official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Why do mosquito bites itch?
Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Everyone in the USA still believes that the USA is the first etc etc. The only thing that matters is the domestic response to foreign posturing. "I'm against America First" is a viable posture in America because nobody in America really believes that America could be anything but first.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Meh, it's like reading a creationist forum where they pat themselves on their backs for owning people with "if we evolved from monkeys then why monkeys are still around" and naturally anyone objecting to that is getting banned and their objections removed.
When I want to enjoy watching stupid people being stupid I prefer the stuff rdrama links to, where they also get their just deserts, or at least we make fun of them there. Watching idiots idiot with no consequence is more annoying than fun.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers.
There could be other reasons than hidden motives for that. Consider for example that one of the largest debate here recently was about a completely hypothetical situation involving red/blue pills. Or imagine a technical discussion about some software engineering problem, those can get quite heated too.
So, first of all, sufficiently complex problems tend to be like icebergs, with only a small part being easily communicable, and a lot of underwater assumptions, connections, and intuitions that are personal to you.
For example, if the concerts at that place are always on Thursdays which I know because I'm a regular there, and you have never been there before, I'm sure as hell double checking your claim. Or if your answer to the physics problem is not just different from mine but doesn't make any sense given all other stuff I learned about the problem while working on it, I'm likely to start by asking pointed questions about those discrepancies instead of humbly assuming that one of us just made an arithmetic error somewhere and that could as well be me. And of course in case of software engineering, "your approach is going to suck, I feel it in my bones as a result of decades of experience that I can't just spend years relaying to you here"...
Second, that last example doesn't fit into your model even if it does have an underlying conflict of interest. I can 100% honestly believe that my approach is superior for complicated reasons I can't articulate convincingly enough, and I don't want to waste my time implementing your inferior solution, while you honestly believe and feel the exact opposite. So that seems to be a conflict of interest, but we both can easily be 100% open about it because it's actually driven by a factual disagreement.
That's not to disagree with your main thesis, that there's a lot of "bad faith" arguments, so much that it becomes a counterproductive label. But you're both too optimistic and too pessimistic about that, because there's also a lot of hard to reconcile factual disagreements.
I stumbled upon this post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgqh99SHsCv3jJYDS/we-found-an-neuron-in-gpt-2 where the authors explain that they have found a particular "neuron" activations of which are highly correlated with the network outputting article "an" versus "a" (they also found a bunch of other interesting neurons). This made me thinking, people often say that LLMs generate text sequentially, one word at a time, but is that actually true?
I mean, in the literal sense it's definitely true, at each step a GPT looks at the preceding text (up to a certain distance) and produces the next token (a word or a part of a word). But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in between, and as the "an" issue suggests this literal interpretation might be obscuring something very important.
Suppose I ask a GPT to solve a logical puzzle, with three possible answers, "apple", "banana", "cucumber". It seems more or less obvious that by the time the GPT outputs "The answer is an ", it already knows what the answer actually is. It doesn't choose between "a" and "an" randomly, then fit the next word to match the article, it chooses the next word somewhere in its bowels, then outputs the article.
I'm not sure how to make this argument more formal (and force it to provide more insight contrary to the "it autocompletes one word at a time"). Maybe it could be dressed up in statistics, like suppose we actually ask the GPT to choose one of those three plants at random, then we'll see that it outputs "a" 2/3rds of the time, which tells us something.
Or maybe there could be a way to capture a partial state somehow. Like, when we feed the GPT this: "Which of an apple, a banana, and a cucumber is not long?" it already knows the answer somewhere in its bowels, so when we append "Answer without using an article:" or "Answer in Esperanto:" only a subset of the neurons should change activation values. Or maybe it's even possible to discover a set of neurons that activate in a particular pattern when the GPT might want to output "apple" at some point in the future.
Anyway, I hope that I justified my thesis that "it generates text one word at a time" oversimplifies the situation to the point where it might produce wrong intuitions, that when a GPT chooses between "a" and "an" it doesn't yet know which word will follow. While it does output words one at a time, it must have a significant lookahead state internally (which it regenerates every time it needs to output a single word btw).
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.
From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The USA and the UK are not real countries I guess. I mean, I'm firmly on the Ukraine side as far as self-determination goes, but this now twice-removed linguistic bullshit is just ridiculous.
Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name comes from Slave?
It's the other way around, technically. Slavs is a self-name coming from the words "word"/"glory", which then gave Romans the word for slave because they kept importing those peoples as slaves.
official_techsupport
who/whom
6mo ago
Or maybe it was just about stirring up enough heat that the Israel-Saudi normalisation doesn't happen. I dunno.
I don't see how this was supposed to work. A small terrorist act that causes Israel to respond disproportionally, all right. 400 paratroopers killing Israeli civilians? Again, this is a thing that you do when you have 5000 tanks ready to roll towards Tel Aviv and you want to show your potential Saudi allies that you mean business. They don't have a single tank. Saudis will be like, fuck those idiots.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I don't understand this line of argument.
When you don't understand some argument and want help with that, you should try to explain what in particular you don't understand, which parts you're able to follow and where it loses you, paraphrase confusing parts in your own words to see if you understand it correctly and explain why it sounds unconvincing to you. Just stating that you don't understand without any elaboration sounds like bait.
On a related note, here's a funny tweet from a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1590722899702591489
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
By the way, "Mother of Learning" author wrote 3 "alternate-universe" chapters for it and started a whole new series, the first chapters of which hooked me hard: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/71045/zenith-of-sorcery
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
What story below, I can't find it?
Anyway, as one of the active participants in the cat thing, usually there are misconceptions going in both directions. First of all, rdrama people weren't entirely innocent since we actually included our site name in the picture eventually, which was a no no even for most benevolent sites and a no no no hell naw for us.
Weird things happened afterwards though. First of all, instead of using the official offensive content removal tool that just erased rectangles Chtorrr and Redtaboo started erasing our site name and then the cat pixel by pixel with no time delay. Worse, Chtorrr was not just erasing it but replacing it with a neighboring chaos chess pattern, both pretending that it's a routine overtake by them and giving them the unfair advantage of placing a pixel every second instead of every five minutes.
Then the next day shit hit the fan all over reddit, and attempts to censor it only added fuel to the fire. Then it went beyond reddit, for example a World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold made a video accusing admins of cheating that got 150,000+ views. Naturally, being on the business end of a pointed crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand angry people was not fun for the admins in question, and again, that's just from one source (but one of the biggest ones). So there was much not entirely unjustified whining about stochastic terrorism from the admin-loving mods.
It also felt kinda surreal for me, I can't really wrap my head over angering 150,000 people. And we didn't actually do this on purpose at all, it's like how people describe Steve Jobs as having a reality warping field around him that would make people to shoot for the stars, apparently we have something like that that makes people act very stupid, we drew our cute cat and admins (and then admin-supporting mods) went full retard in all the worst possible ways and brought it all on themselves.
Anyways, pretty much everyone involved on our side got a very special ban wherein reddit tells you that your password is wrong no matter what. You can still get a reset password link and it seems to work but nope. I actually tried to talk with the support about it, the only thing that came out of it was that they linked me to a page that admitted that it's a thing reddit might do. They also unleashed the full power of ban evasion detection on us, so I still haven't managed to make a working reddit account (though I do have some ideas about it). I don't know if there were any innocents swept along us, I asked mods of /r/cats (we got a recruitment post there!) if they heard any such reports and they said no, but of course it would be hard for a random stonewalled victim to report anything via reddit itself.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Static isn't really a concern where I live, it's far too humid.
It's not static electricity, it's a bunch of energy stored in capacitors. It's real as you can see by unplugging the computer, then trying to switch it on -- the fans briefly start up, at least for me. But after that it should be mostly safe, if in doubt poke with a grounded screwdriver or something.
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
How do I know that "bloxor-1 is greeblic" is elementary, if I am totally uncertain about this proposition, and I don't even understand the terms?
Skill issue.
What do you mean "correctly"?
That I, doing Bayesian math about some bets against you, will leave you poor and destitute in the long run, unless you're using Bayes too. What do you want to use instead of Bayes for the record?
the Allais paradox
My point is not that the poors are always instinctively right. My point is that they have well-honed instincts for when someone is trying to take advantage of them, and the usual Bayesian reasoning like the above rightfully triggers it, even if they don't have the concepts or the introspection to communicate to us what was that, that triggered them.
My point is that a Bayesian megamind is entirely justified in asking the yudkowsky what fraction of his prediction came from the data, and basing his bet amount on that, and grumbling about the yudkowsky being useless if he refuses to answer.
Nobody actually has arguments against assigning a symmetric prior to a coin bias
How many of the arguments in probability theory have you read to come to this judgement? Because I can think of large parts of the literature dedicated to exactly this point.
Huh?
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
That was one of the objections listed in the post, Scott's response was that you should only be neutral about elementary propositions, not about compound ones ("bloxors are greeblic AND bloxors are grue").
I personally think that this entire kind of objections can be dismissed by pointing out that Bayesian math works correctly and without contradictions, and when looking at actual priors there's not much disagreement about how to choose them either, in practice. Nobody actually has arguments against assigning a symmetric prior to a coin bias, or even can muster a lot of enthusiasm to argue that you should use a gaussian instead of a uniform prior.
People get hot and bothered when they feel that someone tries to hide how much information they have actually updated on and how much is their prior.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I said:
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them
And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.
Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing.
You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.
I might have recommended (or would have recommended) "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash". It has the Mule protagonist character who talks like Snakes. Also it turns out that MLP canonically has a pony with SS lightnings as her ponymark or whatever it's called. Also it's pretty good.
I discovered a fascinating thing.
There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.
Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?
But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm
Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):
How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.
Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
GPT failed me on this, so I'm asking you folks: Find a sci-fi short story about a politician who was denied rejuvenation treatment and started a campaign against it in revenge, only to discover that being elderly he forgot to check mail and missed a letter offering permanent immortality as a space colonist. That plot twist came after he talked to a friend who explained that the only reason the treatment didn't grant permanent immortality was because of the lack of living space, once the space colonization issues were solved everyone would be allowed to become immortal.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
It gets funnier than that! They started autoremoving posts on /r/doggrooming/, and Chtorrr was too incompetent to realize that she can see the removed post because she's an admin!
https://rdrama.net/post/89433/reddit-is-cracking-down-on-dog (check out Snappy's snapshots)
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
One thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that Russian Bots are a paper tiger, probably.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals?
They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.
It's, like, I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.
The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.
My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.
It's not comparable at all. A cut doesn't begin to itch until after several days, and don't itch at anywhere the intensity proportional to the affected area. Needle pricks don't itch at all and they are tens or hundreds of times larger by area than mosquito bites. So no, it's evidently a reaction to the anesthetic stuff they inject.
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