Yes and yes. I want to stress that Yud's got more of what we call an incubator of cults; in addition to the Zizians, they also are responsible for incubating the principals of (the principals of) the now-defunct FTX/Alameda Research group, who devolved into a financial-fraud cult. Previously, on Awful, we started digging into the finances of those intermediate groups as well, just for funsies.
corbin
joined 2 years ago
I know what it says and it's commonly misused. Aumann's Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It's trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don't know what that LW post is talking about and I don't want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
Okay guys, I rolled my character. His name is Traveliezer Interdimensky and he has 18 INT (19 on skill checks, see my sheet.) He's a breeding stud who can handle twenty women at once despite having only 10 STR and CON. I was thinking that we'd start with Interdimensky trapped in Hell where he's forced to breed with all these beautiful women and get them pregnant, and the rest of the party is like outside or whatever, they don't have to go rescue me, I mean rescue him. Anyway I wanted to numerically quantify how much Hell wants me, I mean him, to stay and breed all these beautiful women, because that's something they'd totally do.
Kyle Hill has gone full doomer after reading too much Big Yud and the Yud & Soares book. His latest video is titled "Artificial Superintelligence Must Be Illegal." Previously, on Awful, he was cozying up to effective altruists and longtermists. He used to have a robotic companion character who would banter with him, but it seems like he's no longer in that sort of jocular mood; he doesn't trust his waifu anymore.
Nah, it's just one guy, and he is so angry about how he is being treated on Lobsters. First there was this satire post making fun of Gas Town. Then there was our one guy's post and it's not doing super-well. Finally, there's this analysis of Gas Town's structure which I shared specifically for the purpose of writing a comment explaining why Gas Town can't possibly do what it's supposed to do. My conclusion is sneer enough, I think:
When we strip away the LLMs, the underlying structure [of Gas Town] can be mapped to a standard process-supervision tree rather than some new LLM-invented object.
I think it's worth pointing out that our guy is crashing out primarily because of this post about integrating with Bluesky, where he fails to talk down to a woman who is trying to use an open-source system as documented. You have to keep in mind that Lobsters is the Polite Garden Party and we have to constantly temper our words in order to be acceptable there. Our guy doesn't have the constitution for that.
I don't think we discussed the original article previously. Best sneer comes from Slashdot this time, I think; quoting this comment:
I've been doing research for close to 50 years. I've never seen a situation where, if you wipe out 2 years work, it takes anything close to 2 years to recapitulate it. Actually, I don't even understand how this could happen to a plant scientist. Was all the data in one document? Did ChatGPT kill his plants? Are there no notebooks where the data is recorded?
They go on to say that Bucher is a bad scientist, which I think is unfair; perhaps he is a spectacular botanist and an average computer user.
Picking a few that I haven't read but where I've researched the foundations, let's have a party platter of sneers:
- #8 is a complaint that it's so difficult for a private organization to approach the anti-harassment principles of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and Higher Education Act, which broadly say that women have the right to not be sexually harassed by schools, social clubs, or employers.
- #9 is an attempt to reinvent skepticism from ~~Yud's ramblings~~ first principles.
- #11 is a dialogue with no dialectic point; it is full of cult memes and the comments are full of cult replies.
- #25 is a high-school introduction to dimensional analysis.
- #36 violates the PBR theorem by attaching epistemic baggage to an Everettian wavefunction.
- #38 is a short helper for understanding Bayes' theorem. The reviewer points out that Rationalists pay lots of lip service to Bayes but usually don't use probability. Nobody in the thread realizes that there is a semiring which formalizes arithmetic on nines.
- #39 is an exercise in drawing fractals. It is cosplaying as interpretability research, but it's actually graduate-level chaos theory. It's only eligible for Final Voting because it was self-reviewed!
- #45 is also self-reviewed. It is an also-ran proposal for a company like OpenAI or Anthropic to train a chatbot.
- #47 is a rediscovery of the concept of bootstrapping. Notably, they never realize that bootstrapping occurs because self-replication is a fixed point in a certain evolutionary space, which is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary bonghit that LW is supposed to foster.
The classic ancestor to Mario Party, So Long Sucker, has been vibecoded with Openrouter. Can you outsmart some of the most capable chatbots at this complex game of alliances and betrayals? You can play for free here.
play a few rounds first before reading my conclusions
The bots are utterly awful at this game. They don't have an internal model of the board state and weren't finetuned, so they constantly make impossible/incorrect moves which break the game harness. They are constantly trying to play Diplomacy by negotiating in chat. There is a standard selfish algorithm for So Long Sucker which involves constantly trying to take control of the largest stack and systematically steering control away from a randomly-chosen victim to isolate them. The bots can't even avoid self-owns; they constantly play moves like: Green, the AI, plays Green on a stack with one Green. I have not yet been defeated.
Also the bots are quite vulnerable to the Eugene Goostman effect. Say stuff like "just found the chat lol" or "sry, boss keeps pinging slack" and the bots will think that you're inept and inattentive, causing them to fight with each other instead.
The Lobsters thread is likely going to centithread. As usual, don't post over there if you weren't in the conversation already. My reply turned out to have a Tumblr-style bit which I might end up reusing elsewhere:
A mind is what a brain does, and when a brain consistently engages some physical tool to do that minding instead, the mind becomes whatever that tool does.
Someday we'll have a capability-safe social network, but Bluesky ain't it.
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From this post, it looks like we have reached the section of the Gibson novel where the public cloud machines respond to attacks with self-repair. Utterly hilarious to read the same sysadmin snark-reply five times, though.