• lime!@feddit.nu
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        7 minutes ago

        it’s also poisonous! potatoes are related to deadly nightshade, but much less potent. cooking them makes the glycoalcaloids break down.

      • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 hour ago

        Idk maybe it’s a variety thing but the one I tried was all starch and no taste except some kind of sourness. Exactly the kind of stuff that would make one say “this apple tastes horrible”. IIRC it was the variety to make mashed potatoes.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    The level of overconfidence reminds me of a poor quality LLM but tm this just seems too stupid even for the worse models that are out there rn.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      Chat, is this real?

      yes.

      and we’re seeing it now because two days ago he wrote a long tweet (something only people who pay for twitter can do) musing about why so many people have been failing to understand that he was joking for the last eight years.

      • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
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        41 minutes ago

        I get it, I’m also confused that not even the vine thing was enough to clue a bunch of people in this thread in.

        It’s just some light-hearted trolling. Pretty sad that the dude gets so much hate for something so harmless.

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    Potatoes are definitely apples. The French call them “pommes de terre”, apples of the earth. Ipso facto.

    I will not be accepting questions at this time.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    9 hours ago

    I hate when we look at something and think “not sure if that obvious troll is actually a troll and not a completely deluded person, or a dumb bot”

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      48 minutes ago

      He’s best known for a blog on rationality called LessWrong, Harry Potter fan-fiction written as a vehicle for his notions on rationality called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and being more than a little obsessed with AI risk and being behind the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s also written some other fiction that’s broadly not bad, including a piece about first contact called Three Worlds Collide and an isekai Japanese-style light novel called A Girl Corrupted By the Internet Is the Summoned Hero?!. He once wrote an April fools post where he claimed to be from an alternate universe and for a one off April fools bit contained a surprising amount of world building.

      None of the above implies he is actually human, let alone is familiar with where common human foods grow from. I could totally see him being exactly clueless enough to assume that since holy fuck are a lot of foods technically cultivars of wild mustard, that potatoes and apples are similarly related.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      Not a physicist. I suppose you could call Yudkowsky an anti-AI activist. And/or world-famous fan-fiction author. These would be strange but technically accurate ways to describe him.

  • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    From a biological standpoint, we don’t classify things as vegetables. From a culinary standpoint, we do

    Stop trying to apply biological concepts to my dinner

  • lime!@feddit.nu
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    15 hours ago

    ai visionary/harry potter fanfiction master eliezer yudkowsky, folks. the man’s intellect is perpendicular to the rest of humanity. truly inspiring.

    this is why i can’t take anything he says seriously.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
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      46 minutes ago

      Because he makes jokes that you don’t find funny? Didn’t even the vines tip you off?

    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      The more I see him in the real world the more very upset I become that I genuinely really liked his story. HPMOR is a banger, possibly one of my favorite pieces of amateur literature in existence.

      I didn’t know the author was a wanker at the time of reading, and now that I do, I want to make myself retroactively un-like his work, but I can’t.

        • uuldika@lemmy.ml
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          6 hours ago

          Roko’s Basilisk is real, but only for LW rationalists. living with contradictions in our thinking and using gut feeling rather than obsessively chaining Bayesian priors together protected the rest of us.

          seriously, Yudkowsky and others were tormented by the thought of the Basilisk. it’s a literal mind virus. just one that requires a very specific host (true believers in Timeless Decision Theory.)

        • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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          9 hours ago

          Roko’s basilisk is a really cool metaphor for fascism. If you help the regime come into existence, you are rewarded; if you fight it, you are punished but only if you are unsuccessful.

          • Fusselwurm@feddit.org
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            7 hours ago

            If you help the regime come into existence, you are rewarded

            well don’t count on that. totalitarian regimes have a tendency to be paranoid and to enact rather unpleasant purges at every level of the organisation.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            35 minutes ago

            Specifically it will only be real if it becomes real and you didn’t support it becoming real.

            It’s like the inverse of the notion that the proof of God’s omnipotence is that he doesn’t need to exist in order to save you - the whole idea of Roko’s Basilisk is that if the AI super-intelligence machine God comes to be, it might decide to punish everyone who worked against it coming to be, as an incentive for people to help it come to be in the first place. For exactly the right kind of host, this is an effective memetic infohazard, despite essentially being “God will be angry if he don’t assist in his apotheosis”.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
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        15 hours ago

        it is, based on most people who read it, actually very good. the problems start when you analyse it in context with the author. ironically, same thing is true for the source material.

        • uuldika@lemmy.ml
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          5 hours ago

          the context makes it better, for me.

          Harry is the protagonist, but he’s not a good person. he’s a ruthlessly utilitarian sociopath who takes himself far too seriously, but it’s entertaining to watch his thought processes. again, much like the author.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            4 hours ago

            i mean, as long as you don’t go into it expecting to sympathise with the main character and get immersed in the story, yeah. it’s not badly written, it’s just bad.

            • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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              28 minutes ago

              One of the key things to enjoying it is realizing that Harry is very often wrong about astoundingly obvious things because he’s not half as bright as he thinks he is and has massive, glaring blind spots. Rather like watching someone with a PhD who thinks that means they know much about things wildly far away from their specialty.

        • Impassionata@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          most people have bad taste. hpmor spreads vapid grandiose intellectualism and the people who like it should act more like skulblaka: they were trivially manipulated by a cult leader.

          to be fair, though, eliezer yudkowsky is being sardonic in the OP text.

          • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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            9 hours ago

            HPMOR definitely has its share of problems – a mary sue main character for one. But it was incredibly unique at the time it came out, in particular for taking the world of harry potter down as many pegs as it could with such exacting precision. I think it’s one of the all-time greats (of fanfics) personally, but you definitely have to get past how full of himself the author is.

            • Impassionata@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              the thing is

              you don’t have to get past how full of himself the author is

              the entire cult the author founded is in denial of the fascism

              • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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                4 hours ago

                If you prefer, there’s the “post-rats,” which are a spin-off of the same cult and are pretty much identical except every few minutes they make sure to mention how much they don’t like yudkowsky anymore.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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    18 hours ago

    That’s what happens when you use your fearsome intellect to work things out from first principles without bothering to consult the real world.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    I hope his biology teacher sees this post and beats him with his biology school book.