

One thing that may not be visible from outside the profession is that there are a lot of steps in between air-hockey tables and the research frontier, especially for the part of the frontier that gets the most press — black holes, Large Hadron Collider stuff, quantum computing, etc. Wanting to understand any of those things at a level better than (bong rip) man, like, quantum mechanics, dude, requires systematic study. Doing that entirely on one's own might not be impossible, but it's damn hard.

The orange site comments aren't all worthless:

His attention span won't be enough to stick with physics for longer than 4 weeks.

When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in.

What a fucking idiot. Also a fascist collaborator, but importantly, a fucking idiot.