gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Haven't really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This isn't an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.

This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.

Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.

(src)

Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.

Edit nah he's a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6BBRtduhH3q4kpmAD/against-that-one-rationalist-mashal-about-japanese-fifth?commentId=YMRcfJvcPWbGwRfkJ

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (5 children)

LW:

Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.

Perfect. No notes.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Also into Haskell. Make of that what you will.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago

LOL the mod gets snippy here too

This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y'all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?

"Why are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar????"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (8 children)

LessWrong's descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH

Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):

Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?

First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT

Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.

[...]

EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.

Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but it's still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people don't want to date them.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (5 children)

In the recent days there's been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I don't have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:

The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham's Bulldog boils down to: "Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts".

"Of course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsygLcj3stCk5NniK/you-can-t-objectively-compare-seven-bees-to-one-human

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (4 children)

NYT covers the Zizians

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

Choice quotes:

Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

Good news everyone, it's popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god's sake don't stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

More on Banks and Elon's terrible reading of his books

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/apes-do-read-banks-elon-they-just-dont-understand-him

edit from the comments I see the meme that The Player of Games is the Culture book to start with is prevalent there too. Oh well.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago

This true, but I'm convinced the original poster knows this and is using the term ironically.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote

For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.

Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!

The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence

I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.

What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?

 

Sorry for Twitter link...

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