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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • that seems about right, and “this anti-cult information source isn’t actually anti-cult, it’s a competing cult you should avoid” is a pretty common form it can take. it’s very convenient for the cultists, because it defuses criticism without engaging with it, by keeping all thought within the framework of the cult. the idea that we all organically stumbled upon Rationalist ideas (or were exposed to them through our friends or industry) and wholesale rejected them, must be eliminated as a possibility. we must have an ulterior motive that can’t be summed up as “hahaha holy shit look at these assholes” — or else the cult has to accept that a lot of people legitimately hold the idea that Rationalists and Zizians and all of Yud’s other ideological children are in fact fucking assholes.







  • This is obviously insane, the correct conclusion is that learning models cannot in fact be trained so hard that they will always get the next token correct. This is provable, and it’s not even hard to prove. It’s intuitively obvious, and a burly argument that backs the intuition is easy to build.

    You do, however, have to approach it through analogies, through toy models. When you insist on thinking about the whole thing at once, you wind up essentially just saying things that feel right, things that are appealing. You can’t actually reason about the damned thing at all.

    this goes a long way towards explaining why computer pseudoscience — like a fundamental ignorance of algorithmic efficiency and the implications of the halting problem — is so common and even celebrated among lesswrongers and other TESCREALs who should theoretically know better




  • it may be possible to reconfigure lemmy’s markdown renderer to shunt anything (within reason) between $s to mathjax; I wouldn’t mind looking into that once we restart development on Philthy.

    in the meantime, as an inadequate compromise, you can enable mathjax on gibberish.awful.systems blogs and get better rendering for a long-form math-heavy article there. the unfortunate trade-off is you’ll lose the ability to upload images and they’ll have to be PRed into the frontend repo if you want them local (yes, that’s really the recommended way to do it in bare WriteFreely, unless you’re on their paid flagship instance where they spun up a private imgur clone to handle it).

    if there’s interest and PRing images in (or using an upload service elsewhere) isn’t doing it, we can look into doing a basic authenticated upload into object storage kind of service. (or maybe there’s a way to hack pict-rs into doing it? I don’t like pict-rs, but it is our image cache)


  • I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways, and have them provide the genetic material. I think that it would be immoral not to, and that it is impossible not to think this way after thinking seriously about it.

    we’re definitely not a cult, I don’t know why anyone would think that

    Consider it from your child’s perspective. There are many people who they could be born to. Who would they pick? Do you have any right to deny them the father they would choose? It would be like kidnapping a child – an unutterably selfish act. You have a duty to your children – you must act in their best interest, not yours.

    I just don’t understand how so many TESCREAL thoughts and ideas fit this broken fucking pattern. “have you thought about <normal thing>? but have you really thought about it? you must not have cause if you did you would agree it was <severe crime>!”

    and you really can tell you’re dealing with a cult when you start from the pretense that a child that doesn’t exist yet has a perspective — these fucking weirdos will have heaven and hell by any means, no matter how much math and statistics they have to abuse past the breaking point to do it.

    and just like with any religious fundamentalist, the child doesn’t have any autonomy. how could they, if all their behavior has already been simulated to perfection? there’s no room for an imperfect child’s happiness; for familial bonding; for normal human shit. all that must be cope, cause it doesn’t fit into a broken TESCREAL worldview.




  • Sweet: Comments talking about the specific situation of JD Vance referencing an SSC post.

    Not Sweet: Any other references to JD Vance about anything unrelated, including the upcoming election, per the culture war rule.

    I probably shouldn’t be looking for meaning in a rule that’s designed so that none of Scott’s fans associate him with the fascist shit he constantly and intentionally platforms, but what the fuck is this supposed to mean? don’t bring up the only reason anyone including Joe Rogan gives a fuck about JD Vance?