Sailor Sega Saturn @ sailor_sega_saturn @awful.systems

I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the bles

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Within 5 minutes of my first hike, the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom.

This probably only sounds profound to people who haven't been outside in 7 years. Don't get me wrong hiking is good for the soul. But if it hits you that hard after five minutes you're probably terminally online.

Also why can't trees have complex wisdom gosh darn it?

Great no problem I'll just read through the sequences and be all caught up!

Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year--

Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering

Huh. I guess it'll be another weird one.

(I know I know, low effort post, I'm sick in bed and bored)

Once a month or so Awful Systems casually mentions a racist in some sub-sub-culture who I had never heard about before and then I get to spend an hour doing background research on obscure net drama from 2013 or whatever.

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz

"reputational cost" eh? Let's see Mr. Moskovitz's reasoning in his own words:

I guess "we're too racist and weird for even a Facebook exec" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though.

Yes but if I donate to Lightcone I can get a T-shirt for $1000! A special edition T-shirt! Whereas if I donated $1000 to Archive Of Our Own all I'd get is... a full sized cotton blanket, a mug, a tote bag and a mystery gift.

Holy smokes that's a lot of words. From their own post it sounds like they massively over-leveraged and have no more sugar daddies so now their convention center is doomed (yearly 1 million dollar interest payments!); but they can't admit that so are desperately trying to delay the inevitable.

Also don't miss this promise from the middle:

Concretely, one of the top projects I want to work on is building AI-driven tools for research and reasoning and communication, integrated into LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum. [...] Building an LLM-based editor. [...] AI prompts and tutors as a content type on LW

It's like an anti-donation message. "Hey if you donate to me I'll fill your forum with digital noise!"

Now this is a fun blog.

Dan asked me “what’s the fastest Big O notation?” and hey, to my credit despite not having a college degree, I knew the answer from self studying! “Oh, I know this. O(1) Constant time”, I said over the phone. “No, see it’s O(0). The fastest program is the one that never runs. It’s clear you don’t have enough experience for this role. So let’s test you on your sysadmin capabilities. Maybe you can redeem yourself there”. I wasn’t interviewing for sysadmin.

Silicon Valley was a mistake. What the hell.

Days since last comparison of Chat-GPT to shitty university student: zero

More broadly I think it makes more sense to view LLMs as an advanced rubber ducking tool - like a broadly knowledgeable undergrad you can bounce ideas off to help refine your thinking, but whom you should always fact check because they can often be confidently wrong.

Seriously why does everyone like this analogy?

The book costs 100 dollars?? Why?

Also lol can't even escape from gambling when buying overpriced doorstops:

Holder Edition: In addition to what you can expect from the Trade Edition, the token-gated Holder Edition features custom edge printing, available exclusively to CryptoPunks holders. 240 editions have been personally signed by CryptoPunks creators Matt Hall and John Watkinson, and will be distributed at random. Holders can pre-order here 4/15/24 through 5/15/24

Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).

Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

Senior software engineer programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.

Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren't hidden away behind a "beware of leopard" sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

So what harms has Mr. Yudkowski enumerated? Off the top of my head I can remember:

1. Diamondoid bacteria
2. What if there's like a dangerous AI in the closet server and it tries to convince you to connect your Nintendo 3DS to it so it can wreak havoc on the internet and your only job is to ignore it and play your nintendo but it's so clever and sexy
3. What if we're already in hell: the hell of living in a universe where people get dust in their eyes sometimes?
4. What if we're already in purgatory? If so we might be able to talk to future robot gods using time travel; well not real time travel, more like make believe time travel. Wouldn't that be spooky?

Ah yes, the journal of intelligence:

First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait.

In their defense you have to make money to spend money ^{on castles}

Mirror bacteria? Boring! I want an evil twin from the negaverse who looks exactly like me except right hande-- oh heck. What if I'm the mirror twin?

what the heck is an eigenrobot??

Update: It is too late, Sneerclub, I have seen everything.