blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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Well, not all of the comments there are horrible. Though there is a guy calling himself "richardfeynman" saying some pretty silly stuff. His prior comment history is full of promptfondling.

There could be other "into the locker now" signals that are as strong as calling yourself "richardfeynman" on Hacker News, but I cannot think of a stronger one.

Variations on this theme have probably come up repeatedly in promptfondler circles.

Ah, gotcha.

No, that's not what superdeterminism is. You are importing a whole lot of baggage about what it means to understand things "as quantum mechanical systems". You are also making the same mistake that Tim Maudlin does about the implications of Bell inequality violations. He thinks that the EPR criterion of reality is "analytically" true, and he's wrong. Since you have recommended Maudlin elsewhere on Lemmy (as well as promulgating the myth that a singular "Copenhagen interpretation" exists), I'm going to do something else than try conversing with you further.

Something is missing here:

damages their users’ critical thinking and mental acuity whilst , all

The very unscientific sampling I did just now suggests that those complexity classes which Wikipedia covers, it covers better than the Zoo does anything. Of course, the Zoo has room for #P/lowpoly and LOGWANK and all the other classes that are attested in one paper apiece.

And we don’t want to introduce all the complexities of solving disagreements on Wikipedia.

wait for it

There should also be some kind of support for multiple AIs disagreeing with each other.

"The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children's medication doses. I find it helpful."

From the comments:

I wonder if you could do something similar with all peer-reviewed scientific publications, summarizing all findings into an encyclopedia of all scientific knowledge.

True believers are fucked in the head.

And hardly run, at that: this changelog is all spam. Tsk, tsk.

The issue of interpretation is wildly unresolved. Scratch any question in "quantum foundations", and you end up in the territory of debates like whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Lovely fuel for online discussion threads, but by the same token, also exactly the kind of thing that many physicists try to ignore whenever possible. Even so, there are views that are very hard to argue for. The implication of Bell's theorem (and a host of related results: Gleason, Kochen--Specker, ...) is that you can't find a consistent layer beneath quantum mechanics, not without something like a conspiracy of hidden causes propagating backwards in time. In other words, the hidden layer you postulate has to look baroquely nonclassical itself in order to be consistent with the real experimental data. 't Hooft occupies a position way out on the fringe, one that many people (including me) would say amounts to giving up on science and declaring that everything happens the way it does because Amon-Ra wills it.

I suppose one prominent thing is his book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I know of various other books about quantum information/computing, written from a physicist perspective. There are David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2007) and Eleanor Rieffel and Wolfgang Polak's Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2014). If anyone knows a decent undergrad introduction to Gödel incompleteness and its relation to the halting problem, that would probably cover a lot of the rest, apart from what I recall as rather shallow pseudophilosophical faffling. (I am going off decade-old memories and the table of contents here.)

The Sinfest subreddit does have some real gems.

What's he doing with the hammer and chisel? According to this comic, you become a Christian by signing a contract that you believe will improve your life (or death, I guess). Several tiny undead Jewish skeletons will then enter through your mouth, and your eyes will become screens that display religious symbols. How will woodworking tools help with any of this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sinfest/comments/1mvcffn/comment/n9plpf5/

I'll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, since it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:

At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I'm not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can't suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?

This isn't my field, but it looks like a neat project!

The malware stole a lot of people’s login keys and, apparently, their crypto wallets.

Seinfeld "Shame".gif

And he's really showing the unidirectionality of his empathy as well as his persecution complex. E.g., here's Woit telling Aaronson to get therapy:

I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.

And in another comment:

Seriously: seek professional help for your paranoid delusions/psychological defense mechanisms for justifying murdering Palestinian children on a large scale as part of a genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.

And another commenter says,

I hope Scott gets help, he is clearly insane.

OK, call it casually ableist, but it's not wishing death upon the man, or harm to his loved ones. But here's Aaronson commenting further down the thread:

In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not addressing any of my comments here to Peter, or to any of the cowards of his comment section. They’re unworthy of civilized conversation, as they don’t fulfill the basic prerequisites for it, like caring whether their interlocutors and their loved ones live or die.

Jeshua H. ben Joseph, dude. Get help.

You know who Scott Aaronson reminded me of, back when he first had his incel-ish blogospasm? Tatsuya Ishida. Scott Aa's blogging echoed, to an extent, the "Sisterhood" phase transition of Sinfest. Both of them stemmed from a man being his own worst enemy. In both cases, my reaction was, "Good grief, bro, take a breath. There is not a mass movement to declare that your penis makes you bad. Whatever you're reading, you're seeking it out to hurt yourself because some part of you feels you deserve to be punished."

For those who don't rubberneck at online car crashes, Sinfest was a popular webcomic in the early 2000's known for raunchy, bawdy, deliberately "edgy" humor delivered with rather technically adept art. It was anti-establishment during the Bush years, with a bit of a "spiritual but not religious" streak. Tatsuya seemed to mellow when Obama rose to prominence; the strip bought hard into the "yes we can" message. And then... whoo wee, things got off the chain. He swerved into "feminism", of a self-flagellating kind. Then from anti-porn, anti-sex-work-ism, he went TERF, then MAGA, and eventually esoteric pagan neo-Nazi. The art quality decayed apace, first discarding the personality of the brushwork, the settings, the character design... eventually losing its grasp of basic frame-to-frame continuity. A significant fraction of it by now is probably AI slop. Tats' politics have degenerated into a few hateful ideas in orbit around each other. One Reddit user said, IIRC, "Tats believes that genocide is bad because the Jews are doing it."

Mirror images, man. Mirror images.

Scott here is provoking me to inchoate "fuck your trolley problems" rage.

You know, if I were ever actually confronted with a situation where I had to choose one child's life over another, the trauma would fuck me up for years. Anyone who says they could feel self-righteous in that circumstance is emotionally and morally diseased.

I ... just ... what?

He made up a whole society to be mad at.