Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
My new-years resolution is to lose weight. I've been a bit overweight all my adult life, except when I participated in slimemoldtimemold's "only eat potatoes" community trial which worked really well. This year I'm doing it again, but just by myself. (One also saves a ton of money doing it, which helps!) The plan is to not eat anything except potatoes and vitamin supplements until Easter – except for important celebrations, like birthdays and such.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Rather lazily copy-pasted content from an old /r/CultureWarRoundup post as well.
Edit: Oops, you said "apolitical" which this hardly is; at the very least not back when it happened!
I'd say that there's a somewhat reasonable chance that the Red Army Faction didn't commit suicide but where executed by the West German police, as the circumstances are pretty suspicious:
They managed to smuggle guns into their cells in one of the most secure prisons in the world at the time, in a wing built especially for them. The guards a few meters away didn't hear any gunshots, Baader fired thrice, missed the first two, and finally died from shooting himself in the neck from behind using his right hand, but he was left-handed.
There was no fingerprints found on Raspe's gun and no gunpowder residue, even though his gun was lying in his hand when he was found. Meinhof's hanging was suspicious as well (wiki article, too many things to list here). Möller stabbed herself four times in the chest, survived, and claims to this day that somebody tried to assassinate her.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I wrote a post about de-biasing efforts in machine learning, which got a bit long, so I decided to turn it into an article instead. It's about how corporate anti-bias solutions are mostly only designed to cover their asses, and does nothing to solve the larger (actually important) issue.
(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.
If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Do roguelikes count? I've played a whole lot of them, like Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm DDA, ADOM, and of course NetHack (for which I have to shamelessly brag that I hold the shared realtime speedrun world record in, from back when tool-assisted runs were allowed)
Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus attempted that a bunch of times. It generally didn't go so well:
Immediately before the vote Bibulus ordered it suspended for religious reasons. Caesar, who was also pontifex maximus, the most significant religious official in Rome, ignored this and continued with the vote. Bibulus and two of his tribunes mounted the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and attempted to denounce the bill. The crowd turned on him and his entourage, breaking his fasces (the symbols of his consulship), pushing him to the ground and pouring feces on him. Getting up, Bibulus uncovered his neck and shouted to the crowd to kill him to end his embarrassment. His fellow senators persuaded him to leave and regroup at a nearby temple, as the assembly proceeded to pass the bill.
In theory Roman law is very "hackable". In practice people are going to throw you out, dunk you in shit, and pretend you never said anything.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Ten years ago, I'd have said that the most likely way that I'd die would be of heart disease at 78 years old or the like.
Today? My "normal" death is forty years away! With the speed these models are advancing, and how we are still picking low hanging fruit in several different areas, it seems increasingly unlikely we won't have AGI by then – barring some disaster like a global nuclear apocalypse. Today, I'd say my most likely death is either getting paperclipped, or surviving for thousands of years until I die of some scifi crap I can't even currently imagine.
How should one act in the face of this? I'm not Yudkowsky; what little he can do to affect the course of humanity, I certainly can't do much better. Still, are there not steps one could take to improve one's own lot in case it works out for the better? I'd like to see some sort of "retirement plan for the AI-pilled", common sense stuff you can do to at least hedge for the eventuality. Post-singulary I'll get hopelessly outcompeted in alpha, but maybe there's some beta to be had if you act now? Buying physical items with historical significance, perhaps? I imagine the rich people of the year 3000 would pay a lot for an authentic medieval manuscript, for example.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
In Demolition Man (1993), there's a scene where they mention Taco Bell. In the international version, this is dubbed over to Pizza Hut, presumably because it's more recognizable outside of the US. You can still kinda tell that the audio had been changed though, as their mouths don't match.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spent much time reading the Taco Bell wikipedia page if that hadn't been done.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
I see Americans complaining online about how many spam telephone calls they are getting, to the point they don't even pick up the phone when the caller is unknown.
This is pretty alien to me; I live in Sweden and have literally never gotten a spam call in my life. (Maybe the reason for this is that the scammers naturally won't bother learning Swedish?)
So, potential silly lifehack: why not get a foreign telephone number from e.g. Denmark or something, and then never get spammed again? Presumably your calls will be more expensive as you'd be paying the international rate constantly, but this can be ameliorated by getting a plan where that's cheaper.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
Would you mind sharing what your idea is? I enjoy reading and thinking about software architectures.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
In the corner of the ChatGPT replies there's a little profile picture; if it's a blueish-green it's running a 3.X model; black means it's 4.
You might need to click on the image on the Caplan Twitter post to view the entire thing, it gets cut off in the preview window for me.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
You can use the "function calling" mode for that, using the API. It restricts the model to output JSON, so it doesn't get any opportunity to scold you about your questions.
I asked it to "Provide a list of (at least ten) races and their average IQ", and limited it to only return an array of objects with a "name" and "iq" field. The result was this.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
Yeah, there's a lot of text on the internet. With a pretty cursory Bayesian analysis, even with a 99.9% accuracy you're looking at a thousand false positives if you are combing through a million posts. Without some other thing to narrow it down, it seems reasonable that it'll not be possible from writing patterns alone.
I wrote a quick and shitty script to bruteforce English Sator squares from a big wordlist. The only one that makes any sort of limited sense is this:
t i m i d
i r a n i
m a d a m
i n a r i
d i m i t
I.e. "[the] timid Iranian madam that Inari dimit(=had dismissed)".
Edit: Of course somebody else had done the exact same thing and found the exact same square before. Oh well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
mask race as an explicit input
"Unfortunately" for the machine learning case, they lack the complex internal self-censorship that humans can do to be able to pull that off. Even if you mask out inconvenient inputs like race and gender the model will likely immediately notice clusters of correlated traits that stem from that, and reconstruct the race and gender from scratch.
(A fun idea for a dystopian story element: people conspicuously purchasing items and visits places associated with a "safe" demographic like elderly Asian women, to keep the eye-of-sauron AI off their backs.)
A simple example might be the Lacey Act of 1900. It prohibits import, export, transport, purchase, or sale of species of wildlife, fish, timber, and plants, if that would violate any state, federal, tribal, or foreign law. Since it's so extremely broad it makes it basically impossible to predict what will be legal or not, and could plausibly result in you theoretically committing a very large amount of crimes every day.
If the state really, really wanted to ruin your day and had no qualms about the poor optics they could totally find some obscure law about oak wood in Botswana and nab you for it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
The biggest disappointment with the ending was
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
It's not the fault of the website, it's just that they don't specify a file extension at all, and so the browser appends one automatically.
On Firefox (likely the same for Chrome) the browser asks the operating system for the appropriate extension it wants for the MIME in question ("image/jpeg"). On Linux, this is read from /etc/mime.types. On Windows, this is read from the registry (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > MIME).
You're seeing .jfif because Microsoft recently decided that should be the primary extension for that file type. Note that this is actually the proper name for "jpeg" files, as the container format is actually called "JFIF" – "JPEG" is just the compression method it uses which has become the informal name for it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Most people have no intention of ever getting into politics I don't think. Even so, for the examples we've seen of politically active people getting called out (Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, and Shaun King, from the top of my head) they've leaned into their racial category more than simply using it for admissions. Even then, for Warren it took a while and she had to do something foolish like having her DNA tested for it to become obvious. Comparing with a strategic person who never mentioned their fake race again after being admitted and they'd probably never be found out.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Availability bias, probably. There's a very large amount of other possible things that might have happened at the same time but didn't, we just don't take them into account. If there's a million different coincidental things that can happen every news cycle, you can expect to experience one-in-a-million chances constantly.
"Cheating" is a pretty common event, too. If we assume there's two such stories each cycle and they occur randomly in a Poisson distribution, you'd need ~42 cycles to have a ≥50% chance of seeing six or more at the same time. Not too much of a coincidence.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.
(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
Tangential, but the term in economics you are touching here is a Kaldor–Hicks improvement I think. It's not Pareto-optimal, but total-wealth increasing, and could theoretically be converted to a Pareto-optimal situation with redistribution from the winners to the losers (assuming such redistribution does not have any externalities itself!).
That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.
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