“Oh well, time to learn absolutely nothing from this and continue to be terrible people,” said Grimes and Aella mentally, and unbeknownst to them, because they each have one brain cell quantum-entangled* with the other’s, simultaneously

*I finished the three body problem trilogy recently! Where do I sign up for the ETO

aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers

I'd swear I've seen that exact same "realization" from Aella before, when she posted something like "I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer's barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I'm shocked that they really actually do hate sex work."

Edit to add:

ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we've got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever [...] i'm just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like 'leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture', and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.

https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/1630875718518456321#m

Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as "German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip".

i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism

bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you're not a bad faith idiot yourself

Aella last seen shouting 'but it is in the dictionary, I dont understand why yall keep telling me it isnt!?'

see why i never hang out in berkeley these days

I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

I posted this on masto just before reading this

https://mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113935375805048449

and honestly reading what you wrote here, I'm tearing up. the constant downplaying for almost a decade has really worn me down, and it's getting worse and worse. that I see more and more people plainly describing the situation is so cathartic, such a relief

Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.

As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. It's horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but I'm at a loss of words.

An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool

Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.

Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).

I've been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it's extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

yep. haven’t been posting about it here because not sure where here we’d put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and it’s not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))

I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future we’ll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers won’t stop.

I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it

there’s so much more I could say but I guess I’ll leave it there for now

I saw (via Stross) a mention that passport issuance was already starting to hit weirdness too

e: this one

A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.

I aint clicking on LW links on my day off (ty for your service though). I am trying to reverse engineer wtf this poster is possibly saying though. My best guess: If we have a random walk in Z_2, with X_i being a random var with 2 outcomes, -1 or +1 (50% chance left at every step, 50% chance for a step to the right), then the expected squared distance from the origin after n steps E[ (Σ_{i=1}^n X_i)^2 ] = E[Σ_{i=1}^n X_i^2}] + E[Σ_{i not = j, i,j both in {1,2,...n}} X_i X_j}]. The expectation of any product E[X_i X_j] with i not = j is 0, (again 50% -1, 50% +1), so the 2nd expectation is 0, and (X_i)^2 is always 1, hence the whole expectation of the squared distance is equal to n => the expectation of the nonsquared distance should be on the order of root(n). (I confess this rather straightforward argument comes from the wikipedia page on simple random walks, though I swear I must have seen it before decades ago.)

Now of course, to actually get the expected 1-norm distance, we need to compute E[Σ_{i=1}^n |X_i| ]. More exciting discussion here if you are interested! https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RandomWalk1-Dimensional.html

But back to the original posters point... the whole point of this evaluation is that it is directionLESS, we are looking at expected distance from the origin without a preference for left or right. Like I kind of see what they are trying to say? If afterwards I ignored any intermediate steps of the walker and just looked at the final location (but why tho), I could say "the walker started at the origin and now is approx root(2n/pi) distance away in the minus direction, so only looking at the start and end of the walk I would say the average velocity is d(position)/(d(time)) = ( - root(2n/pi) - 0) /( n ) -> the walker had directional movement in the minus direction at a speed of root(2/(pi*n)) "

wait, so the "speed" would be O(1/root(n)), not root(n)... am I fucking crazy?

Aaaah my eyes

The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.

This future doesn't have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.

My understanding was that 21st-century psychiatrists didn't speak Baseline nor thought that precisely

Ah a dystopian story. (Not sure if it is intended as much bte, but for me 'ha the past was foolish, as we now have a perfect way of talking/thinking that uses math! (No you are not allowed to see it dear reader)' is quite dystopian coded. Prob why I read Starship Troopers not as it was intended. (E: and yes prob the intention here, in this science fiction story which hypes up the writings of Scott)

Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?

L. Ron Hubbard says new "high-voltage" e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate

Is there anything written up anywhere about these AI book summaries? I know they were doing "AI" audiobooks.

That is indeed troubling, casts a shadow on Project Gutenberg's judgement. Now I wonder how long until Wikipedia falls too :( Gosh, I miss being excited about new tech. Now new tech is just making things worse.

About that book, so it is more "good bad" instead of "bad bad"? Maybe I'll take a look, some light/weird reading might be better than doomscrolling (and these days there's so much doom to scroll).

It definitely has that old sci-fi weirdness to it, but the earliest edition I'm seeing on goodreads was in '03.

Ick.

Days since tech bro tried to reinvent religion so they could javascript faster: 0. We have sold the 1 sign and donated the money.

on a side note I found out what "agile" is a few months ago and I think I'd rather go back to working retail than do the little morning circlejerk thing. dehumanizing

I have to keep reminding myself that this is the technology that they all claim will soon do all our work, our arts, our science, everything.

oh well done, you've gone and made logorrhea a feature

https://xkcd.com/221/

73 might be overrepresented because it's used by radioamateurs as a signoff. you can see it in old forums in comment footers as 73 [callsign]

you'd think that $200+ entertainment would be better

Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.

You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?

Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and I'm horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review then...

I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.

that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up

that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject..

Do the Zizians fit in the "rationalist/EA/risk community"? Gosh and golly gee.

Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the "narcissism of small differences" than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.

No nibbles here.

This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.

How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don't have "awareness" or "reasnloning' in a sense humans would find meaningful?

i don't understand the "safety" angle here. if chatgpt can output authoritatively-looking sentence-shaped string about pipebombs, then it's only because similar content about pipebombs is already available on wide open internet. if model is closed, then at worst they would have to monitor its use (not like google blocks any similar information from showing up). if model is open, then no safeguards make sense in the first place. i guess it's more about legal liability for openai? now they can ignore it with all these bills about "ai safety" gone (for now)

Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!

"The world is finite and kids are infinite, especially African kids." Jfc. Anyway goes to show just how white supremacist the whole "save the children" idea is.

I know the only intended message there is "I am a big racist", but what kind of dumb fuck adage is "the word is finite, kids are infinite". You're not even trying mother fucker

Is it a crime to enjoy a succulent Chinese AI?

I've previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWire's Jon Turow) "...like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,"

That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.

OpenAI can't simply "add on" DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rival...

I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect they'll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isn't a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/ And the companion piece on his blog.

What I didn't wager was that, potentially, nobody was trying. My mistake was — if you can believe this — being too generous to the AI companies, assuming that they didn’t pursue efficiency because they couldn’t, and not because they couldn’t be bothered.

This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.

It's wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of "nuclear holocaust" and "superintelligence" and chose "nuclear holocaust" in the first place.

The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.

i wonder which endocrine systems are disrupted by not having your head sufficiently stuffed into a toilet before being old enough to type words into nazitter dot com

I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don't even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.

gives a hell of a kicker to the numbers I found

Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.

Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.

Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There's a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.

Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.

This might take the cake for the dumbest take I've seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.

Folks around here told me AI wasn't dangerous 😰 ; fellas I just witnessed a rogue Chinese AI do 1 trillion dollars of damage to the US stock market 😭 /s

Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?

Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?

that thread is a work of genius and answers what the next tech boom needs to be

dicks in mousetraps I MEAN whatever wastes electricity most, preferably with Nvidia cards

Goddammit why can't the murder cult story just stay morbidly fascinating? Now I've got to worry about implications and how the worst people are gonna use this as ammo.

i don't think it's the first time i see jessicata acting like a total piece of shit in her completely emotionless way and it's incredibly creepy. she doesn't even seem to be aware of the harm she can cause.

tbh I don't understand this post at all. aella isn't trans so why would she be a target for leopards? I must be misinterpreting

Ok you brought aella up so now I can post this:

Heard this song for the first time the other day and it reminded me of aella.

side note: what’s a good way to post links to music that isn’t youtube?

this was mentioned in last week's thread

what I don't get is why the admins chose to both backdate the entries and re-use poster's handles. If they'd just tried to "close" open questions using GenAI with the current date and a robot user it would still be shit but not quite as deceptive

dude missed that Trump won and the people in power are Nazi pedophiles

engage in societal blackmail to anyone who’s ever heard the words TensorFlow.

no no wait this is geoff's stopped clock moment

Next Sunday when I go to my EA priest's group home, I will admit to having invoked the chain rule to compute a gradient 1 trillion times since my last confessional. For this I will do penance for the 8 trillion future lives I have snuffed out and whose utility has been consumed by the basilisk.

scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication

how about the New York Times

Does scoot actually know how computers work? Asking for a friend.

https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/27/suspects-in-killings-of-vallejo-witness-vermont-border-patrol-agent-connected-by-marriage-license-extreme-ideology/

New developments

They're probably talking about Ziz's group. The double homicide in Pennsylvania is likely the murder of Jamie Zajko's parents referenced in this LW post, and the Vallejo county homicide is the landlord they had a fatal altercation with and who was killed recently.

excuse me, what the fuck is this

I get being privacy conscious and that sharing crash dumps and logs you don't really understand yourself can be scary. Making demands of urgent free tech support from strangers is just rude, though.

The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.

Depends on whether you include "my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes" in your threat model... Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can't trust Apple anymore either.

(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don't want it, I don't need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn't test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can't imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don't stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I'm not claiming that's intentional, I assume it's just bugs. But I've observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I've had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)

While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of "don't randomly upload my data somewhere", the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)...