blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts

51

Comments

1,267

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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"How long is't ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?"

My informal impression is that they range from "OK" to "... the Hell?!".

As a physicist with a background in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics before moving to quantum information theory, let me reassure you that I speak from training and decades of experience when I say, "No, you dork ass loser."

You gave 'em the benefit of the doubt, but you can take it right back. :-)

"I don't even see the RFC 4648 anymore. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..."

I think you mean "swing & a miss"

:-P

"Honest, babe, I'd only dump you for a ten-out-of-ten smokeshow as evaluated on my personal scale!"

"Honey, it's time we had the conversation."

"You mean, are we getting serious?"

"No."

"The 'is this going to be exclusive' talk?"

"No."

"The 'do you ever want kids someday' talk?"

"No."

"Moving in together? Making plans to meet my parents?"

"No, I need to tell you that I would trade up if I found someone 37% better than you, and now you need to tell me your corresponding percentage."

[a deadly silence falls]

Oh look, a clarification:

It didn't even occur to me that anyone would read the tweet as being about "25% more general market value" rather than "25% more value to me personally". Who thinks like that??!?

Yud is just a uwu neuro-atypical smol bean who is ignorant of generations of cultural context about people rating each other and cannot be blamed for people reading his words in the wrong way instead of the correct, equally repellent way.

Quoted for posterity/convenience:

in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about "I'd trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you" in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers

(Marriage makes sense as a promise not to do that period; but if so, you want to make sure that both partners are on the same page about that. Not everyone assumes that marriage means that.)

Her: I am never, ever letting you go unless I find someone 75% better. Me: Works for me.

oh hello there Performative Allistic Twitter

It’s not worth explaining because it’s stupid, but Roko’s conclusion was

(jazzy finger-snaps of approval)

Our house, our rules, I suppose... but maybe TechTakes is a better fit, unless the examples you have in mind seem rooted in TREACLES particularly.

New top-level thread for complaining about the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in one's field of specialization?

I wonder how much Rationalists have mucked up Wikipedia over the years just by being loud and persistent on topics where actual expertise would be necessary to push back.

More from the "super-recursive algorithm" page:

Traditional Turing machines with a write-only output tape cannot edit their previous outputs; generalized Turing machines, according to Jürgen Schmidhuber, can edit their output tape as well as their work tape.

... the Hell?

I'm not sure what that page is trying to say, but it sounds like someone got Turing machines confused with pushdown automata.

Taking a look at Super-recursive algorithm, and wow...

Examples of super-recursive algorithms include [...] evolutionary computers, which use DNA to produce the value of a function

This reads like early-1990s conference proceedings out of the Santa Fe Institute, as seen through bong water. (There's a very specific kind of weird, which I can best describe as "physicists have just discovered that the subject of information theory exists". Wolfram's A New Kind[-]Of Science was a late-arriving example of it.)

"Solomonoff induction" is the string of mouth noises that Rationalists make when they want to justify their preconceived notion as the "simplest" possibility, by burying all the tacit assumptions that actual experience would let them recognize.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics. [...] The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.

(source)

Shot, in the post:

Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.

Chaser, from the comments:

Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection

Yeah, it's been ages since I've heard anyone be that indirect about it... and if one is being indirect, the point is to minimize the reaction, not deliberately provoke one.

Huh. That post doesn't appear in the archives, as far as I can tell.