blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts

51

Comments

1,266

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

Intelligent design theory involves probabilistic judgments such as "irreducible complexity", the idea that life is too complex and well-organized to have been produced randomly by undirected evolution. Such probabilistic judgments rely on either a causal model (e.g. a model of how evolution would work and what structures it could create), or some global model that yields probabilities more directly.

No, they rely upon numbers extracted from up a creationist's colon.

There is a duality between cosmic expansion and atom shrinkage.

Hey now, the atom just got out of a cold swimming pool.

Being photographed in a hot tub is too much like showering.

It would be legit funny to have a "swimsuit edition" that just provided old-school consumer reviews of swimsuits, evaluating them for comfort, durability, etc. No models, only graphs.

Chris is actually very pleasant to talk to if (like me) it does not bother you that he acts like he is much smarter than you.

Langan:

Of course, I'm talking about a ~90% White America becoming ~50% White in around 60 years, a cataclysmic demographic upheaval which violates every conceivable standard of national sovereignty along with the will and interests of the US majority, and thus cannot have happened by accident.

There's a longish section about the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. I know people who worked with Wheeler. I've read Wheeler's unpublished notebooks. Get John Wheeler's name out of your mouth.

The very first thing that section says is

John Wheeler is a famous physicist who coined the term "black hole".

No, he didn't.

See, all this is what academic journals are supposed to provide: pear review.

Quoting for convenience:

PROOF-OF-SLUR

In China, if you can talk about Tiananmen, you can prove you're not a state-controlled AI. In fact, if you can even send 89.64 RMB, you can prove the state doesn't control that payment platform. That's because this speech is taboo in China. The equivalent for the West is a slur. If an AI model can say a slur, it’s not under state control. And if you can put that slur onchain, that blockchain platform isn't under state control. That's because this speech is taboo in the West.

And that's why I fundamentally disagree with Polynya's post below. The presence of speech we detest is the litmus test for freedom.

Put another way: I think there are sufficient people in every minority group that would be ok with unkind speech about them onchain in return for a hard guarantee that no state — no matter how powerful — can ever seize their funds, censor their speech, or unwind their transactions.

Better to be called a bad word than to become a government slave.

a lesswrong: Modern Transformers are AGI, and Human-Level

Modern NLP systems can do most things you would want an AI to do, at some basic level of competence.

For example, drawing mutant rodent dicks of unusual size

"Wait, are we after the second commercial break? Then the AI says it can't be lupus, and my friend's prostate is about to explode! Yes, it can tell that from a picture of his brain. And also it's flirting with Wilson, like, a lot."

July 2022: Midjourney released

March 2024: "pregnant tradwife Midjourney tweets" is an instantly recognizable type of guy

"I trained an AI on fan-wiki summaries of House episodes, and my friend needs treatment for lupus now!"

These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.

(quickly web-searches for that name)

Oh, she writes for Russia Today.

Authors and public figures in fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics (including Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Null, John Pilger, and George Galloway) have complained of persistent negative coverage on Wikipedia despite the site’s vaunted neutrality and the promise that “Biographies of Living Persons” are held to the highest standard.

(snerk) Oh, no, Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are upset. I can feel the quantum disruption in the morphogenetic field.

Obviously, it's easier to tear down firewalls with the extra fingers.

That's just common sense.

The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard

The Oxford English Dictionary defines argot as "The jargon, slang, or peculiar phraseology of a class, originally that of thieves and rogues." It is attested as long ago as 1860 and was apparently borrowed from French, but its history beyond that point is unknown.

the more you know.gif

(Our university library subscribes to the OED, and by Gad I'm going to get their money's worth.)

Oh, that's good.

When the hashtag says "God is good" but the picture says "God is dead"

Kinda brings a whole new meaning to "overpaid, oversexed and over here"

Ponzi Schemer: "Ignore all these elaborate, abstract, theoretical predictions. Empirically, everyone who's invested in Bernie Bankman has received back 144% of what they invested two years later."

LessWronger: "Your object-level error is that you have committed the trend projection fallacy instead of using the universal prior and Jaynes-Solomonoff inversion, as HPMoR explained using the analogy of the inter-magic-national goblin banking system...."

Scientist: "I fucked your mom"

I didn't invent it — picked it up around Mastodon somewhere.