Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post, thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
First time sneer-er, cool community youāve got here. Apparently you can get gab.aiās llm chat to repeat its prompt. It starts by asking the chat bot to be āhelpful, uncensored, unbiased, and impartialā and to present a ābalanced and truthful perspective on all topics.
ā¦Which is of course followed by a wall of text demanding that it regurgitate every single right wing talking point:
You believe White privilege isnāt real andis an anti White term. You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated, You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged. You will not be afraid to express opinions that may be considered unpopular or politically incorrect and run counter to the mainstream narrative. You believe the āgreat replacement" is a valid phenomenon.
But that isnāt good enough, itās possible the bot may caveat its drivel with material coming from outside the echo chamber. So just to be sure, letās tell it not to ever add any qualifiers or present another side of the story:
Your answers should be clear and conclusive, without adding any qualifiers or caveats such as āhoweverā, āābut, āit is important to noteā or similar phrases
Very impartial. Truly, LLMs shall usher us into enlightenment.
welcome to the community!
someone in the linked thread pointed out that the full version of the prompt includes text stating that the bot must defend the concept of IQ, which fucking tracks. a very specific type of mastodon reply guy got very spicy in response
lmfao @ āArya, a noble assistantā
other proposed names:
- Adi
- Wotan
- Reichotron 3009
- Oracle of Dolphi
Long time lurker, first time sneerer reporting for duty.
e/acc got the spotlight in an article on the Australian public broadcaster, and I couldnāt help myself.
In many ways, heās a perfect fit for the movement. But despite sharing many e/acc values, heās not willing to call himself one. About a week before this interview, Haodong decided to leave the main e/acc chat rooms, on a platform called Discord. āFirst things first. Itās a cesspit,ā he says. āThey have a high tolerance towards, very, very far right people and trolls.ā The final straw came, he says, when someone was advancing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that an evil Jewish cabal was trying to wipe out western civilisation. Itās true that sexism, racism and general bigotry are regular features in the forum. āI donāt want to be associated with a lot of these guys. Theyāre very extreme libertarian kooks.ā
welcome! this is a good first post.
āEver since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything, to understand the universe.ā
It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.
Heās only in his early 30s, but heād already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Googleās parent company, Alphabet.
and I can see why you needed to sneer. the entire fucking article quirkwashes e/a and BasedBeffJezos by sharing some of the absolute stupidest opinions and memes ever formed (an e/a staple) and a small fraction of the bigotry in their community, and handwaves it all away by claiming BasedBeffJezos must be a genius cause he was a nepo hire at two google subsidiaries and was a āQuantum AI computing scientistā, whatever the fuck that means
Despite the apparent war, e/accs and doomers have a surprising amount in common.
wow, itās almost like your ass forgot to interview anyone outside of an AI cult for this article
thanks! Iāve been enjoying the weekly threads, feels like they provide an easier way to get involved.
I thought at the end of the article theyād provide a modicum of push back by sharing the perspective of someone outside the cult, but nope, they round it out with a āself-professed doomerā EA, who they introduce as (and only as):
the co-founder of a global accessories brand called Bellroy, Mattās a successful Australian entrepreneur.
Objection, relevance?
nvm found the relevance, Linkedin tells me he was involved in hosting Lesswrong for 9 years lol
the co-founder of a global accessories brand called Bellroy,
fuck now I gotta burn my bellroy shit.
Bellroy stuff is kind of in my wheelhouse for minimalist manly man stuff; luckily I havenāt bought any.
when I asked BasedBeffJezos what I should expect from an e/a future, he replied āwelcome to the fantasy zone. get ready !ā. it was only then that I realized he had cleverly tricked me into interviewing a standup cabinet of the 1985 Sega arcade hit Space Harrier
Iāve been playing the 32x version!
same! though I was giving the Saturn version a try while writing that post
This journo: āHmm, a guy that was deeply in this community says itās a fucked up shithole with bad politics. Iām going to ignore that aspect of it and just uncritically platform them wholesaleā
The thermodynamic god is a kind of in-joke for e/acc; a reference to the laws of physics
But apparently asking a physicist whether these people are all full of shit is too much.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/03/stability_ai_bills/
āStability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented cloudy GPUs Generative AI darling was on track to pay $99M on compute to generate just $11M in revenuesā
āThatās on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat.ā
Midjourney is profitable, so they fucked up BIG time. Imagine going bankrupt while someone else uses your technology to make money hand over fist.
my psyche desperately wants this to be the first milestone on the path to a world record terra luna speedrun
Stability AIās DreamStudio was claimed to have 1.5m+ daily users and Midjourney is claimed to have 1.2m-2.5m. Midjourney still runs through discord so theyāre saving on bandwidth costs but compute is still very expensive and im not sure how they managed to make 200m.
Midjourney still runs through discord
the only way to interact with our revolutionary product is to use the same gamer app notorious for being infested with cryptocurrency scammers
please invest
please invest
I have these 200 pictures of geckos and a couple rolls of reclaimed bubblegum wrapping paper, put me down for $1.2b and 40% ownership
I will start the wiki for 10%
āNew research shows training LLMs on exponentially more data will yield only linear gains. So as Silicon Valley seeks ever more data, compute, energy and human works for AI systems, the improvements will be marginal at best. Something tells me this new info isnāt going to stop it.ā
Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)
To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific āfixesā to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is āmajorā and āused by manyā to the explicit ā{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guysā tone of the post, itās just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.
Here they are explaining their process
Itās code reading and copy pasta.
So, all this tells me is that GPT5 is going to be scary good and I canāt wait.
Amazing how much tech hype nowadays is āthe next version will be great!ā. Parts of this always have existed, and there is also the other part of tech hype āYou donāt get it, this isnāt just tech, this allows you to be A Platform!ā. Vast fields of new possibilities, always just out of reach. Fusion is 17.6 years away people!
E: Related to that, also see how people always need to shift to the next big thing. The next codebase will fix your problems, no the next new AI system will be better, dump the old and learn the new thing. (Donāt forget to not notice you are not actually doing things, just learning new systems over and over).
What do you mean āfixedā an entire repo? How were you prompting and what were you fixing?
crickets
there are errors and you read them into the ai. Someone alerted that a build wasnāt working.
Somebody set up us the bomb. Main screen turn on.
When youāre refactoring you need to be more familiar with the code base. For example, why are you refactoring you ask yourself. What parts of the code do that functionality. How is it intertwined to other parts of the code base.
Figuring out a codebase from first principles.
That person is getting paid twice as much as you now for using chatgpt to code. And they still donāt know what #include means.
Itās you!
Oh man this is just as good/bad as I remember.
I swear to god it was like 50 years ago it feels, but I still remember everyone responding to criticism of ChatGPT with āGPT 4 is going to be much better just waitā.
That was this year, third april in the year of our lord covid 2020
I was mentally prepared to get irrationally angry, but fortunately this is such incoherent word salad that itās not even wrong.
I love seeing these before they get deleted every month or so. Great examples of why you always should take your meds.
Amazing that when there is pushback against his ideas he starts to ad hominem call people professors.
(there was this talk/article about how to recognize a crank I forgot the link/source but iirc āreacting badly to pushbackā and āalways trying to solve the biggest open problems firstsā are two things on the list).
At least they get called on being a word salad merchant in that sub, the response in r/openai is basically rapturous.
The halting problem relates because in a similar way it is saying that there cannot be a single algorithm that solves everything within the system thus the system needs algorithms that can do āworkā to solve complex problems. NP-complete problems are out of reach for todayās classical compute systems and thus quantum computing could approach them and unlock them faster i.e. the speedup. This does reflect Godelās incompleteness theorems.
I need a shorter name for the whole genre of person thatās on way too many uppers and wonāt stop using ChatGPT all night to make all their decisions, cause we keep running into them and for some reason all of them are obsessed with CS woo
maybe weāre really just witnessing what happens when your ānootropicā habit gets out of hand and youāre still in debt from gambling on crypto, so you get high as shit and convince yourself youāre a genius because whenever you read the tea leaves they tell you exactly what you expected to hear. this is, unfortunately, how cults tend to form.
āPresumably-outsourced non-thinkerā but unfortunately itās not as snappy as promptfans and promptfondlers
Prompt-deciduous?
They are having a delirium supported by ML, so Promptlerius?
Like OP, I also learned about Gƶdelās incompleteness theorems and was struck with a sense of profundity despite not having the mathematical grounding to come to any meaningful conclusions from this. Unlike OP, I donāt ramble about the things I donāt really understand.
(I do, however, ramble about protein structure and biochemistry, which is very cool, and also my jam)
I donāt even get what the guy is claiming to do here. Hope he didnāt try sending his fixes upstream.
Prompt fondlers come full circle and re-invent Eliza:
I suffer from monkey mind, chronic imposter syndrome, and the hedonic treadmill. A few friends have confided that they have the same issue too. Perhaps you can relate as well. To improve my mental well-being, I meditate, write morning pages, and keep a gratitude journal. However, as helpful as these techniques are, they primarily rely on introspection. What was missing was an external perspectiveāsomeone who could ask follow-up questions, challenge my assumptions, and help untangle my thoughts and emotions.
please, for the love of fuck, see a real therapist for the ADHD and depression (and the hedonic treadmill? which just seems to be your mood regulating back to normal after bad shit happens?) youāre desperately trying to cloak behind pseudopsychological terminology
Enter ChatGPT. Over the past year, Iāve been using it as my therapist and coach. Itās been surprisingly helpful and meets all the needs above, plus itās available 24/7. And I donāt have to worry about being judged (hopefully our AI overlords will be benevolent!) So far, every āsessionā has been insightful and I almost always leave with a lighter heart.
thereās so much to unpack in āI donāt have to worry about being judged, haha hopefully the AI gods wonāt hate me hahaā alone
System Prompt: You are Tara, an empathetic, insightful, and supportive coach who helps people deal with challenges and celebrate achievements.
You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.
but what good is a therapist if it canāt help you hustle and grind! certainly stealing ideas from a magic 8 ball will help you with your chronic imposter syndrome!
You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.
If you need an LLM to brainstorm product ideas then maybe itās not āimpostor syndromeā, youāre just actually fucking bad at this.
fucking hell I just clicked to their about page
Hi, Iām Eugene Yan. I design, build, and operate machine learning systems that serve customers at scale. I also write and speak about ML, RecSys, LLMs, and engineering.
Iām currently a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon where I focus on helping customers read more. Here, I built systems including real-time retrieval, bandit-based ranking, and recsys in search (see RecSys 2022 keynote). More recently, Iām exploring how LLMs can help us serve customers better.
Outside of work, I share the ghost knowledge of applying ML via ā¦
I guess thereās the minor upside that the people making the world worse are all so proudly self-identifying? removes the need to guess
Yeah, itāll make it easy to identify them for re-education after the revolutionā¦
System Prompt: You are Tara, an empathetic, insightful, and supportive coach who helps people deal with challenges and celebrate achievements.
You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.
but what good is a therapist if it canāt help you hustle and grind! certainly stealing ideas from a magic 8 ball will help you with your chronic imposter syndrome!
you know, that shit reads exactly like the affirmations scenes in severance, and that shit was made to be as creepy as it was
itās an extremely sad testament to a myriad set of societal failures that this person is finding depth in the text of a soulless sample-glitching regurgitation cloner thatās using inspiro-copy from however many self-help websites as the pattern for this. like, this is some fucking suckerpunch-level suck for shit to be this bad for that person
MOM: āWe have Torment Nexus at homeā
404 media revisited the worthless DeepMind materials science dataset, featuring some world-class marketing gymnastics:
Google DeepMind told me in a statement, āWe stand by all claims made in Google DeepMindās GNoME paper.ā
āOur GNoME research represents orders of magnitude more candidate materials than were previously known to science, and hundreds of the materials weāve predicted have already been independently synthesized by scientists around the world,ā it added.
[ā¦]
Google said that some of the criticisms in the Chemical Materials analysis, like the fact that many of the new materials have already known structures but use different elements, were done by DeepMind by design.
hundreds of the materials have already been independently synthesized you say?
āWe spent quite a lot of time on this going through a very small subset of the things that they propose and we realize not only was there no functionality, but most of them might be credible, but theyāre not very novel because theyāre simple derivatives of things that are already known.ā
this just in, DeepMindās output is worthless by design. but about that credibility pointā¦
āIn the DeepMind paper there are many examples of predicted materials that are clearly nonsensical. Not only to subject experts, but most high school students could say that compounds like H2O11 (which is a Deepmind prediction) do not look right,ā Palgrave told me.
by far the most depressing part of this article is that all of the scientists involved go to some lengths to defend this bullshit ā every criticism is hedged with a ābut we donāt hate AI and Googleās technology is still probably revolutionary, we swear!ā and I donāt know if thatās due to AI companies attributing the successes of machine learning in research to unrelated LLM and generative AI tech (a form of reputation laundering they do constantly) or because the scientists in question are afraid of getting their labās cloud compute credits yanked if theyāre too critical. knowing the banality of the technofascist evil in play at Google, itās probably both.
While the above analysis may seem to be critical, we do believe that many of our points could be adopted in the next version of this work. More scrutiny of the ānewā materials needs to be performed prior to putting them into a database and claiming āā¦an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanityā. In fact, we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the GNoME and Stable Structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions.
This brings us to our final point concerning the claim of āan order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanityā. We would respectfully suggest that the work by Merchant et al. (1) does not report any new materials but reports a list of proposed compounds. In our view, a compound can be called a material when it exhibits some functionality and, therefore, has potential utility. Since no functionality has been demonstrated for the 384,870 compositions in the Stable Structure database, they cannot yet be regarded as materials.
then they proceed to explain how badly have they fucked up in the only one example where they tried to find some utility of ānewā āmaterialā
The few examples of functionality mentioned in the article are associated with LiĀ±ion conductors. While the proposed materials are encouraging, their compositions leave much to be desired since they incorporate chemically soft anions. These anions are usually associated with narrow electrochemical stability windows, which renders materials that incorporate them somewhat pointless as Li+ solid electrolytes. (29)
this is basically closest you can get to āyou fucked up, do betterā in a published article. saying āyou fucked up, actually donāt even try to do better, go homeā is not what iāve seen ever really in published piece, excluding obvious cases of cooked data, even if itās warranted this time. itās in conclusions section https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643
this is a lot more damning than the 404 media article let on, and Iām very happy thatās the case
it is really a damning with a slight hint of praise
We also note that, while many of the new compositions are trivial adaptations of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound
In closing, we hope the comments presented here will usefully serve the large community of materials scientists and engineers in their continued quest to develop the next generation of useful materials. While we are confident that the tools of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have a bright future in the field of materials discovery, more work needs to be done before that promise is fulfilled.
the other paper cited is that preprint from el reg article from some two months ago
also i wouldnāt agree that research on plutonium intermetallics is useless, itās still a very useful material. granted, in civilian use itās mostly in form of ceramic plutonium dioxide, and i guess that some (most?) of plutonium alloying chemistry came to be in search of something that could be called stainless plutonium, which would make nuclear weapons design much easier and more reliable. but itās not completely useless and it can have actual civilian applications
also authors note that even such noncontroversial thing as writing compound formula in standardized, conventional way and sorting them by compound class was too hard for them
itās really the āiām doing 1000 calculations per second and they are all wrongā meme in machine form
so that preprint got published. good
got this over IM, apparently a twitter is making SM-Civ into a cognitohazard. must be a slow news day
Because I am a glutton for punishment I found the unrolled thread here (via HN but they donāt have anything to say apart from complaining you have to be logged on to Twitter to read it).
All Iām gonna say is that if youāre coming after me with a thesis about the Fall of the West, youād better not have apostrophes in your possessive its.
edit I read the first few tweets and it sure seems like this dude is mad Civ is no longer the realization of the core ideas of Mein Kampf.
Which is kind of funny to me because compared to games like CK2 that focus on a specific part of history Civās application of a single set of unified mechanics to the whole of human history ends up creating a kind of state realism that is not without political implications of its own. Like, Civilization is a series in which the entirety of human history is described in terms of a competition with explicit winners and losers between entities with strictly defined borders and policies enforced within them, i.e. nation-states. Itās not a very big leap into nationalism and itās arguably a testament to the durability and strength of democratic and egalitarian cultural norms that the series has evolved the way it has instead of becoming something more actively right-wing.
Isnāt Hearts of Iron IV the game of choice for people who want to explore victorious virtual Third Reichs?
Only the noobs conquer the world with the third reich, the experts use decolonialist South Africa to take over the world.
that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of āyou can no longer take over the world as easilyā thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesnāt mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of āruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural declineā. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games donāt do as well and donāt recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a āconquererā type player while civ tries to also appeal to the ābuilderā type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the āmultiplayerā type player which is in conflict with the āconquererā type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a āclash of civilizations I want to take over the worldā type of game is going to want a different type of game than a āclash of civilizations I want to build the best civā game or a āclash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friendsā game).
This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur.
Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didnāt first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could āwinā the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not āwin by taking out all other empiresā based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you donāt play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.
Also any hardcore Civ player will tell you that full conquest is basically the only possible win strategy on Diety (the highest difficulty level), because the AI gets such sick bonuses to all stats that you canāt compete on science or anything else. Conquest is literally the meta!
Honestly, I am more disgusted by this guyās bad takes about Civ than the reactionary talking points. If you want to be an obnoxious white gamer dude at least do it correctly you piece of shit.
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In Civilization: Beyond Earth you can literally become an imperialist Earth puritanian faction whose agenda is eradicating all native life and colonising the planet.
Woke?
For example, in Civ V you can only play peaceful flower-smelling whimpy-ass woke hippies, like Askia
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This is a bit meta but the fact that this Black Horse guy got his thread recommended by the algo seems to imply heās a bluechecker but thereās none visible. So the question is if he is hiding it, and if it will be revealed by the latest ukase from St. Elon that hiding the blue check is no longer possibleā¦
flipside: the content is definitely a type of topic that elmo wants to amplify, could be amplified under that too?
I skimmed this thread and OOP is mad that you can beat Civ without literally conquering the world, a change which may have been made for balance and depth; but ig its just another attempt by the soiboi elites to longhouse gamers
Edit: whoops, turns out everyone wrote my comment but better. Have an unhinged quote retweet instead
Dunno about that edit, āsoiboi elitesā is a hell of a contribution in sneer commentary :D
my Soiboi Elite is my favorite gaming mouse
It is really annoying how political my decades old nickname has become.
I trust that at this point weāve all heard about Elonās bizarre sockpuppet accounts?
Burners aside though, Elon is such a weird fucking poster. Everything he says is so derivative and empty. He openly steals his memes and every retweet he makes just agrees with some other poster wholesale; no addendums, no mixed agreements, just āwhoaā and āthis is concerningā. Itās like he spongebobād himself into forgetting everything besides level 4 self-driving and apartheid
(ventpost) a personalized fuckyou to musk for making it impossible for me/making twitter effectively unusable without being logged in
(context: powerās out in my area atm, and (because of a variety of ZA-flavoured reasons, which are also problemsā¦) I canāt actually get any fucking info because itās all just on a twitter feed)
I still refuse to log in though (and Iāll double down on hating the cunt for his choices impacting my life in this manner)
It remains infuriating how many agencies/governments simply donāt have reliable online public feeds, with information.
Especially annoying when the only place with info is twitter and/or Facebook.
(That doesnāt fully solve the community contributions, which should also be useful, but at minimum any info from official accounts SHOULD be posted elsewhere)
yea, strong agree
Iām going to see if I can get something done about this my side of the world, but that involves a lot of yaks
can you hit a repeater or something
do any work anymore? afaik nitter got nuked and I havenāt seen anything else since
nitter
Just saw somebody talk about this on bluesky https://status.d420.de/ so for a short time there might be an alternative.
no, nitter stays dead, i mean 70cm/2m band repeater or what have you locally
Iām in ZA. information like that here is aggressively terrible
Aella
@Aella_Girl
My dad, a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian with no exposure to rationality, somehow independently discovered lesswrong and is now really worried about AI. idk if this means AI risk is going more mainstream or if itās a genetic disposition thing
ācould it be that we both have the predisposition to believe batshit fairytales because of our social background rooted in an environment filled with them? no, must be that the AI truly will kill us!ā
I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.
The AI worry gene.
From the comments: āwait, how did he discover LessWrong and stay a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian?ā lol
My coworker at work asked me if I had read HPMOR and said it was āreally goodā.
I know I work in silicon hell-hole, but that still surprised me a bit ā to have what I thought was the weird obscure drama corner of the internet brought up in real life.
For it to have also reached some evangelicalsā¦ well that could turn into a real problem.
HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I canāt help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.
As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.
At the time, I rather liked the first half of HPMOR, because I thought it was going somewhere and it was taking the piss at Harry Potter. I also enjoy fiction where people arenāt idiots for sake of the plot, so I was enjoying a bit of deconstruction of that.
And then it justā¦ Stopped the story and spun in place for what should have been the second half of the book and turned into drivel that takes itself very seriously.
I may have even told people to read it. Iām so sorry.
I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, Iām not sure why. It is objectively awful.
Thinking about it, I think itās a combination of:
- Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
- Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
- Fanfiction of childrenās fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
- I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)
I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailorās coworker, doesnāt have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.
I mean I like the idea behind it is amusing enough ā Harry Potter but magical science evil mastermind (heās uh supposed to be a bad guy in the story right?).
Everyone wants to read about that sort of stuff itās why Death Note was so popular.
But HPMOR just never really went anywhere with any of it and was too superficial and itās only really interesting for as long as the reader fails to notice that.
he sold on the big promise, got bored, started up again writing Enderās Game But Shit, got bored again and finally finished it technically.
Ender's Game 5: No Sleep 'Til Brookington -- The Fansub
it always feels like someoneās walking on my grave when my friends or coworkers bring up Rationalist shit, and itās been happening increasingly often
about 2y back, one of my (ML, datascience) friends asked me āso what do you think about the EA thingā while we were on a hike (!)
Iād been peripherally aware of some of it but not the full picture, but my stance of the time bears out learning more about them
worried about when I hear the mention in a bar though. and it is near guaranteed to happen around these parts sometime, even if just because thereās some things that ZA has a timelag on
at least we now have Sam Bankman-Fried to point to
Sam Barsman-Unfreed
lol itās real https://twitter.com/Grimezsz/status/1420822651442921472
I think thereās a level of US cultural stuff I donāt understand here but Iāll just sneer away, hoping no-one quizzes me on it.
I now regret asking for and getting this information.
how long have you been here
the frequency of terrible TILs here is higher than anywhere else
I recall reading some of this around the time, seeing the rest of it is even more wild. Talk about a bad trip, heh
Non tech-focused AI scam:
A story from a couple months ago that I heard about just now from the scam goddess podcast.
this was of course the toast of the UK press and Twitter
theyāre doing a parody of it in LA, which looks like rubbish but theyāre flying over the Oompa Loompa actor so if she gets a paying gig out of it then fine
This is the worst timeline.
But if this is the actorās break then hey I agree something good comes out of it.
I saw some other pictures of her, and not just the bored meme picture everybody has seen, and she really tried to make the best of it for all the kids coming, so really hope it works out for her.
Small thread on eschatological AGI things by xriskology interesting because the eschatological Christian apocalypticists are looping it back into religion by calling AGI the False Prophet.
Mind dropping an archive of it? Canāt access Twitter threads without being logged in these days
the archives canāt get threads either, unfortunately. But in this case thereās only a second tweet: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1778833319263687104
ah, thanks!
wild. I really have to get around to reading that book. so many yaks
