Original writing prompt: “Write a romantic comedy. Difficulty: both lovers are emotionally mature and have excellent communication skills.”
What our good friend Eliezer makes of it
Oscar Wilde's job is in no danger
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Nice try, but you're going to have to work a lot harder if you want to trick me into clicking on that. I lived through browsing peak Slashdot at -1, you know
Next time Gadget, next time!
SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.
Following "gowned" so closely with "dress" is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., "She is gowned in black, the fabric sewn with..." Using both "gowned" and "gown" in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., "the darkness of the velvet" or "the darkness of the silk".
Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.
Impressive how someone can be so bad at writing after writing so, so much.
yud, 15-year top of score chart of expert beginners
(e: s/p,/d,/ stupid phone)
guy chooses never to take in feedback or think about how to git gud at writing so every time he spurts out more sludge it’s just more infinite degrees of fractal bad.
Why the fuck is it in bad script form? MAN: WOMAN: MAN: WOMAN: just fucking name them! There’s like ten names in the text, just fucking do it, you shit!
FWIW the only way to read yudkowskian dialogue is to imagine yud as each character wearing a different wig for that character. No distinctions in voice though, none are apparent in the text.
ah good point. He reads "mature and excellent at communication" as a self-description. After that, there's absolutely no way he can resist writing himself into both characters.
The man is a hollow shell, and the woman is tripping over her own tongue in the least regal fashion imaginable. There's no emotional maturity because there's no interiority. There's no communication, just Yud doing Ready Player One with Nerd Culture(TM) references. Remember the Evil Overlord list? You do, don't you? Wasn't the Evil Overlord list funny? Now imagine if an Evil Overlord had, wait for it, read the Evil Overlord list. Wouldn't that be amazing?
(Yes, he did the same damn thing in HPMOR, too.)
all of his works are socrappy dialogues (crappy socratic dialogues). This one is an unsubtle exploration of his BDSM fetish
Also, shit writing prompt. I haven’t seen a writing prompt online that I didn’t hate. “Hey wouldn’t it be neat if someone wrote about this premise???”
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
"Yarrgh. Another crew of bushy tails, more wet behind the ears than 'tween the legs. You've no idea what's in store for you, but these eyes, these old eyes have seen things. Like the great injector malfunction of aught-six..."
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
Dragon whats?
Writing Prompts:
- Pokemon and Digimon are both real and they are at war.
- Fractals are alive and they hate us
- A woman explores beyond the event horizon of a black hole and it's just very hot and cramped and boring and not at all pleasant
- A company starts a time mine where they mine causality but they didn't think about sustainability
OK OK you have a point, I hate all of these and I wrote them.
• Diligent application of Bayesian reasoning finally gains you the ability to fly, propelled by your own farts
bullet 4 is almost the plot of the film In Time (2011)
when I think about it more, what I don’t like is how insistent WPs are. Like what’s being communicated to me is “hey this is a good story idea, now you write it so you can prove my point!!!” You aren’t my editor, pal!
Yeah, it's a lot easier to think of a potentially interesting premise than it is to sit down and actually write it out. Also if I'm gonna write something it'll be something I think is interesting rather than a prompt.
canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either
A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trump's hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.
Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that it's hard to keep up?
On the kid gloves, my bank keeps sending me updates on the state of the world economy and general big picture investment advice (and explaining their own actions). And between a lot of talk on AI, I saw they posted "we are going to take our profits on the usa investments, despite the tarifs being off the table". Which was, esp the first half, an interesting way to suggest to readers that they are pulling a lot of money out of the US and others might be wise to also do so. (Not that they would literally say the latter as 'not financial advice' etc). But yes worrying.
Yeah I already have a lot of non-US stocks, and next week I'm going to rebalance to make them the majority.
I'm not a finance person. My uncle who's in the world of international corporate law thinks things will be fine so maybe I'm being a bit cautious but the way I see it there are a few big issues:
- The US government is trying it's best to implode itself.
- There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
- The US government is becoming much more isolationist and detached from the global economy.
- There is a small but real chance that the US government will start one or more major wars over the next decade
All of this also increases the risk of "black swan" events like pandemics, hacks, the US "investing" all the "savings" they "found" into cryptocurrency schemes, large-scale unrest, or god knows what else.
There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
speaking of, https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1ipsasx/firing_the_next_generation_of_scientists_from_the/
Yeah just saw that. It's messed up.
I told my job a couple weeks ago that I'm planning to move out of the US. They need me more than I need them so they might actually help with that; but even if a transfer works out I intend to get out this year one way or another, even if it means a study visa instead of a job.
Even if things magically turn around like some people think my mind is set. Irreversable damage has already been done in my mind. I said in another comment that I feel like a stranger in America now (this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling).
for a moment there i thought i'd been uninformed about the US threatening to annex California
The usa already tried to flood California, which might cause some food problems in the future.
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
Wow that sucks, doubt his fam will read this but still condolences.
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
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