bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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633

Joined

2 yr. ago

If a container ship ever arrives or departs the landlocked Vatican City, that is some credible evidence of an act of God.

inb4 the Papal State peacefully annexes parts of Fiumicino and Civitavecchia

Dowhammer 40k is real!

In the land of ball-busting, the one-balled is king.

Are you telling me it's improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?

Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.

Wow, that's some venomously hateful text.

new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other

Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use "Third World" to mean "poor countries", fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.

Those comments are tight, but really the problem with trying to explain any of this to laypeople isn't exposing how wrong it is. The hard part is making any sense of it.

Like if I told you Donald Trump has connections with a cult that believes grandmothers are a species of raspberry, whose goal is turning Denmark into cheese and oh, a splinter group of theirs just murdered a police officer. That will just raise more questions than it answers. How the hell did they come to believe that? Why would anyone want that? And then I have to choose between looking like a loony conspiracy theorist, doing an impromptu lecture or just having to decide you actually probably don't want to know.

Not even a thank you

United Healthcare of all things is green though.

I don't think Yud is that hard to explain. He's a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he's always the smartest person in the room and he didn't pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he's gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.

He's kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same "cool sci fi tech" category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It's easy to forget that not too many years ago the public's perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.

Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be "implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian" or what that those "timeless formulations of quantum mechanics" were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.

Also, it's really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you're about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren't the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.

Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.

I feel I've lost enough sanity transcribing these that I'm almost ready to make a political compass chart myself.

This is only the beginning. Check these out!

Transcriptions for the last two will be in follow-up reply. I'm hitting the character limit.

Made a tariff thread

I know this is going to hurt millions of regular people in and outside the US, many of them through no fault of their own. Despite that I can't help myself.

Wow, I didn't expect AGI to start the armageddon so soon.

8kw is rookie numbers. That's like a median Eliezer tweet.

Hi, I'm an unimtentional moderate centrist! I don't have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chesterton's fence! Everyone's sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: I'm an independent thinker!

Matt Levine, qntm

I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can't be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.

No comment on Wildbow. I'm sure Worm is excellent but I'm just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don't know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.

Wow, what an honor it must be to get invited to speak with such luminaries as Scott Siskind, Jordan Lasker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin and Aella. Maybe if I write ten million words of high-concept genre fiction I can make the organizers think I'm also a white supremacist and/or a neoliberal vampire.

Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.

Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!

I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.