blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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For posterity:

The Nazis were very evil, but I'd rather the actual literal Nazis take over the world forever than flip a coin on the end of all value.

There's a 404media story about it now.

It is always somehow worse than one remembers.

I just can't respect a man who is posturing and arrogant yet still fails to go for the phrasing "to whom you are speaking".

Or in this specific case, https://nitter.net/HRTFRG/status/1725681262919377030

Historical examples like Apple, Uber, and WeWork show that such moves often led to stagnation or even GPUs.

Proving once again that text generation is at its best when it mimics the first step of the "write high, edit sober" process.

Ding ding ding, we have a prediction market

The opening line is... certainly a phrase.

I have been working on a research project into the scale, tractability and neglectedness of child marriage.

Later:

Some studies even showed that child marriage was associated with more positive outcomes, such as higher contraceptive use

Ummmmmmmmmm

OK, what will the other shoe be when it drops? Embezzling? Sexual harassment?

source: trust my dick, bro

Gee, one might almost think that EA was hostile to women.

Academic prose is not known for its scintillating qualities, but reading meta-analyses and reviews about calorie restriction (for example) is easier than reading a Yud tweet.

Suppose I said, "I have this clock that I really like. It's a very nice clock. So, I am going to measure everything I can in terms of the times registered on this clock."

"OK," you might say, while wondering what the big deal is.

"In fact, I am going to measure all speeds as the time it takes to travel a standard unit of distance."

"Uh, hold on."

"And this means that, contrary to what you learned in Big University, zero is not a speed! Because the right way to think of speed is the time it takes to travel 1 standard distance unit, and an object that never moves never travels."

Now, you might try to argue with me. You could try to point out all the things that my screwy definition would break. (For starters, I am throwing out everything science has learned about inertia.) You could try showing examples where scientists I have praised, like Feynman or whoever, speak of "a speed equal to zero". When all that goes nowhere and I dig in further with every reply, you might justifiably conclude that I am high on my own supply, in love with my own status as an iconoclast. Because that is my real motivation, neither equations nor expertise will sway me.

Yud argues that 0 and 1 are not probabilities in exactly this way. He says that you can't turn a probability of 0 or 1 into an odds ratio, because you'd be dividing by 0. This and everything that followed is just getting high off his own supply. One could try showing how he presumes his own conclusion. One could try showing how he breaks the basic idea that probabilities by their nature add up to 100% (given an event E, what can Yud say is the probability of the event E-or-not-E?). One could even observe that the same E. T. Jaynes he praises in that blog post uses 1 as a probability, for example in Chapter 2 of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003). If you really want to cite someone he admires, you could note that Eliezer Yudkowsky uses 1 as a probability when trying (and failing) to explain quantum mechanics, because he writes probability amplitudes of absolute value 1.

As an academic, I have to hold myself back from developing all those themes and more.

I'm in the Boston area.

I begin to believe that some people literally do not have senses of humor with which to distinguish impossible statements meant nonseriously from seriously.

"It's everyone else's fault they don't recognize me as a genius," said the dork ass loser

It just reminds me of the "diamondilium" in the Futurama movie that proved the Futurama writers didn't know how to sustain a whole movie.

I'm pretty sure that my response in that situation would get me fired. I mean, I'd start with "how many trees did you burn and how many Kenyans did you call the N-word in order to implement this linked list" and go from there.

Men will literally use an LLM instead of going to therapy writing documentation

tmy;dr

(too much Yud; didn't read)

I think it was Walter Lewin of MIT, not Harvard