Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Some effect similar to the euphemism treadmill, perhaps? No matter what method you use, that method will steadily lose favour due to it being associated with killing, so you keep inventing new ones to shed the old emotional baggage.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
They cut the fiber optic cable between Svalbard and Norway
Is there any good evidence for Russian involvement in that? From my (admittedly cursory) search it seems it's just speculation.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
"Coincidentally" there was this popular tweet ("Horror story where the same ominous figure recurs across Stable Diffusion samples regardless of the prompt"), shared by e.g. Yudkowsky three days before. Quite likely that the "Loab" author saw that and decided to spin up a hoax on it.
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!).
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush
I figure that can be perfectly valid evidence for the quality of the product! A company shelling out money for sponsorships signal that they believe in the product itself, which is important in situations where the consumer needs confidence that they won't drop support for it in the near future. For e.g. tech like game consoles this is especially valuable.
The Kardashians also have a personal brand to protect. If they sponsor a product I can be more confident it won't be so bad it'll damage their image; ceteris paribus this is certainly better than nothing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How concerned would you be if your home address was visible online if somebody googled your name? What about your age, SSN, tax return (naturally including your exact income), company involvement, real estate ownership, and every court case transcript and and police report you appear in?
In Sweden, that's all public information. If you looked up my name you'd find my address pretty much immediately, which you could drop into google maps to get a view directly into my kitchen. Police reports is slightly more difficult; you'll find websites stating things like "Foo Bar is present in 2 court cases! Pay $10 to see them!", and you'd have to send an email yourself to the court/police if you don't want to pay for that.
In addition, if you happen to work for the government, then all your work letters, emails, and instant messages become public information as soon as the case it concerns is closed. Tangentially this means that it's very easy for a Swedish person to be a major pain in the ass for government agencies, as you can anonymously keep bulk-requesting random emails and and the employees have to do time-consuming archive digging.
I find it interesting how people here really don't care about it. Hell, I don't really care, mostly because it's been like this my entire life and nothing bad has come out of it (yet? Knock on wood).
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?
Yeah, it shouldn't matter, but if a site has e.g. an XSS vulnerability the attacker will need to be able to run some initial Javascript as the victim to kick it off. Sending an email so that they'll visit a specific page might be just that.
nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.
Attackers can host exploit kits on the target site, which spray a bunch of exploits against your computer if you visit them. If your browser/plugins/extensions/OS isn't fully up to date this might very well successfully install malware. This was really relevant when I worked in IT security about 6 years ago but seems to have declined a lot recently; still, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand quite yet.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I find using GPT-3 as an "unblocker" works quite well. Insert the last few paragraphs you've written, and let it complete the text. The result isn't always very good, but you frequently get decent ideas on how to structure the next section.
bias the algorithms ahead of time
While anti-bias efforts are easy to abuse, I don't think they are inherently bad. There really is a bunch of detritus in the datasets that causes poorer results, e.g:
-
Generate anything related to Norse mythology, and the models are bound to start spitting out Marvel-related content due to the large amounts of data concerning e.g. their Thor character.
-
Anything related to the "80s" will be infected by the faux cultural memory of glowing neon colours everywhere, popular from e.g. synthwave.
-
Generating a "medieval knight" will likely spit out somebody wearing renaissance-era armour or the like, since artists don't always care very much about historical accuracy.
This can be pretty annoying, and I wouldn't really mind somebody poking around in the model to enforce a more clear distinction between concepts and improving actual accuracy.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.vatican.va has some deliciously shitty web design if you poke around a bit. The home page is pretty bad but not too crappy, but if you click around a bit you'll end up on pages such as this one, describing the pontificate of John Paul II. The way that they use alert boxes for information when you hover over the years are so utterly baffling that I'd immediately assume it was some sort of joke or shitpost if I saw it on any other website.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Well, I mean evidence in the bayesian sense. When it comes to "new crypto coin with no clear practical use case" my prior is strongly on "scammy pyramid scheme"; the soft evidence of celebrity endorsements does not do too much to move that.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
both here and on your blog,
I wouldn't say it's a blog at all, and no advertisement was intended. It's just that GitHub is a convenient host for long-ish texts with images. The content was intended entirely for themotte; there is no other link or index to the text except the post I made above.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I don't like throwing away books, even though I know for sure that it doesn't matter; the world's not running out of paper and ink any time soon.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
That'd be forbidden, but it doesn't have anything to do with the actual food specifically so I don't consider stuff like that.
Also Allah, being the/a monotheistic god, is less bad than paganism! E.g. if an idol worshipper touches kosher wine it needs to be destroyed so it doesn't benefit anybody; not so if a Muslims does.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo 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)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Maybe intelligence is just a really slow and finicky thing to evolve, and "add moar mass" is a natural fast shortcut that evolution takes if the animal can support the extra size. Birds could not, since they still need to be able to fly. Humans could do it, at least until our heads became so large we started having trouble being born. After we reached that limit we'd need to "optimize" the brain instead to become much smarter, but that simply haven't yet had sufficient time to happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Comparing it to Alpha Centauri seems almost unfair; considering it's probably the game with the most philosophical depth of all games, ever. It's not a coincidence that Scott frequently inserts references to it in his posts (click the colon characters in his review of Albion's Seed, or read Unsong, where I noticed at least one chapter deal with and directly reference concepts introduced in SMAC e.g. the quote from a "wise woman" here, a reference to this).
The chief difference I think is that the writers clearly had a whole bunch of genuinely interesting ideas stewing in their heads that they wanted to express, and chose the computer game medium to do so. Other games have a plot and then attempt to come up with "deep" ideas after the fact, something which almost always fail.
(Tangentially, If you've played it and enjoyed it as much as I did, I can recommend this blog containing in-depth analysis of basically every quote in the game.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
Is anyone else interested in poetry here?
A thing I've noticed in poetry analysis that annoys me is what I've come to think of as "schizo" interpretations.
On the one hand, you have symbolism that was likely put into the text intentionally; e.g. in "Ozymandias" (which I assume you are familiar with) the famous "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" can be very reasonably interpreted as the onlooker ironically despairing that even the greatest ruler will eventually decline and be forgotten.
On the other hand you have stuff like "Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout". How reasonable is this interpretation? I think not very; if the poem had instead referred to the statue's arms or something, would there have been another possible tenuous interpretation to some other person or concept? Probably. You would need some sort of Bayesian intuition for this, as there is a "base rate" of possible random associations you could make – and for any connection less credible than that you're basically finding patterns in random noise.
It reminds me of how the famous schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis would "speak to God"; he had a random number generator that spat out words, and he'd do free associations between them. Textual criticism is rife with this. I suspect it's because there is really no incentive to find out the "truth" of a text, just finding cool associations that makes the reader look smart, and since there's no ground truth to verify anything it easily gets disassociated from reality.
To "fix" this, I propose a calibration game of sorts. One would write a text with actual symbolism and poetic devices, then publishing both the text and a canonical explanation for everything in it. Readers could then interpret it, and afterwards find out how much their interpretation missed the mark. If anyone wants to try this, I have done so with one of my old poems here.
(For the unfamiliar with meter, it's written in straightforward iambic tetrameter, i.e. each line consists of four pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables; with an ABAB rhyme scheme.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.
The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.
Much of media works on narratives. "Wealthy petrostate spends an obscene amount of money on prestige sporting event" is a nice bite-sized one.
If the journalist mentions that the official numbers might be made up, it adds complicated nuance to the story. How expensive is the World Cup really, if you can't trust the numbers? This leaves the reader uncertain and mildly confused instead of thinking they have learned something about the world. Easier for the article to just print whatever BS amount Qatar says and move on; the vast majority of journalists have tight deadlines and wouldn't have time to investigate it anyway.
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