gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Good link, thanks.

The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to "if the king is bad just kill him" is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Putin is lucky that Needy Amin's stupid attack on Iran pushed his invasion of Ukraine down to the 2nd most idiotic military adventure so far in the 21st century.

Look, before that, he had a decent hand. Russia was a 2nd or 3rd rate power, but no-one knew it, because the shiny armed forces were just seen on parades. He was getting a decent chunk of cash from fossil fuels, Russia was a good place to do shady business in , and he and his freidns could stash all that money in UK and US banks and send their kids to university there. Every alt-right party could count on some rubles getting sent to them.

So he wasn't Peter the Great, but he wasn't some boyar losing battles with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth either.

In 6 or 12 months, Zelensky would be brought down by a combination of corruption and or shitty economy, and some Russia-friendly oligarch would use Russian disinfo to get elected and tie Ukraine even closer to Russia. But he just couldn't stand that somewhere there were Ukraine kids getting an education in Ukrainian and where the Holodomor was part of the curriculum.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (17 children)

This is part 2 in a serious of posts by Habryka. The first has this tagline:

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.

(the 3rd is entitled, I kid you not, Vladimir Putin's CEV is probably not that bad)

All 3 are almost impenetrably jargon-y.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 2 days ago

To be honest I thought it was an April Fool's Joke at first

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

HEre's an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

Stop-AI terrorists: Eliezer Yudkowsky told us to bomb the datacenters.

Yudkowsky: no no no, I said we needed airstrikes to hit the datacenters

IRGC: I gotchu fam Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom

(edit reworded comment around link to attempt to make it funnier)

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

BTW what kind of site is Naked Capitalism? I've heard of it but never read it before .

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 3 days ago

Both subject and verb were deliberately chosen, simply because I don't find Yudkowsky's expectations of citationary fidelity worth honoring.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,

bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.

Also this evisceration of Zvi:

As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

That would also imply that Tallinn is collecting tax deductions for giving to a charity whose greatest single expense is repaying money he lent them.

This is both so evil and so genius I am surprised it's not a very common tax-planning layup for other very rich people.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago (4 children)

If you don’t build any datacenters, Yud won’t have to bomb them.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony.

Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW

Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): https://old.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1slu23a/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_make_building/

via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784650

edit aww the coward lawmakers have backed down https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artificial-intelligence-limits-opts-for-study-instead/

 

“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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