blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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616

Joined

2 yr. ago

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Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:

Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers

Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours

Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)

NOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!

Is that the tomato scale guy?

https://bsky.app/profile/klovar.cc/post/3lnigfkg67c2p

"The man in the glowing rectangle is Mark Kretschmann, a technology enthusiast who has grown out of touch with all but the most venal human emotions. Mark is a leveller, in that he wants to drag all people down to his. But as Mark is about to discover, there's no way to engineer a prompt for a map out of... the Twilight Zone."

Vacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face... "optimistic"

I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it's just incompetent.

The only one I've met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don't travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven't heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that's worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the "a gig's a gig" principle.

"Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’"

https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c

Yep, he's been operating in obvious bad faith since the conceptual penis days, at least.

But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already

Yeah, I didn't write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.

An lesswrong:

countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.

uh-huh

An different lesswrong:

LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.

Christ on a futa dick

The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:

We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We'll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.

Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for "ban evasion". Dunno what that's about.

Dan Olson finds that "AI overviews" are not as constant as the northern star.

The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.

But also,

The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.

Olson says,

Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.

Kicking off the week's Stubsack with the evening's example of "why do I know who these people are":

Paul Graham approvingly mentions Jordan "Cremieux" Lasker as one who "has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism".

Via the above search, here's some made-up bullshit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement

And there's a random LessWrong reference in the goddamn introduction here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

Ah! Further fucking around leads to a search query for all instances of lesswrong.com in page source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%7Elesswrong.com&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1&searchToken=9u6c55in4yuoezpsk08h0czmf

I got curious whether the Wikipedia article for Bayes' theorem was burdened by LessWrong spam. I don't see overt indications of that, but even so, I'm not too impressed.

For example:

P(B|A) is also a conditional probability: the probability of event B occurring given that A  is true. It can also be interpreted as the likelihood of A given a fixed B because P(B|A) = L(A|B).

The line about "likelihood" doesn't explain anything. It just throws in a new word, which is confusing because the new word sounds like it should be synonymous with "probability", and then adds a new notation, which is just the old notation but backwards.

P(A) and P(B) are the probabilities of observing A and B respectively without any given conditions; they are known as the prior probability and marginal probability.

But both P(A) and P(B) are marginal probabilities; they're the marginals of the joint probability P(A,B).

The first citation is to one random guy's book that's just his presentation of his own "subjective logic" theory. And that reference was originally added to the article by (no prizes for guessing) the author himself, writing a whole section about his own work!

There are long stretches without citations, which I've been given to understand is frowned upon. On the other hand, one of the citations that does exist is to a random tutoring-help website whose "about us" page crashed Firefox on my phone. (I have been trying other browsers on my laptop, but not on mobile yet, due to finiteness of brain energy.)

To summarize that blog post and the three "Rationalist cases for Trump" that it points to: "We made up a Trump to like and a bunch of Democrats to get mad at".

When exactly did that "left-wing monoculture" flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?

Prediction markets: Your source for all prediction tulips

Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.

No, he didn't. His "explanations" are turgid and useless even when they're not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids' table, and who aren't actually tested on how much they've learned.

Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.

No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.

Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance

OK, zero notes there.