blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems Posts 33Comments 616Joined 2 yr. ago
🎶 If I had a Death Note / Ya da shinna shinna shinna shinna gamma gamma game / All day long, I'd namey namey names / If I had my own Death Note 🎶
One erratum: the review that goes into how HPMOR's science is bad was by "su3su2u1", not Dan Luu (who just archived it from the original Tumblr).
One possibility is Rebecca Weber's Computability Theory (American Mathematical Society, 2012).
I can't be bothered to look up the details (kinda in a fog of sleep deprivation right now to be honest), but I recall HPMOR pissing me off by getting the plot of Death Note wrong. Well, OK, first there was the obnoxious thing of making Death Note into a play that wizards go to see. It was yet another tedious example in Yud's interminable series of using Nerd Culture(TM) wink-wink-nudge-nudges as a substitute for world-building. Worse than that, it was immersion-breaking: Yud throws the reader out of the story by prompting them to wonder, "Wait, is Death Note a manga in the Muggle world and a play in the wizarding one? Did Tsugumi Ohba secretly learn of wizard culture and rip off one of their stories?" And then Yud tried to put down Death Note and talk up his own story by saying that L did something illogical that L did not actually do in any version of Death Note that I'd seen.
And now I want potato chips.
Reliance upon "AI" is a fucking disease. Effective treatments are unknown, but theory suggests that repeated tasing in the nads may show potential.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable duck.
The name of the company is actually important information in a news story about a company.
And yes, if you change the headline to one that is confusing, then it becomes confusing.
On that note, I would recommend perusing Underwood Dudley's Mathematical Cranks, not so much for the details of any math topic like trisecting an angle, but for the tone and psychology of the crank letters.
I love the smell of ban-worthy levels of condescension in the morning.
One area where I don't know of good recommendations is theoretical computer science. I am not sure what to suggest that would accessibly teach topics like algorithmic/Kolmogorov information theory without sliding downhill into "we can automate the scientific method" crankery. Or, perhaps, which teaches the relevant concepts clearly and solidly enough to make it obvious that LW use of them is crankery.
Another suggestion: Instead of indulging in LW-style Feynman worship, read James Gleick's biography of him. It does a pretty good job covering the actual science while giving a warts-and-all portrayal of the man.
I'm not dying on a hill; I'm saying that you're coming off as a pompous twit who will get themselves banned from the community the moment I or the other mods find your pompous twittery no longer amusing.
Edit to add: Whoops! That already happened whilst I was typing the above. Enjoy your free trip to the egress.
So sorry you wasted the five seconds it took to tell that the thing someone felt like sharing was not, in fact, the latest volume of the Oxbridge Handbook of Deep Analysis and Arguments for the Ages.
Locker Weenies
(Geordi LaForge holding up a hand in a "stop" gesture) transhumanism
(Geordi LaForge pointing as if to say "now there's an idea) trans humanism
What happened was that I had a handful of articles that I couldn't find an "official" home for because they were heavy on the kind of pedagogical writing that journals don't like. Then an acqusitions editor at Springer e-mailed me to ask if I'd do a monograph for them about my research area. (I think they have a big list of who won grants for what and just ask everybody.) I suggested turning my existing articles into textbook chapters, and they agreed. The book is revised versions of the items I already had put on the arXiv, plus some new material I wrote because it was lockdown season and I had nothing else to do. Springer was, I think, the most likely publisher for a niche monograph like that. One of the smaller university presses might also have gone for it.
I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.
AI slop in Springer books:
Our library has access to a book published by Springer, Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Nanotechnology for Anti-Cancer Immunity.  Credited to Nanasaheb Thorat, it sells for $160 in hardcover: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86185-7
From page 25: "It is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized advice..."
None of this book can be considered trustworthy.
https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/114217609254949527
Originally noted here: https://hci.social/@peterpur/114216631051719911
Does this need to be marked NSFW? I think the joke about tagging the more serious posts that way ran its course a while ago, and we haven't been sticking to it.
And a new language feature, generating a list by lack-of-comprehension