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2 yr. ago

  • Makery: The bakery ... for straight men! Now with scones in monster truck and shark testosterone flavors! GRAAARRR

  • I just can't get over the "struggling with a flour sifter" bit. Like ... what's there to struggle with? What accessory would help a person locked in combat with a flour sifter? Another flour sifter, to intimidate the first with the knowledge that it can be replaced?

  • Probably unrelated to the Eudaemons, the UC Santa Cruz grad students in the '70s who built hidden wearable computers to beat roulette.

  • (taking notes while talking in Zoidberg voice) "Don't ... let ... acid ... on job"

  • They did.

    The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it.

  • LessWrongers don't have a sense of a "vaguely plausible normie" that is calibrated in a grounded way (by trying to teach the Intro for Non-Majors courses, trying to explain to relatives and high-school friends what you do for a living, etc.). Instead, they have a concept constructed to set them apart and above. The normie is the ideal rube, the complete inverse of the sophisticate that the LessWronger aspires to be or believes themselves to have become.

  • It's like he heard the phrase "flesh-eating bacteria" and decided they would be more scarier if they had tiny knives and forks.

  • Quoth Yud:

    Algae are tiny microns-wide solar-powered fully self-replicating factories that run on general assemblers, "ribosomes", that can replicate most other products of biology given digital instructions.

    Ribosomes ... make proteins.

  • Quoth Yud:

    I'm sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience, though lord knows I'm not necessarily succeeding either.

    All the faux modesty of Tommy Tallarico saying "my mother is very proud".

    The key valid ideas to be communicated are [made-up sci-fi bullshit about nanobots]

  • If I were inclined to be charitable, I'd wonder who he was talking to that honestly thought in terms of "elan vital" and "game balance". Like, take the question "Why is flesh soft and diamond hard?", and ask somebody without a science background. I'd guess that the typical response would go something like, "I'unno, it just is." Or, "I've never thought about it, why?" Or, "Heh heh heh, you said hard". I suspect that Yud is making up a layperson of his own invention, a mythical audience upon whom his Educate spell is perfectly effective. He refuses to admit any challenge to his mental model of how the process of explanation works.

  • Yudkowsky:

    Talking to the general public is hard.

    Multiple commenters on FanFiction.net replying to chapter 23 of HPMOR: Genetics don't work that way. If magic were recessive, then wizard parents would always have wizard kids and there would be no such thing as squibs. Look, I drew the Punnett square....

  • "If you take only the statements where I was vague instead of the ones where I was explicitly wrong and interpret my words in the way that I am now telling you to, you will see that I am right."

  • That hat could only work with New Year's Eve glasses from a year with "00".

  • In an essay that somehow manages to offhandendly mention both evolutionary psychology and hentai anime in the same paragraph.

  • Is one truly fulfilling the fantasy if one's lair is not in a volcano?

  • A fart-huff that hard qualifies as an Alvistime miracle.

  • my "not a cult" T-shirt has raised many questions, etc.

  • I couldn't tell what you were saying. Answering "yes" to the question of whether you were writing "in sarcasm or support" is not at all informative.