blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts

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1,240

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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before i begin, i want to be clear that what i am about to say is not an endorsement of chattel slavery

— eigenrobot

My mental voice for DM guy is Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.

FYI, Python is named after Monty Python

NO? Really?! Educate me, hackernews!

condescending Wonka.jpg

Wait, we had the option of e-mail notifications?

"HPMoR is canon - fact"

Dang it, am I going to have to learn a new programming language after 24 years of getting things done in Python because the edgelords are indulging in a fit of pique?

were the human raters drunk? (honestly, I couldn’t blame them — I wouldn’t give a shit either if my mturk was “which of these 1.6 second clips is doom”)

"I'unno, I'm fuckin' wasted and guessin' at random."

"So, your P(doom) is 50%."

I prefer the Jimmy Wales version of authority. The project operates democratically, but Jimmy always retains the ultimate authority to act as a sovereign at the end of the day because he built it, has the reputation of the project to protect, and it's his legacy. The option to fork the project will always be there if the people want new leadership.

Setting aside the blithe just-fork-it-ism and the insult to the people who actually write the articles... Isn't Wales just one of a dozen people on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees now?

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed story:

For this year’s ICLR, Guha, the Northeastern computer scientist, turned in a study about how successfully large language models can write code when used by students with little programming experience. Conceptualizing and designing the experiment, running it on dozens of undergraduates across three colleges, and writing up the results took him and his team more than two years. Last fall, he got back four anonymous reviews, including the one complimenting his “lucid narrative.” It declared, too, that “this paper heralds a new dawn for the LLM community” and the analysis was “rendered in an approachable fashion, ensuring it is digestible for a broad readership.”

"We spent more than two years normalizing the eating of faces by leopards, but we never imagined that the leopards would eat our faces!"

Russo acknowledged that he uses generative AI to help him write reviews — emphasis on help. He said that he always reads the paper and writes his own response, but occasionally asks ChatGPT to analyze it and come up with counterarguments for him to consider incorporating. Similarly, other scientists said that they value the tool for its ability to distill technical concepts and suggest relevant research to cite.

I'm sorry, but this is just morally bankrupt. "Our process is only powered by a forsaken child during the intermediate stages. The final product is completely orphan-free by weight."

an hackernews:

a high correlation between intelligence and IQ

motherfuckers out here acting like "intelligence" is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed

intelligence can be reasonably defined as "knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income"

eat a bag of dicks

I was today years old when I learned that there was a rationalwiki discord server.

Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism, it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system. When “Americanism” was a form of cheerful bland official optimism, the gangster used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened, guiltily; nothing is resolved at the end of “The Godfather,” because the family business goes on.

Wow, it's nice that that doesn't feel at all relevant in this, the year 2024

While I'm sure that some people were cool on The Godfather when it came out, it was the highest-grossing film of 1972 and won Best Picture at the 1973 Oscars. That's not exactly a good example of a movie being vindicated in retrospect.

Hindenburg, hitler, great depression, ronald reagan, stalin, modi, putin, decades of north korea life, …

🎶 we didn't start the fire 🎶

J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:

Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.

I first read this comment before having coffee and thought that "R. Scientism" was a joke about Asimov's robot novels.

Happy birthday!

and that's twice in as many days that I have been doing a Lady Macbeth "out, out damn spot" routine with my entire central nervous system

Surprise Aella cameo!

A new plan to save America!

17 followers.

To paraphrase Jenny Nicholson: Nobody's watching your revolution except sneerclub, and we're only watching it as performance art.